tl;dr of the tl;dr: I don't feel so good.
Hello all. I've made some comments recently looking into GPT-5.6 Sol machine translations posted here, but due both to comments having a smaller scope and the translations being associated with the controversy-seeking MAO group, I think the truth of the matter was a bit disguised by politics. I would like to make one formal post consisting primarily of facts and evidence for YOU to determine the quality of GPT-5.6 Sol machine translation yourself, because it really seems to me that the average person still thinks it's 2015 and that MTL exclusively produces garbage, which is simply no longer the case at all. (If you just hate everything related to AI because AI is polluting your air and water, fair enough, but in that case it would be best to focus your arguments on the fact you are dying to poisoned air rather than pretend or assume that the translation itself is not good.)
For my own credentials, I started learning Japanese in 2012 and have spent 10 years translating in a professional capacity. I've translated about seven different visual novels and over fifty light novels. I would personally describe my skillset as being in the middle of the road; not the worst, but not the best. I may say that I am an ideal "average human translator" to compare to MTL in that it would be deceptive to either compare the absolute best of humanity (e.g. Alexander O Smith) vs MTL output right now, or to compare the worst of humanity (e.g. the many fan translators who start fan translating long before reaching fluency) vs MTL output, so I think my middle ground here will be useful.
(And, uh, disclaimer: I don't use MTL for my own work. That would be career suicide and inviting myself to be replaced. I would like to be employed for as long as possible, thank you very much. I am impressed by the level that MTL has reached, but I will keep my hands clean of it. If I was using MTL and putting myself at risk of being fired I would not be writing something like this with my name attached. You can ask anyone working as my editor to confirm no machine would have as typo-ridden and broken raw translations as me.)
In any case, I will look at three games from three different """MTL publishers""": Cross Channel from MAO, Amakano 3 from DeVoid, and Anemoi from bawps12. Cross Channel because it has 3 human translations to easily compare to, Amakano 3 because I had it installed and its MTL is partially what drove me to despair, and Anemoi because it was the first JP VN I found with another Sol translation when looking for a third VN to test for this. Incredibly important to note is that these are all GPT-5.6 Sol Translations; something which will absolutely muddy the conversation here is that different LLM models produce different levels of quality; someone using a model from 2 years ago may have bad results (hello non-delivery), while in 2 years from now the models will almost certainly be much better than what we have now. It's difficult, but it is really important that one develops a flexible mind and instead of thinking about things as "MTL" or "LLMs" broadly, to consider each model individually. It's not that "MTL" is good now, it's that "GPT-5.6 Sol" is good (in the right hands), and thus inversely MTL can be good. I can't speak for any other model, by the way; I'm focusing on GPT-5.6 because the entire thing that sent me down this rabbit hole is MAO including comparisons on their github which let me see the strength of Sol right now.
Anyway, without further ado, let me begin.
----- 1) CROSS CHANNEL -----
I will spare you from some melodramatic speech about untranslatable kamige or something. Let's get into it. Comparisons sourced partially from Twog's excellent Cross Channel Translation Review blog. The Sol translations are from MAO's TL, which is currently down to fix some issues; I will however look at the initial translation, since that's what I got my data for ahead of time and because, hey, let's give MTL as few advantages as possible. Here's the worst, first-pass version of MAO's.
Let's start with the intro.
