Late last week, Sega fans got a welcome surprise thanks to the release of the English language patch for Segagaga, a Dreamcast RPG which had remained untranslated for decades.
The work was undertaken by a team led by Exxistance, and finally gave fans the chance to play the game in English – but the good news came with a catch.
The patch was made possible by AI translation, which many members of the fan translation community frown upon.
Soon after the patch went live, many pointed out that the translation was low quality, despite the team behind it insisting that AI had only provided the basic framework for the project and that it had undergone a thorough human review before being deemed worthy of publication.
To be fair to the team behind the translation, the tools used to translate the game have been made available for others to improve on the work already done, but for many, the use of AI has tainted the entire project.
There's also another, more troubling side-effect. A lot of the appeal of translating a game comes from making it playable in English for the first time. Given that plenty of amazing games still haven't been translated, it's easy to see why the arrival of this AI-driven patch would discourage future translators from tackling SEGAGAGA again; if one translation exists, then why create another? These machine-based translations are literally poisoning the well.
On the flip side, the fact that so many games remain untranslated might be seen as a strong argument for leveraging AI to speed things up and bring more Japanese titles to a wider audience. Despite issues with the quality of the SEGAGAGA translation, many people seem very happy to finally be able to play the game properly.
It remains to be seen if others choose to clean up this translation, but as Reddit user MyNameIs_Anthony points out, the damage might already be done, as the AI translation will have missed many of the nuances which exist with this humour-packed game:
What are your thoughts on this? Are you happy that you can finally play the game, or would you rather have waited a little longer for a fully human-authored translation which fully captures the meaning of the game's text?
Post a comment below and vote in the poll to let us know your thoughts.