Part of why the whole Aloe Mano (now known as Delutaya) situation went as thermonuclear as it did is machine translators missed a lot of context, even if Depressed Nousagi sold the whole thing as “um ackchually it was about ethics in spreading speculative misinformation, also if you have a problem with idol culture, you’re a colonizer!”.

I remember the early days of machine translators. Back around 2006, my father’s (now former) brother-in-law got a knockoff DVD player. It had all the features, it even lasted as long as some other, more expensive yet less feature rich DVD players from big brand names. The catch? Besides it had a sound-alike brand name, its Hungarian manual was machine translated, all without the many advancements of modern machine translators, that try to guess the context within the text at least. A thing about the Hungarian language, that the word “player” can be translated in two different ways: “játékos” as in someone plays a game, or “lejátszó” as in playback device/software. This shortly became an inside joke within the family (especially as játékos also could mean “playful”), and by 2010, I’ve seen it on Hungarian meme sites, including a complete scan of the manual.

The biggest advancement that modern translators did is to guess context from rest of the text. AGI translators could take things further, but I don’t want my software to have human feelings.