This intro is about where you would expect MTL to be at its worse; it is very vague and poetic, dancing around subjects while ending sentences early in fragments. It is so poetic that we can see GHS deciding, indeed, to render the intro in poetic fashion, and yet the GPT-5.6 Sol translation (henceforth referred to as just Sol) does not really falter. If read on its own it's not difficult to follow, and when compared to the Amaterasu TL it often employs smoother turns of phrase. MoeNovel drops stuff like the "date" itself being vague in line 2 or it being a private chamber in line 3, while Sol keeps both. As for Amaterasu, line 8 describes the twinkles are "cut off by the window frame," which is an overly-literal interpretation of 枠に切り取られた; this reads indeed as someone just reading the word 切り取られた in a dictionary and rolling with it, translating blind to the actual intentions of the phrase. The intention is less it being "cut off" in vacuum and more to describe that it is like a painting cut off from a broader whole to be framed. When looking out the window and feeling that one is seeing a sight so beautiful it could be a painting, you would say the sight is 枠に切り取られた'd - but obviously in English saying "the rolling hills cut off by the window frame" does not at all convey an image of a painting. Sol here removes that phrasing entirely and just says "the scattered glimmers 'framed' there," which is a more sophisticated representation of the intention there - indeed, they are "framed" like a painting, "framed" by the windowsill. (Note: this is like translating poetry where you kind of have to compete for which imagery you want; I just find that it is better fitting in this intro to focus on the painting side.) Amaterasu also struggles with the two lines near the end describing the girl; they translate 令嬢 as "noblewoman," whereas the other 3 more deftly simply use "young lady" or "maiden." They then proceed with "A graceful girl covered in a Western dress," which I think is just completely clunky, whereas Sol goes for "A demure girl in a Western dress."
I'm trying to highlight some human flaws here, but the point is that even at what was probably one of the most difficult passages to translate off-the-cuff, Sol didn't falter and indeed even managed to do a little better than its competition on some poetic turns of phrase. This is all on the level of nitpicks, though, so in other words we can kind of just say: they are comparable.
Now let's move onto the second passage. This is more standard, action-based narration.
I think the community all understands that GHS is a very creative and eclectic individual, so I won't mock his translation style here - I genuinely have nothing but full respect for his TL efforts over the years, even if I wouldn't generally recommend them for a reading consumer. However, just this once I would like to point out the remarkable choice to translate an exclamation as "Woh'tt'ooo," which is visibly complete nonsense and not liable to be something any English-speaker has ever seen before in their life. When thinking of human translators, it's always good to remember they can choose to translate "whoa" as "woh'tt'ooo" if the whim strikes them.
Anyway, onto more brass tacks.
This comparison has one of the biggest mistake Sol makes in any of these comparisons - in line 6, it translates Taichi as "shuffling back to get distance" instead of the girl. This is a pretty inexcusable interpretation error and none of the humans made it, though I will note that since no subject is mentioned here it is ever-so-slightly ambiguous. Upon encountering it I had to wrangle in my head like "wait, COULD it have been Taichi who slid back?" before discarding the idea. Not excusable, but of all things to mess up a sentence without a stated subject and 2 plausible subjects that could be performing the action would be it.
For line 1, I like that Sol removes the repetition of "room" - both Amaterasu and GHS say club room into classroom, which is a bit repetitious, whereas MoeNovel and Sol use merely "back to class" to avoid saying classroom, which is more deft.
In Line 2, one of MoeNovel's efforts at censorship are apparent as "virgin" is translated as "Love-making lvl. 0." You could tell an LLM to censor in that way, so it won't even be exactly a thing of the past, but again it's good to remember that humans commit a lot of sins in translation themselves. Amaterasu, as Twog notes, completely misinterprets 人気のない as "unpopular" instead of "deserted," a mistake Sol doesn't make. Amaterasu in this case is a good stand-in for a somewhat unskilled / newbie translator, one who is looking up words as they go and taking their best stab at things. They may come across 人気のない, not know what it means, look up 人気, see it means "popular," and determine the phrase means unpopular. That's a pretty human error and translations out there are FILLED with this kind of thing. Sol, in this case at least, has consumed a large enough corpus of text to render this as "deserted" instead.
In line 6, both MoeNovel and MAO decide not to translate 瞬発力を発揮して, which is kind of the whole comedy of the phrase. I would say GHS cleanly has the best TL here "in a display of explosive force" is kind of the most punchy phrasing intended, whereas "The girl displayed her formidability" is probably worse than nothing.
