ひげ
@matana the guy was using MT and the English was just horrible. There were times I did actually look up specific words and I used multiple translators to get a clearer picture. I kept it simple and as close to the source as I could while actually playing the game to get better context. I think the end result was improved over the original translation. A native French speaker with a good grasp on the English language could have probably done better, there's no doubt in that, but I was the guy who was up for the task and I'd do it again if there was an indie dev who didn't speak English very well to help polish their game. In that role, I'm less of a translator and more of an editor, making sure the grammar is good and looks natural for English speakers who will read it.
I don't really see how that's akin to localizers inserting weird stuff that didn't exist in the original but fits their vision instead. Surely you wouldn't get American politics or "hello fellow kids" memes generated from a simple translation. Nintendo of America localizers saw that Robbie was thinking Purah was cute and funny in Breath of the Wild and decided to remove it because they thought players in the west wouldn't find that appealing. That's a lot different than just cleaning up some broken grammar that would have resulted from a machine just translating things 1:1.
French machine translation is also a lot better than Japanese is. There are a lot more people that speak it and it stems from Latin and German just as English does. The two languages are much, much more similar than Japanese and English are. Thus, you'll get more accurate results to begin with.
It might be interesting for me to take some lines of foreign text from a game that actually have a translation from a native speaker and see how close I can get without looking at their translation, compare the two, and look at points where I could have been incorrect. I still think whatever I come up with would be closer to the original than a localizer thinking they know what's best for western gaming or some shit like that.
@matana to better prove my point, compare my translation of this meme to the others (yours included): https://gameliberty.club/@Mr_NutterButter/108527695474596600
You both used the symbol for "ru" instead of "ro." This was before I knew what those were or that they were even hiragana. The result is a translation that the cat is calling the vagina gourmet, more or less. The cat's face looks a little distraught so I don't think that's the joke. Plugging in the actual characters to the jisho website gives me some weird grape vine as a result. That makes sense, because this joke is a pun and doesn't actually translate out to anything. That's why Google just spits out "guroman" instead of anything tangible.
My translation, if I was putting it in an official product instead of an explanation of the joke, would be hard to get right. I would probably have to either go the route of "that's not a pussy, that's just a gross baked bun!" while showing a picture of the bun or simply "that's not a pussy!" if I couldn't be as verbose due to a character limitation or something, which was often the case with older games. You wouldn't get the full pun, but it would still make sense as a pun in English and still be funny because it's a pussycat.
Machine translation is not perfect and still needs a human element in many cases. I filled that role and did my due research. I don't think that makes me "part of the problem."
@beardalaxy @matana Gourmand also means glutton which lends itself more the to guruman/guro man pun. I’d probably put something like “what a bloated pussy.” to get across the gluttony of the cat and the disgustfulness of the vagina while keeping the primary reading about the vagina and the secondary pun about the cat.