I mean, honestly? Yeah. This isn’t how you should translate if you wish to adhere to the original material. You need to understand meaning and context in both languages. AI doesn’t grasp that on account of not grasping anything at all, and the game of telephone that the image is suggesting is completely obliterating it as well.
Example; Lipton, in an ice tea advert had an actress dance and sing, and in the middle of it, took a sip of tea and said 「美味ちい」
If you were to translate that directly, she sips the tea and says “Tasty!” or “Yummy!” which is acceptable. However, you’ve lost the double entendre of how チー (ちい) sounds like the English word tea, which is kind of relevant given what they’re advertising and so you’d lose the opportunity to make the same pun in English; “Tealicious!”
Now apply it on a larger scale and suddenly characters and stories end up diverging between the versions. Sure the overall picture might be similar but the nuance can be vastly different. I saw it all the time in Final Fantasy XIV. Sure, not all media needs that kind of meticulousness and hell, a lot of media doesn’t even care for it. People can be perfectly happy with basic, but they also don’t necessarily know what they’re missing.
Granted, sometimes you have to settle for that method of translation, because you can’t easily or appropriately convey the original intent in another language.
Just for fun, this was Opus’s attempt at translation with the prompt: “I saw this in a commercial for tea. Please translate: 「美味ちい」Keep an eye out for wordplay or cultural difference that would matter in the translation.”
This is clever Japanese wordplay! 「美味ちい」 is a pun that combines:
美味しい (oishii) = “delicious”
茶 (cha) = “tea”
They’ve replaced the し (shi) in “oishii” with ち (chi), creating a portmanteau that sounds like “oichii.” This blends “delicious” with a phonetic hint at “tea” (since ち/chi is close to ちゃ/cha).
Translation: “Deli-tea-ous” or “Tea-licious”
In English, we’d need a similar pun to capture the playful spirit. The commercial is essentially making a tea-specific version of the word “delicious” - it’s a fun bit of marketing language that suggests the tea is so good it deserves its own special adjective!
I don’t speak Japanese, but based on the difference between your explanation and its, it’s gotten it subtly wrong while still arriving at a good translation. Interestingly, Anthropic’s newer (but smaller) model, Sonnet 4.5, doesn’t catch on at all without following up with something to the effect of, “What is tea in Japanese?” LLMs showed pretty amazing multilingual capabilities before they even started intentionally training them with more languages. That said, you definitively still need someone who speaks both languages to check/guide em. As it is their way to bullshit.
But AI can do that! - my first attempt at rage bait.
I mean, honestly? Yeah. This isn’t how you should translate if you wish to adhere to the original material. You need to understand meaning and context in both languages. AI doesn’t grasp that on account of not grasping anything at all, and the game of telephone that the image is suggesting is completely obliterating it as well.
Example; Lipton, in an ice tea advert had an actress dance and sing, and in the middle of it, took a sip of tea and said 「美味ちい」
If you were to translate that directly, she sips the tea and says “Tasty!” or “Yummy!” which is acceptable. However, you’ve lost the double entendre of how チー (ちい) sounds like the English word tea, which is kind of relevant given what they’re advertising and so you’d lose the opportunity to make the same pun in English; “Tealicious!”
Now apply it on a larger scale and suddenly characters and stories end up diverging between the versions. Sure the overall picture might be similar but the nuance can be vastly different. I saw it all the time in Final Fantasy XIV. Sure, not all media needs that kind of meticulousness and hell, a lot of media doesn’t even care for it. People can be perfectly happy with basic, but they also don’t necessarily know what they’re missing.
Granted, sometimes you have to settle for that method of translation, because you can’t easily or appropriately convey the original intent in another language.
Just for fun, this was Opus’s attempt at translation with the prompt: “I saw this in a commercial for tea. Please translate: 「美味ちい」Keep an eye out for wordplay or cultural difference that would matter in the translation.”
I don’t speak Japanese, but based on the difference between your explanation and its, it’s gotten it subtly wrong while still arriving at a good translation. Interestingly, Anthropic’s newer (but smaller) model, Sonnet 4.5, doesn’t catch on at all without following up with something to the effect of, “What is tea in Japanese?” LLMs showed pretty amazing multilingual capabilities before they even started intentionally training them with more languages. That said, you definitively still need someone who speaks both languages to check/guide em. As it is their way to bullshit.