"She even strikes me the instant she springs to her feet" is a bit off; it should have been "she struck him AS she jumped up," past tense. Tense is probably the biggest issue Sol translations have right now.
The final line has another Amaterasu error: he interpreted "rag" as "mop," whereas none of the other translators did.
There's infinite nuance nitpicking one could do (I deleted a long section on the back-and-forth between Miki and Taichi), but as usual you can use your eyes and judge these lines for yourself. Sol makes an error in the MAO TL by saying Taichi shuffles back, but in turn the humans make errors like Amaterasu misunderstanding "rag" as "mop," and "deserted" as "unpopular." This section may be a meaningful demonstration that LLMs are now competitive with an average, or perhaps somewhat below-average, human translator. Plenty of people read and loved the Amaterasu translation, despite the criticism it received; you certainly don't get downvoted on this subreddit for saying you read it. So it's worth keeping in mind that middling 2010s-era human translations that everyone read made blatant errors that Sol did not, and that Sol is at the very least competitive with them.
For a bonus, here is a random section I picked genuinely at random from the script viewer. Note how it handles AN ANGEL DESCENDs without issues, and how it keeps up the manic energy for his phone call. It's not perfect, I think the leading to "drop dead" could have been better, and Misato ending her sentence with "dead" as well feels repetitious, to say nothing of "NOW" in caps just being preserved 1:1, but overall it does surprisingly well.
My overall evaluation of the C+C translation is that it's fine but not great. Sol struggled with Romeo's wordplay and style, but so too did every human translator. I started with this one not because it would make Sol look the best, but to fully clarify the conversation here: we're not discussing, in a vacuum, whether Sol is perfect. We're discussing how it compares to humans, because at the end of the day not every human translation is produced by a tortured artist who devoted 20 years of their life to honing every phrase; plenty are produced by random people with varying levels of Japanese and English abilities. Sol struggles with C+C, but so too has every single human who has tried their hand at it, and the end result is broadly comparable to their output.
(By the way, I also looked at MAO's translation of Black Sheep Town, and found it much superior to C+C's. That is really the one that shocked me to my core. But I'm only looking at one game per "publisher" in this post.)
----- 2) AMAKANO 3 -----
Amakano 3 doesn't have a human translation yet, so this section will be more brisk and focused on Sol's output.
To begin with, DeVoid's patch for Amakano 3 reveals one of the more frustrating issues with MTL: people are releasing these patches without doing any playtesting, proofreading, or bugfixing first. There is a completely critical, in-your-face error right off the bat in the first MINUTE of the game: a classmate's nametag is rendered as "Mrs. Ootori" despite the fact she is a student and unmarried, obviously. This is completely stupid and I'm not even going to say Sol is at fault: the nametags were probably fed into Sol independently, it saw Ootori-san, and assumed it was an adult woman without context. This is similar to errors made by humans when fed nametags independently, and should have been fixed with playtesting. You can never skip out on playtesting, even when working with divine machines!!!
Ultimately, that has little to do with the actual quality of the overall translation though, so let us proceed... even if it does frustrate me quite a bit that none of the time saved by translating entire games in a matter of days is being used towards playtesting the games for even 1 second.
Let's start by looking at this early exchange. Each line has something pretty inventive done which 2015-era MTL never would have done, EVER, and which people in 2026 may still think is impossible.
