For the past few years, I've been reading a lot of light novels and, more specifically, lesser-known web novels (WNs). The majority of these are Japanese novels available on the Syosetu website, which are not translated anywhere else due to their lack of popularity. There are many excellent hidden stories on Syosetu, and each time I had to use machine translation (MTL), which was rather tedious and resulted in poor quality. However, as you may know, at the end of 2022, large language models (LLMs) began to evolve significantly and are now truly effective for translation (ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, etc.). Most importantly, they use context, resulting in far fewer pronoun errors. As someone with some knowledge in this area, I decided to create what I wanted for myself: LangMTL, an MTL site that aims to translate all Syosetu novels with at least 10,000 points, indicating that they are at least somewhat well-known and often have a good number of chapters. Currently, the site has around 800 WNs completely translated into English (all novels between 20,000 and 80,000 Syosetu points), and I have already finished translating 2,000 more that will soon be added to the site. As a non-native English speaker, one of my priorities is to add translations into other languages and then attempt to include Chinese or Korean WNs in the future. The translation utilizes an LLM, and my site also serves as an experiment to determine whether people will genuinely prefer an average LLM (as translating millions of characters is quite expensive so I can't take like GPT-4) or Google Translate. I honestly believe that the LLM translation is better, but I have noticed numerous formatting issues that I should address. So, if you also enjoy reading lesser-known Syosetu novels, feel free to visit langmtl(dot)com . If you have a Syosetu code like "n5798gy" (a good novel I recommend), you can replace the curly braces with it, like this: langmtl(dot)com/novel-tag/{}/
We are entering an era where many translations will be LLM-powered, but there are still some issues today that make it a pain to use for the average user. That's why we've built a platform to help everyone harness the power of Generative AI for story translation! And now we are also introducing a new browser extension, available on both Chrome and Firefox, that lets you translate and read any story you want directly in your browser, using our Translation API powered by Generative AI. We believe that people will definitely enjoy the quality of these translations much more than using other built in MTL tools like Google Translate or Papago. Browser Extension Demo Video Links to the extension through the Firefox Addon Store and Chrome Web Store in signature below!
I would have preferred to avoid having a commercial pitch in the first response of the thread, but I must say that what you are doing is quite interesting. I have also made efforts to automatically generate a record of the story history and a glossary to improve the translation quality, all of which is available completely free.
We also implemented the ability to bring your own API Keys, which would allow you to use the infrastructure of our platform (minus any models you don't have keys for or our custom models) completely for free as well and unlimited! If you're interested we hope you give it a try!
You can access it, it's just that I can't put a link so you have to replace the (dot) with a "." : langmtl(dot)com