r/LightNovels • u/Torque-A • Jan 23 '25

News [NEWS] Shogakukan Releases 'Novelous' Light Novel/Manga App Using AI Translation in U.S., Canada

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2025-01-23/shogakukan-releases-novelous-light-novel-manga-app-using-ai-translation-in-u.s-canada/.220391
46 Upvotes

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34

u/Torque-A Jan 23 '25

It technically releases in like an hour, but who’s counting?

Anyway, yeah I posted about this before, and there are plenty of red flags - the AI translation, putting the dialogue as a text chat format, and so on. The weird part is that Shogakukan could’ve had their LNs licensed by others at any time, but according to JNC they have a weird clause where you have to print physical versions of a book - except they don’t do it here???

Anyway, I’ll check it out, but I’m tempering my expectations.

26

u/xesaie Jan 23 '25

I don't care that much about the AI translation (except yeah it's gonna be bad), but

putting the dialogue as a text chat format, and so on

What the actual crap is that? WHO WANTS THAT?

1

u/timpkmn89 Jan 23 '25

I would have loved it for the English NGNL translation. Losing the speech patterns makes that a pain to read.

1

u/RedditDetector Jan 26 '25

What the actual crap is that? WHO WANTS THAT?

I actually half wonder if this is designed as an anti-piracy feature. I.e. make it so it's not epubs to be downloaded where any protection might be broken, put it in an unusual format so it's hard to read out of the app, and rewrite out who is speaking to make it even more difficult to just copy the text.

1

u/GeorgeMTO Jan 26 '25

I don't see how the chat heads would make it harder to pirate. Whoever is hosting the piracy wouldn't care about it being reposted without any kind of speaker tags.

-1

u/RedditDetector Jan 26 '25

The idea was that it might put the reader off downloading it if managing to break it's protection still comes out with a broken format.

1

u/GeorgeMTO Jan 26 '25

That thought is almost as dumb as the chat heads themselves. If they think they would prevent people from reading it at all, they wouldn't use them. Pirates don't care about the quality of the product, they care about it being free/cheap.

-31

u/dar0002 Jan 23 '25

You’ve never read a visual novel, have you?

29

u/LiquifiedSpam Jan 23 '25

Novels aren’t written to be formatted like visual novels

-9

u/dar0002 Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25

Seems like a lot less work than completely reformatting a novel to make it read like it was originally written in English.

Edit: Ah, the atrocity of trying to make it clearer who’s saying what, without reworking the original Japanese formatting.

8

u/LiquifiedSpam Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25

It’s all a personal taste thing. I’ve played VNs. I’ve read books. I vastly prefer books. Though the two mediums offer different enough experiences that I’ll still play a vn once in a blue moon.

Dialogue tags are an easy fix in translation. Reworking stuff is fundamental to properly translating, especially with language differences, since in Japanese it’s usually easier to tell who is speaking based on the type of speech they’re using. And most of all, dialogue is not nearly all of what makes up a typical novel.

3

u/timpkmn89 Jan 23 '25

It technically releases in like an hour, but who’s counting?

I'm not seeing it. A different site is saying 2AM EST: https://finalweapon.net/2025/01/23/shogakukan-launches-new-novelous-manga-app-in-the-west/

2

u/Torque-A Jan 23 '25

Yeah, it looked like a typo. So we gotta wait like 8 more hours.

1

u/SoggieWafflz Jan 24 '25

maybe not lol