Author of No Game No Life Says We Should Not Trust X Automatic Translation

Due to the match between Japan and Brazil in the World Cup, I saw a real horror show of Brazilians being extremely unpleasant and rude to Japanese people. Honestly, I didn’t see this as much from the Japanese side (mainly because my Twitter is almost entirely Japanese).

It turns out that, probably seeing this conflict, Yuu Kamiya, author of No Game No Life and someone who understands both Japanese and Portuguese, said that we should not trust X’s automatic translation.

He said:

“Hmm… I didn’t really want to comment on this, but as someone who understands both Japanese and Portuguese, I feel I need to say something.

The accuracy of X’s automatic translation is simply garbage. It creates words on its own and shows things that are not written in the original text. Because of this, a huge number of misunderstandings are happening. It’s better not to trust automatic translation.”

Let’s see how some Japanese users reacted to his tweet?

• I tried to praise Brazilians and was treated like a sex criminal, and I felt sad.
• Even if something goes wrong, X does not take responsibility, so you have to be careful not to escalate conversations.
• In the end, it’s Elon’s fault.
• By the way, English translation is also terrible. There have been cases where Japanese A was replaced by completely unrelated Japanese B. Google Translate is still better.
• I already said this the other day: even in English, automatic translation is complete garbage. Sometimes you can understand the nuance, but why are proper names replaced with completely different things?
• It’s better to think of it as a rough free translation, like “they’re probably saying something like this.”

• Automatic translation is only good for understanding the basic idea of what is being said — and even then, it sometimes fails. In the end, it cannot produce a proper translation, so it’s best to even turn it off. It’s only useful in casual conversations.
• I already suspected this. Even English and French sometimes get translated strangely.
• Japanese often omits the subject, word order doesn’t matter much, and everything depends on particles — it must be really hard to translate.
• These misunderstandings are sad… we have to be careful.
• That’s why I take the original text and put it into ChatGPT before talking. Even so, the other side’s communication ability is sometimes lacking…
• I’ve seen cases where “Mahou Tsukai no Yoru” was translated as “Puella Magi Madoka Magica” (I made a post about that case here).
• This happens in other languages besides Portuguese as well. But without automatic translation, we wouldn’t even notice these errors — so we end up having to take the original text and translate it again using another service. It’s really time-consuming.

My personal opinion: for Você Sabia Anime, I almost don’t use X’s translator. I did use it in a few posts, but I noticed it was getting weird and decided to stop.

For those who don’t know, I started studying Japanese in a course about 3 or 4 years ago (I think so, I don’t even remember exactly anymore). So posts on the site take time because I’m slow at translating things. I do use ChatGPT to speed things up, but I review everything it gives me to make sure it’s correct.

Even so, mistakes can still happen. I’m not immune to errors. But overall, I agree with him: X’s translation has done some really strange things. You can understand the general context of what people are saying, but it’s basically what Yuu Kamiya said.