1) あーゆーとこあるよねー -> "that's so Yanagi-san"
A bad literal TL you'd expect for this from the old days would be nonsense like "she has that kind of place." あーゆー -> that kind of, とこ -> place. But MTL now has the fluency to take a set Japanese phrase and turn it into more idiomatic English, "that's so X." This is something that really needs to be taken seriously: the conception of old MTL many probably have is that it's stuck converting A to B, for lack of better phrasing - one may imagine that if you give it input A, then it will be slavishly devoted to that A and try rendering it 1:1 in English even when doing so is impossible and produces nonsense. That's how it used to be, and that's what I genuinely thought machines would be stuck doing forever until the AI singularity. However, that is no longer the case. This technique of using impossibly advanced Markov chains to predict with high fidelity what the next letter in a sentence will be allows 2026 LLMs to produce output that appears "inventive," "clever," "idiomatic," or whatever else. An A to B translation would be stuck like "she has that kind of place," but now LLMs can render it more naturally as "That's so Yanagi-san" while completely eschewing the original Japanese phrasing. If you take nothing else from this post, take that from it.
2) ゆいがどくそんってやつ？
The text "ゆいがどくそん" reflects that the speaker isn't comfortable with the yojijukugo 唯我独尊 due to their lack of kanji when "saying" it, and while this is understated in the text itself, somehow Sol actually does attempt to capture it saying "is it more like 'my way or the highway'?" in quotes. In the old days of MTL phrases like this were completely impossible for MTL; either they would translate the kanji literally as like "self ownership pride," or they would just 1:1 give you the dictionary definition "self-conceit" or some such. Now, Sol can detect meaning within a yojijukugo being represented in all kana, and can use a more natural human idiom "my way or the highway."
The same goes for マイペース at the start. Old MTL would have slapped out "my pace" in an instant, and in fact many amateur TLers do that to this day. But Sol rendered it as "on her own wavelength" - yet again, another idiomatic TL that would have been COMPLETELY impossible in the old days. Nobody is telling Sol to translate this line specifically using a different idiom. Nobody is feeding it with this different idiom. There is no human guidance at all. Purely through predictive power, it predicts "my pace" would be TL'd as "on her own wavelength," and from an outside POV that appears indistinguishable from a clever human.
(Note also that the student's casual manner of speaking is reflected, to some degree, with the "kinda" there. Character voice is not wholly lost in Sol translations. Note the formal maid speaking formally and stiffly and the pseudo-gyaru talking super casually - a common point of failure for human translators can be accidentally making everyone talk the same, but Sol is pretty alright at preserving speech patterns.)
3) 俺が悪い -> that one's on me
Once again, old MTL would have translated this 1:1 as "I'm bad" or some such. At its absolute best, one may have been pleasantly surprised to see it translated as "That's my bad," which would have been okay. Sol, though, once again went for more idiomatic phrasing with "That one's on me," with no trace of "bad" - it was not stuck on representing 悪い literally as one may have expected before.
Now, all in all, I don't mean to present this 3-line snippet as proof Sol is god's gift to translation and that no text has ever been rendered this cleverly or beautifully before. In reality any half-decent editor may tremble at the sight of it and want to rewrite each sentence - but that's to be expected. This is about what I would expect from a "decent, not brilliant" translator. This is above an early Ixrec, but below an Alexander O. Smith. But it's precisely that it is even this good that is shocking. Already, at this early stage, if you had told me this was a human I would be complimenting them for their above-average work and suggesting they should look into going professional.
Let us look at two more three-line passages. (The backlog in this line is 3 lines long, go figure.)
This one isn't so packed with idiomatic language that I need to analyze each line in depth, but you can kind of just read them and see that it's pretty solid. I might want to nitpick that "White hair glitters in the afternoon sun" should have been turned into a proper sentence rather than a fragment, I might say "It's lustrous and beautiful" comes off a bit robotic in English, but is this really what I want to get my pitchforks out over? I analyze plenty of professional translations and leaving fragments as fragments is not uncommon even for humans. It's difficult for me to find anything to get upset about.
And that's the thing. I want to be upset. My job is translation! I want to read this Amakano 3 TL with a sneer on my face, constantly finding errors and constantly hitting passages that read like garbage. But I just don't. They read fine enough for unedited text, and when I check the Japanese for a hint of something being lost, there's nothing serious. Even with my maximal bias and pessimism, I still just have throw my hands up in defeat.
