by 
The obscure Dreamcast turn-based RPG Tricolore Crise has just received a fan translation, but rather than celebrating, some fans are calling on members of the Dreamcast community to "push back" against the patch for using what is being described as a new 'AI-friendly' translation tool.
Tricolore Crise was originally released for the Dreamcast in 2000 and is a game about a group of girls on a quest to become masters of a set of towers erected to protect the people of Fayan from humankind's enemy, Iblis.
Developed by HuneX and published by Victor Interactive Software, the game was unfortunately never released outside Japan, leaving the door open for a fan translation to make it more widely accessible to English-speaking players.
However, when closedsockets, the developer of the patch, published a translation online earlier this month, there were some who were disappointed to see the developer rely on AI tools to achieve this goal — chief among them the hacker and fan translator Yuvi, who has reportedly been working on a "proper translation" of the game with a separate team.
Speaking in some detail about the hack in a romhacking.net forum post, closedsockets acknowledged that "AI was used extensively as an assistant for drafting and iterating English text from a structured, scene-ordered CSV worklist," but stated that "The project does not treat AI output as magic or as a replacement for editorial review." Instead, they called on community members to help fix the translation while it was in alpha, asking people to submit "reports of awkward context, mistranslations, text overflow, bad line breaks, or remaining Japanese text," before publishing a revised 1.0.0 version a couple of days later.
Unsurprisingly, given the multitude of concerns related to the growth of AI (from plagiarism to environmental issues, and more general complaints about the quality of the output produced), this type of approach has made some inside the retro community understandably cross, with the freelance writer Sasha Retrobytes voicing her opposition to the project over on BlueSky as follows:
"There's a trend building for 'functional completion' releases as they're now being termed to just be thrown out there as a rough draft with the usual calls for human translators to refine it. But those functional completionists still want their names on the games - a race for first.
"There really needs to be continued pushback on this kind of methodology. The being tasked to refine and correct AI Genslop has been dystopia hanging over freelance writers and editors, so to see a fan community adopt this mindset when anime slopsubs and dubs are being called out is awful."
They weren't the only ones either, with the fan translator, Yuvi, stating that they actually had been working on a "proper" translation of this game with a team "for some time now" and, "This whole thing has just been a slap to my face for all the time and effort I've put into making something great for this great game."
They continued, "This is the type of stuff that makes real people who spent many months and years working to make the best translation possible quit. Because people like this are putting out a bad translation with zero care..."
Back in March of this year, the prolific fan translator and vocal AI critic, Hilltop, posted a lengthy statement about the current fan-translation "gold rush," writing at the time that "AI feels like it was tailor-made to 'disrupt' the fan-translation scene." In that piece, he also noted the increasing trend of people releasing low-quality translations and expecting others to clean up their mess, commenting that, in reality, that never happens.
Given that closedsockets has released the "AI-friendly" tools used in creating the Tricolore Crise patch, it looks like this won't be the last AI fan translation, but there will certainly be some out there wishing it were.