Baka-Tsuki:Machine Translation Guidelines
This page is a DRAFT.
Please use caution. There many be inaccurate or incomplete material.
This page describes Baka-Tsuki's default policy towards machine translations.
Please note that this policy is a convention—individual translation projects may have stricter or more relaxed policies with regards to machine translations. Please check Project-Specific Guidelines to learn more about your project's stance on machine translations. All members should follow these guidelines by default.
Definition of a Machine Translation
Henceforth, the act of machine translating is defined as the conversion of a sentence or phrase of more than 8 characters (in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) into another language via a translating program (babel, ATLAS, google, etc).
Guidelines
1. Any translation performed with a heavy reliance on machines for more than 1/2 of the text will be considered as a machine translation script.
- This also includes romaji translations and other kinds of work done by people who obviously depend on unreliable methods to produce a translation.
2. A machine translation script must be worked on by two people who know Japanese, then checked/approved by a senior translator, in addition to having the consent of the project manager.
- The content will be checked based on the immediate language it was translated from, and translated into.
e.g. Japanese -> Chinese -> English script.
Japanese to English could be checked.
Chinese to English could be checked.
Japanese to Chinese will not be checked.
- There needs to be people who not only contribute to make the translation faithful, but also a respected translator who obviously knows his stuff to check if the work has been done right.
- Still, this is just the minimum acceptable. If a project manager thinks that the minimum acceptable is not good enough, he's free to forbid machine translation scripts.
- For existing chapters that have supposedly been TLCed, a senior translator will be sent to check it.
- An accuracy of 85% to 95% is expected at the very least, depending on the difficulty of the novel in question.
3. Chapters that fail to meet the requirements will be deleted permanently.
- This is non-negotiable. For the translators who would like to want their work back though, we may help you for that. But anyway, a machine translation script that doesn't meet the minimum required (which is already pretty lax) will be deleted.
4. Chapters will be tagged clearly as a machine translation script.
- No more confusion surrounding machine translation script. A -MTL name extension will be added to every chapter, in addition to a template indicating that the script has been produced by a machine.
5. Any chapter done by a machine can be overwritten by a human translator.
- Unless it's a translator guess-lating and inventing stuff out of blue, a human translator who shows the ability and the effort can overwrite the machine translation script with his own work.
Once a Preview script has fulfilled all the requirements as shown by the guidelines, please be aware that the script will become Baka-Tsuki Wiki-communist state property.
Baka-Tsuki staff have the final authority to remove the script, provided that they have fully transparent and accountable reasons.