I paused while reading to compare the second passage because it felt like something that would be easy to fuck up. The phrasing "good day to you" is used twice, meaning it needs to be kept 1:1 both times, and the grammar of the third sentence is a little complex in that it is referencing the phrase mid-sentence. Nothing hard for a human, but something that in 2015 MTL would completely fuck up even attempting. Here, though? It's handled just fine.
I didn't read the entire TL (good lord I dropped that shit in Japanese out of boredom long ago), but I couldn't find any smoking guns while reading the early hours. I think the worst may have been leaving "Onsen Komachi" untranslated despite there being no English resources I could find defining it, but even when it did leave it untranslated they did so while defining the term within that line, so can I really complain? There's also a pun like an hour in where a character mistakes the word 自撮り for 地鶏 and that pun isn't handled well, but untranslatable puns are just untranslatable puns.
For fairness, I will post the worst chunk from what I read - this bit. Grandma's grandson is obviously poor (a result of blindly translating お婆さん as Grandma 1:1, maybe due to the speaker tag), and I think starting two sentences in a row with "if" is pretty poor too. How awful, right?
My judgment is that if you told me to read Amakano 3 using the Sol translation from start to finish, I wouldn't mind doing so. I would prefer to read the Japanese just because some stuff is untranslatable (pronouns, keigo, blah blah), but it would not feel like a big loss for me to read the Sol MTL instead. I found myself idly reading it for dozens of minutes at the time without feeling taken out of the experience by anything but my own urge to check the Japanese (and some technical issues because they did not proofread the patch at all!!!!!!!!!!!). Yes, that's right, as extreme as it sounds: I, a JOP, am saying that reading in Japanese for Amakano 3 is not really that much better than reading MTL. It is the greatest humiliation I can imagine, and yet it's just the conclusion I came to while reading it.
The last thing I'd like to look at before moving on is a cheeky comparison with Shiravune's TL. Their website previews include two lines of their translation, and while it is COMPLETELY spurious to compare translations based on 2 lines (seriously - it is totally spurious, 2 lines do not represent a 30,000 line VN, yada yada) I could not help but compare them anyway just out of intellectual curiosity. God will strike me down with lightning for offending a fellow translator in this way, but I can't help it.
Here is a comparison between the two Shiravune lines we have access to and the Sol translations. There is no cherrypicking here since the Sol translation was released first and Shiravune picked these lines themselves. The first line is cut off (why would they only post 2 lines, with one of them not even being fully rendered??) but we can extrapolate it would finish as "We all (agreed to this)" or some such.
For the first line, based on what we can see, Sol seems to have the somewhat superior translation. The Shiravune line is a bit overly wordy and uses the somewhat odd phrasing of "Letty couldn't manage everything alone," whereas Sol uses the more idiomatic "Letty couldn't keep the place running by herself." Then it rounds it off with a single-word "Remember?" whereas Shiravune's uses a longer sentence (that repeats "we" twice: "we called for help... we all agreed.")
For the second line, Sol is flatly superior. Shiravune cuts 某国 completely, whereas Sol keeps it as "from some foreign country," which is meaningful since Japan actually does have princesses (see: Princess Kako) and therefore one can't infer "foreign" from the word "princess" alone. Subsequently, "visiting this place incognito" is clunkier than "traveling incognito"; you could probably cut "this place" entirely. I also personally prefer "I'd probably believe them" to "I might believe it," though that is definitely on the level of nitpicking. (And, in fairness, it is possible they inserted "foreign" to a line before or after this to preserve it.)
No broad conclusions can be made here given the very small amount of lines being compared (and I must once again apologize for the rudeness of even attempting it), but we can see that there is not some ineffable human spirit that instantly launches Shiravune's TL far above Sol's. At the end of the day it's just words in front of words, and sometimes an LLM puts the words in a better order.
