Book Blurbs Discussion

Here’s an example I just ran into that argues for “old Deepl was bad”: 水車館の殺人 | L35

Japanese blurb:

仮面の当主と孤独な美少女が住まう異形の館、水車館。1年前の嵐の夜を悪夢に変えた不可解な惨劇が、今年も繰り返されるのか? 密室から消失した男の謎、そして幻想画家・藤沼一成の遺作「幻影群像」を巡る恐るべき秘密とは……!? 本格ミステリの復権を高らかに謳(うた)った「館」シリーズ第2弾、全面改訂の決定版!

Current English blurb on Natively, from old Deepl:

The masked master and a lonely beautiful girl reside in the deformed mansion, Suigurumakan. will the inexplicable tragedy that turned a stormy night a year ago into a nightmare be repeated again this year? What is the mystery of the man who disappeared from the secret room, and the terrifying secret surrounding the posthumous work of fantasy painter Kazunari Fujinuma, “Genshikigunzo” …! This is the second volume of the “Yakata” series, the fully revised and definitive version of the series, which has been highly praised for its restoration of the authentic mystery genre!

English translation I get from pasting the Japanese blurb into the Deepl website:

The Water Mill House, a deformed mansion inhabited by a masked master and a lonely, beautiful girl: will the inexplicable tragedy that turned a stormy night a year ago into a nightmare be repeated this year? What is the mystery of the man who disappeared from the secret room, and the terrifying secret surrounding fantasy painter Fujinuma Kazunari’s last work, ‘Phantom Group’. …! The second volume in the ‘Yakata’ series, the fully revised definitive edition, which has been hailed as the return of the authentic mystery!

Note in particular that the old blurb has several words where it just gave up and didn’t translate, missing capitalisation in the second sentence, as well as the curious concept of a “posthumous work” by a painter. (Though neither correctly guesses the name reading for 藤沼一成, which is Issei Fujinuma.)

@brandon is it worth rerunning the jp->en auto translation for the cases where there has been no editing of the translation on Natively?

Claude.ai, for comparison with a different AI:

“The Waterwheel Manor - a bizarre mansion inhabited by a masked lord and a lonely beautiful girl. Will the inexplicable tragedy that turned that stormy night one year ago into a nightmare repeat itself this year? What is the mystery of the man who vanished from a locked room, and what terrifying secret surrounds ‘Phantom Figures,’ the final work of Kazunari Fujinuma, the phantasmagoric artist…!? This is the definitive, completely revised edition of the second installment in the ‘Manor’ series, boldly proclaiming the revival of orthodox mystery fiction!”

Much better choice for the painting title, gets the correct idiomatic-for-the-genre translation of 密室 as “locked room”, manages to translate 「館」シリーズ, but I think “lord” here is a suboptimal choice.

Just for fun, here's the Amazon blurb for the English translation (which obviously was written from scratch)

A twisty and ingenious classic Japanese murder mystery from the author of The Decagon House Murders

Every year, a small group of acquaintances pay a visit to the remote, castle-like Mill House, home to the reclusive Fujinuma Kiichi, son of a famous artist, who has lived his life behind a rubber mask ever since a disfiguring car accident. This year, however, the visit is disrupted by gruesome murder, a baffling disappearance and the theft of a priceless painting.

The brilliant Kiyoshi Shimada arrives on the scene, but as he investigates the seemingly impossible events of that evening, death strikes again, and again…

Can Shimada get to the truth before the killer gets to him? And can you solve the mystery of the Mill House Murders before he does?

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:joy:
It’s either すいしゃ (common reading) or みずぐるま (only heard that in the song from the かぐや姫 Ghibli anime)
Old DeepL was cooking. Speaking of which

I don’t even know what is going on here. 幻視+き? The correct reading would be げんえい.

That didn’t shock me at the time since that’s how I would translate 遺作… but yeah, it’s not like publication where things can move along even after your death…

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Another DeepL oddity: for ミントな僕ら 1 | L20?? when translating the character names まりあ and のえる it has for some reason gone with “MariA and Toeru”. No idea where it got the goofy capitalisation from…

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Here’s a “chatgpt better than deepl even today” example:

もし、恋が見えたなら | L18 has a blurb:

第1巻の内容紹介: 「この俳優とこのアイドル、結婚するね」 昔から当てるたびに驚かれたので、最近ではもう言わなくなった。そんな他人の「好き」がわかる少女 春野鳴の学園生活が始まるーー。

Deepl fails on the passive 驚かれた:

Volume 1: ‘This actor and this idol are getting married’ I was always surprised whenever I guessed it, so I don’t say it any more these days. The school life of Haruno Naru, a girl who knows what other people ‘like’, begins.

Chatgpt does better and also has a better-in-context handling of 他人の「好き」:

Volume 1 Synopsis:
“That actor and that idol are going to get married.”

People were always surprised whenever she predicted such things, so lately, she’s stopped mentioning them. Thus begins the school life of Haruno Naru, a girl who can sense other people’s “feelings of love.”

Claude is OK too, though it has dropped 学園生活 for some reason:

Volume 1 Introduction: “This actor and this idol will get married.” I used to surprise people every time I predicted something like this, so recently I’ve stopped saying such things. The story begins of Haruno Naru, a girl who can understand other people’s “likes” ——.

and also interestingly gave me some extra unprompted notes:

A few notes about the translation:

  • The blurb suggests the protagonist has some kind of ability to predict relationships or understand people’s romantic interests
  • The Japanese text implies she used to openly share her predictions but has now become more reserved about her ability
  • The name “Haruno Naru” is a typical Japanese name, with “Haruno” as the family name and “Naru” as the given name
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Apologies if this is answered somewhere in the thread already, I did a cursory search and didn’t find any good answers.
I added a translated blurb for the first book in this series on the page, but I realized only after saving that the first book’s blurb overwrites the subsequent volumes. All of these books have different plots but the same characters, so I was wondering if there was a way to add translated blurbs per book or if this still isn’t an implemented feature?

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it’s not implemented yet it’s semi-implemented apparently

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which means: you’ll have to ask via the feedback button of some book of the series to make the blurbs of the books separate. It is possible to do it manually by admins. There are series were descriptions are indeed separate, like e.g. the リング series.

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I stand corrected. Good to know

Got it, thanks for the answer!

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@brandon : I tried to add a blurb (Japanese and English) to 札幌アンダーソング | L30?? and it seemed to add it fine in the UI of that page, but when I revisited the page later the blurb wasn’t there. Any idea what happened to it?

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Hmm, it looks like the page cache wasn’t updated. Every page stores data locally (and temporarily) on the servers to reduce database load for frequent visits.

It seems that those blurbs were saved to the database, but that page cache needed a manual refresh. There may be a bug here so thanks for raising. I’ve fixed it for that particular page, but let me know if it happens again~

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