For those unfamiliar, 99% Invisible + Hidden Levels did an episode about the backstory of development of Segagaga that is really worth a listen. I really enjoyed it... and without having listed to it months ago wouldn't have even known what this headline was about!
This is the first time Dreamcast owners can play it in a more understandable way (and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point). Playing SGGG, we can all see how brave Sega was at the time. I'm still shocked that Sony had such good marketing around the PS2 launch, so users could trust them to wait - and NOT buy - a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had already great games (Jet Set Radio! MSR! Shenmue! RECV! and many more!), great online features, and its architecture was so well thought out.
> and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point
Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of Japanese text reads. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po... Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or whatever.
Based on what I read in the article, MT was used as an experiment and proof of concept, and dedicated translation was done for the full release. Was that not the case?
Was the workflow MT -> human translation?
If so thats honestly such a lazy followthru given the technical hurdles overcome wrt the font tech
From the Github repo (https://github.com/ExxistanceDC/Segagaga-English-Translation), the translation went through a process called MTPE (Machine translation, post-editing). This works just like it sounds. The initial translation is done with machine translation, then human translators review and edit the resulting translation to try to correct any mistakes.
> What I call the “playtesting translation” — a base translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get started early and understand what they were working on — was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review. I don't think that the end product feels “machine-translated,” but that’s ultimately for you, the player, to judge.
i don't think the translators had any first hand experience with akiba culture of that time period, nor did they know how to speak japanese to actually research it (and most of those ezweb.ne.jp / imode sites are long gone)
Is it possible for AIs in the future catch up those gags and meta humor in the language? Could the translation team have done a better job prompting the AI with the current technology?
Afaik japanese media (manga) abuse alot the use of puns on its language due to the amount of homonyms on it.
Avante-garde will always be lost on an inferential technology because to 'get it' it needs to be trained on sufficient volumes.
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Edit: I may not exactly be spitting pearls, but passive downvoting for a genuine take on the matter based on professional experience in AI is a canary gasping for oxygen.
It was much easier to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the copy protection was broken to the degree that you could burn a game to a CD-R and have it Just Work without modifying the console in any way. It being both a total piracy free-for-all and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn't seem to fit what you're saying.
Not to say that easy piracy is necessarily a death sentence for a console, the DS succeeded in spite of ubiquitous and cheap flashcarts, but the Dreamcast shows it's not necessarily a path to success either. There are just more pertinent reasons for a system to sink or swim.
Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.
The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.
What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the original discs.
On one hand, I'm happy this got translated and love the dreamcast. On the other, this game is so weird I doubt the translation holds a candle to the original
Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to the details of the actual translation process (whether AI translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has been scathing.
The article says "Something important that should be clarified before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took over."
Fan translations have used Babel Fish or similar during the development process for decades. If the final script isn't AI translated I don't see any issue with that.
This statement still, unfortunately, doesn't clarify whether the final translation was MTPE (machine translation post-editing) or translated from scratch by humans. I'm not a professional translator, but according to those of them I've seen on Bsky and the likes, MTPE greatly hurts both the translation quality and, ironically, the translation speed. It also makes it easier to accidentally recruit translators who don't have a decent enough grasp of the source language.
Screenshots of the translated game do give an impression of edited - or even, at times, unedited - machine translation. What with overly direct word-by-word translations, as well as reasonably obvious references (which the game is chock full of) getting mistranslated as something else entirely. Although those screenshots, of course, are not necessarily representative of the whole script, which was a collaborative effort by many translators.
> this really was the white whale translation of the Dreamcast library, there was a lot riding on this project
I don't understand... what is riding on this?
I have never heard of this game, but based on this blog post I can see why it's a "white whale". It's precisely why I don't think this was a good use of AI at all.
For those unfamiliar, 99% Invisible + Hidden Levels did an episode about the backstory of development of Segagaga that is really worth a listen. I really enjoyed it... and without having listed to it months ago wouldn't have even known what this headline was about!