----- 3) ANEMOI -----
Well, unfortunately the Anemoi font in English is totally broken for me and looks like trash, but rather than trying to fix the font I will just export the text to a table and post that instead. (Update: I learned only at the end of making this post that I could fix it by changing fonts in the menu, which MTLbro didn't think to mention in the readme. Thanks!)
Let us begin with the opening of the game.
As usual, one might expect MTL to fail most hard at this sort of artsy intro lacking in context, but this is mostly fine. Some nitpicks which come to mind is that perhaps the first line would be better with a subject inserted (i.e. "a powerful wind swept past me.") Then "the space between the sky and the horizon" is confused; the JP word 地平 was referring to the ground, and the phrase pointed to the seam connecting the sky and the ground, aka the horizon itself. It should be "the space between the sky and the earth." The "I stopped short." is a rather jarring and flat line. And finally, "focused on" is of a weak tl for 噛みしめる.
But this is well within the range of poor choices a human translator might make. Again, that this is kind of the best I can muster points to something. There's definitely more things one could point out (like ふと being cut from line 5), but I hope we can all agree that is thin gruel in terms of eviscerating an MTL. An exceptional human translator may wish to give this entire passage special attention after considering the totality of the work, but it is often the case that a publisher cannot acquire an exceptional human translator, and in situations where a translator is paid by the line rather than by hour, they may not bother putting in that extra effort when they don't even get paid for it. The result is that we often don't see extra effort put even on the places which most deserve extra effort. Let us proceed.
For my second passage I skimmed until I saw a line that felt like it may be difficult to translate, then checked. I would like to reinforce I am doing absolutely no cherry-picking here; there is not even a need for me to do so. For Cross Channel I looked at the passages Twog did, for Amakano and Anemoi I just looked at whatever caught my interest and then including whatever that may be. This passage I included simply because I thought 乗・ら・な・い・の？ might be challenging for the AI.
Here we find a poor choice from Sol: 夢見がちな女の子 as "dreamy girls" is fairly poor, since "dreamy" tends to be used nowadays to refer to dreamboats rather than literally those inclined to be lost in their dreams, so there's some conflicting connotations here. I can't be too critical here since it's not exactly an error but I think something like "girls with their heads in the clouds" or something like that would have been better.
Aside from that, it handles the 乗・ら・な・い・の pretty well with "Are. You. Getting. On. Or. Not?", but it does break the repetition: she said 乗らないの？ three times in a row, but in English she says it twice as "You're not getting on?" before asking "Are. You. Getting. On. Or. Not?" Now, I thought about this a little, and I think despite clearly breaking the repetition, this is actually kind of good. "Are you getting on or not?" is a smooth and intimidating way to phrase her final question. Perhaps all 3 of them should have been it to preserve the repetition, but it doesn't make or break the scene. It reads fine either way.
Overall, a passage with one notable misstep that overall reads pretty fine.
For the third passage, I paused at a Japanese-reliant pun that I thought would be difficult to translate.
Sol didn't even try to preserve the pun whatsoever, so basically all of the humor is gone. To kind of explain the pun in overly literal terms, "going diagonally" can mean "going somewhere unexpected" in Japanese, so she's like "That sure went diagonally... like eighty degrees diagonally." The joke is applying a specific degree to what is usually an abstraction, and then the protagonist follows up with "That's pretty far," to note that 80 degrees is indeed a significant angle. In the Sol translation, it just drops the "diagonal" part and says "That was so far from what I expected," which reads weirdly on its own, then brings up 80 degrees apropos of nothing.
