We had a lengthy conversation about Korean word order here.
The whole discussion is very interesting, with various people defending literal translations not only of Korean word order but also expressions which are completely meaningless in English, such as “I will leave first”, “Where are you sick?”, “I will use it well” etc.
To which I recently added some new examples of Korean word order.. I preferred to add them there, where they belong, so that I don’t clutter this discussion and veer it off-topic.
I’ve got a whole file with examples of Korean word order literally translated into English, I use it in my Italian Subber Training Course, and after one hour of trying, most of them become proficient in turning those sentences into normal Italian. I then present a test, but not everybody is able to solve all of the presented examples in a satisfactory way, so we have to do more practice.
The relevance of this is that, if human subbers who don’t know the source language (Korean, in this case) have to be especially and painstakingly trained to recognize these literal translations and to apply certain techniques for translating them into their language, how on earth would AI be able to do it? The answer is that it simply won’t do anything, it will translate normally these nonsense sentences into Spanish or whatever.
If you want to delve more into editing and good translation generally, there’s more
here and here.
And of course, another very interesting conversation on quality over quantity here.