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hl-06-segagaga/
This is the first time Dreamcast owners can play it in a more understandable way (and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point). Playing SGGG, we can all see how brave Sega was at the time. I'm still shocked that Sony had such good marketing around the PS2 launch, so users could trust them to wait - and NOT buy - a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had already great games (Jet Set Radio! MSR! Shenmue! RECV! and many more!), great online features, and its architecture was so well thought out.
> and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point
Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of Japanese text reads. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po... Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or whatever.
Based on what I read in the article, MT was used as an experiment and proof of concept, and dedicated translation was done for the full release. Was that not the case?
Was the workflow MT -> human translation?
If so thats honestly such a lazy followthru given the technical hurdles overcome wrt the font tech
From the Github repo (https://github.com/ExxistanceDC/Segagaga-English-Translation), the translation went through a process called MTPE (Machine translation, post-editing). This works just like it sounds. The initial translation is done with machine translation, then human translators review and edit the resulting translation to try to correct any mistakes.
> What I call the “playtesting translation” — a base translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get started early and understand what they were working on — was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review. I don't think that the end product feels “machine-translated,” but that’s ultimately for you, the player, to judge.
i don't think the translators had any first hand experience with akiba culture of that time period, nor did they know how to speak japanese to actually research it (and most of those ezweb.ne.jp / imode sites are long gone)
Is it possible for AIs in the future catch up those gags and meta humor in the language? Could the translation team have done a better job prompting the AI with the current technology?
Afaik japanese media (manga) abuse alot the use of puns on its language due to the amount of homonyms on it.
Avante-garde will always be lost on an inferential technology because to 'get it' it needs to be trained on sufficient volumes.
67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67 67
Edit: I may not exactly be spitting pearls, but passive downvoting for a genuine take on the matter based on professional experience in AI is a canary gasping for oxygen.
The reason the PS2 was successful it was because it was very easy to unblock it and use pirated games.
The Dreamcast wasn't as easy as I can remember.
It was much easier to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the copy protection was broken to the degree that you could burn a game to a CD-R and have it Just Work without modifying the console in any way. It being both a total piracy free-for-all and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn't seem to fit what you're saying.
Not to say that easy piracy is necessarily a death sentence for a console, the DS succeeded in spite of ubiquitous and cheap flashcarts, but the Dreamcast shows it's not necessarily a path to success either. There are just more pertinent reasons for a system to sink or swim.
In models built prior October 2000 - it was very easy, just boot up Utopia loader and then you were able to run any game from CD.
Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.
The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.
What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the original discs.
This is absolutely amazing and I can't wait to deep dive on this.
On one hand, I'm happy this got translated and love the dreamcast. On the other, this game is so weird I doubt the translation holds a candle to the original
Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to the details of the actual translation process (whether AI translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has been scathing.
The article says "Something important that should be clarified before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took over."
Fan translations have used Babel Fish or similar during the development process for decades. If the final script isn't AI translated I don't see any issue with that.
This statement still, unfortunately, doesn't clarify whether the final translation was MTPE (machine translation post-editing) or translated from scratch by humans. I'm not a professional translator, but according to those of them I've seen on Bsky and the likes, MTPE greatly hurts both the translation quality and, ironically, the translation speed. It also makes it easier to accidentally recruit translators who don't have a decent enough grasp of the source language.
Screenshots of the translated game do give an impression of edited - or even, at times, unedited - machine translation. What with overly direct word-by-word translations, as well as reasonably obvious references (which the game is chock full of) getting mistranslated as something else entirely. Although those screenshots, of course, are not necessarily representative of the whole script, which was a collaborative effort by many translators.
> this really was the white whale translation of the Dreamcast library, there was a lot riding on this project
I don't understand... what is riding on this?
I have never heard of this game, but based on this blog post I can see why it's a "white whale". It's precisely why I don't think this was a good use of AI at all.