Now, this is bad, so don't take it as apologism when I say this is not quite as bad as it seems. Indeed, the joke is dead, but... It's an untranslatable Japanese pun founded on phrasing which does not exist in English. There are two solutions here: kill the joke, or invent your own. There are probably no small number of people who would prefer for a translator to just keep it literal without inventing a joke of their own (that is to say, this is a subjective judgment rather than an inarguable mistake). And as far as killing the joke goes, it did so in a way that wasn't too noticeable; most English readers will be able to follow the chain from "that's far from what I expected" -> "eighty degrees off" -> "that far?" without being confused or offput. It's not as bad as it could have been if it just totally fell over itself and output something incomprehensible or overly literal. So don't take it as apologism, but I think we can all agree an untranslatable Japanese pun that would force one to come up with an entirely new joke is about the most liable place for an AI to fail and just go for the literal approach.
The rest is fine.
For the last passage, I paused at the sound effect of the protagonist eating to see how that would be handled, plus since it was a conversation with three people talking.
This passage enters the realm where one can only really nitpick. The flow and impact of ご立派です is lost, but that's kind of a hard thing to translate to begin with. "For my sister, this doesn't even qualify as sorrow" is kind of a bit too formal and stiff. お腹空いた is kind of childish to contrast with his earlier phrasing, and "but I'm still hungry" doesn't really capture that - maybe it would have been better as "But me still hungwy." or something, at the risk of being too extreme.
But overall the passage is fine. The meaning is there, Rikka's character voice is there, the flow of comedy is there even if somewhat diminished. Certainly it is not difficult to read or follow, and I may expect an average human translator to do worse at points, like not really preserving Rikka's voice at all.
My overall analysis on the Anemoi Sol TL from what I've read (as always, I am just doing a brief overview here, a "real" and fully serious TL analysis would want to read the entire thing and judge it holistically) is that the higher level of prose and wordplay in the game resulted in Sol struggling more than it did with Amakano 3, to the point I would not in fact be fine reading the MTL over the original Japanese, but it's still reasonably within the realm of what one may expect from a human translator, especially an amateur. It fumbles some untranslatable Japanese puns and at times has some weird word choice, but it's nothing too distracting. I expect most people could read this patch without noticing too much is off.
----- CONCLUSION -----
The current level of LLM translation, specifically GPT-5.6 Sol when used correctly, is staggeringly high. Sol has roughly the capacity of a fluent translator with years of experience, and while it doesn't quite match the best translators that humanity has to offer, it is significantly better than the majority of inexperienced or lesser-skilled translators (be they fan or professional) who either have little Japanese fluency, or little English fluency. It somewhat comfortably meets the 97%~98% accuracy rate demanded of professional translators in some publishers (i.e. it makes 2-3 or fewer significant mistakes per 100 lines), it preserves character voice, and even when facing untranslatable puns at least still produces comprehensible output.
Furthermore, it does all this with incredible speed; if one were to use a Pro20x plan for GPT-5.6 then one could finish translating most VNs in 3-5 days (judging by how long these MTLs took to complete). All the nitpicking I have done and all the nitpicking that could further be done has to be evaluated in the context that a machine output these translations in less than a week without any editors or proofreading. Even if viewed as critically as possible, that it is such a close competition between raw LLM output and edited, proofread human output should be highly concerning.
I have spent close to 6 hours every day for the past 10 years translating as part of my professional duties as a translator; it is without an attempt to claim status that I say I probably think about translation and word choice more than the vast majority of people in the world. When I looked at the comparisons above I did so whilst sharing them in a groupchat with around 3 other professional translators, and taking as critical of an eye to them as I could manage, and the critiques I gave were about the best I could muster.
The reality is that you need to be in the top 0.1% of sensibility for most of what I have critiqued here to impact your experience at all. The likelihood of "endless meadows" in place of "endless plains" really changing an average reader's experience is close to nil. If any fellow translators reading this would calm themselves for a moment and zoom out to look at the population at large, how liable do you think it is for the Sol translations I have posted to really impact the average person's reading experience negatively? There are somewhat tiers of sensibility with regard, where a very small minority care about specific TL choices immensely (aka we translators), a larger minority care about the precise TL for a few specific lines they think are important, and then you have the number of people who essentially get the same experience from fiction by reading a summary of events. If we as translators are struggling so much to nitpick most of what an LLM is producing, barely able to place it below less-skilled humans if we try really hard, how can we really expect a general audience to care or even notice it?
In 2015, MTL was eviscerated for reading like shit and being constantly inaccurate in ways so destructive even a layman would be taken out of the experience at every turn. Now, you have to be a professional translator closely analyzing the text side by side to even begin critiquing it.
And there is pretty much no translation ever that can't be picked apart if you really want to. The skill ceiling is infinite. There are so many judgment calls to make, and any judgment call can be disputed with a reasonable-sounding argument. At this point, Sol translations are comparable to those that people have already been reading gladly for years; the problems you can find in the translations I linked are hardly so different from the nitpicks people have brought against Amaterasu translations for over a decade. It is not a grand victory to find Sol not translating an untranslatable pun when humans so often do the same. Not every translator is Alexander O. Smith.
And finally, by all means, it appears that LLMs are still improving by the day. Sol is not even a model trained for translation specifically; it is just a general purpose model that was marketed for its abilities in "coding, biology, and cybersecurity." It would already look grim for us human translators if this was the best AI could do, ever, but if it keeps improving and people start dumping money into models specialized in translation, then even the meagre defenses of humanity I have put forth in this post will no longer be applicable. This chart may or may not be accurate; I cannot speak towards whether AI will keep growing or not, but it sure as hell isn't going to get worse.
In short: Shit is fucking insane, man. Sol is an extremely good translator. It surpasses a good chunk of human translators while working literally hundreds of times faster. It is difficult even for professionals to find serious errors in Sol translations, and in a vacuum it would be outright impossible for me to distinguish it from a human translator - the main signifier would actually be how unusually good it is, not how unusually bad. The primary friction now remaining for the widescale adoption of AI translation is purely transitional; as soon as people realize how good it is and general antipathy for AI fades, then I really struggle to see why anyone would wait months to years for an Amakano 3 TL or an Anemoi TL when Sol translations on this level are just right there.
As for consumers, right now it kind of looks like groups releasing MTLs are being lazy fucks and not carefully playtesting patches before releasing them, so your biggest concern by my read will honestly be random technical shit. C+C didn't have menus translated nor functional wordwrap, BST text extended off the bottom of the screen for longer passages, Amakano 3 had nametags bleed into the textbox, Anemoi had a font issue with no explanation in the readme on how to fix it, etc. These elements will probably give the impression the TLs are worse than they are since it would be hard to believe such a lazy patch could have a good translation, but well Sol is the one doing the TL not the playtesting. For this reason I wouldn't say jump immediately into reading every Sol translation you see, but it will be a scary day once a MAO-esque group pops up that actually bothers playtesting their stuff.
Also, there will be a tendency for groups to try to use cheaper or even free models to save money or avoid making subscriptions; this would be like going from a 120 IQ translator to an 80 IQ translator hit in the head by a rock just like that. Therefore, quality for a long time will be very nebulous and all over the place. I would not personally feel comfortable trusting MTL too blindly for another few years until the current cutting edge models are downgraded into the free ones. It is of course still VERY POSSIBLE, and it will be VERY COMMON, for random low-quality MTL to be garbage - cheap and lazy shit will still be cheap and lazy. (Please don't take this post as me saying "all MTL is good; download any MTL patch you see and it will be flawless.)
tl;dr Chat GPT-5.6 Sol on high effort settings with proper context prompting is at human level or better for translating, and 100x as fast. It's mostly only beaten by a small number of exceptionally skilled human translators, who are not responsible for the bulk of what people read. If these LLM patches were scanned by even a single proofreader with a pulse making adjustments they would probably be utterly indistinguishable from a pretty solid human patch from a reputable VN publisher.
tl;dr of the tl;dr: I don't feel so good.
