Retrospring is shutting down on 1st March, 2025 Read more
I feel like I don't have a good enough eye for this thing so I hope you don't mind me asking for your opinion: are the BoU 'official' English lyrics machine TL?
I am going to lead with the fact that this is alleged, based on vibes, and 100% conjecture, and I am not trying to cast any aspersions.
But yes, the impression I get is of machine translation that is lightly overseen or edited by a human, probably by an in-house Japanese L1/English L2 speaker. This is (fairly verifiably) what they use on the site for profiles et al, so I feel pretty confident that it's probably what's going on with the official lyric subtitles.
Song lyrics inherently force you to infer a lot of context and struggle with line-to-line cohesion, which they sometimes struggle with, and you sometimes get lines that read very awkwardly (a few of Kanata's lines in Instinct really stand out to me and are fresh in the mind, but Akan Yatsura are always a nightmare).
I don't love that it's there, as a renowned MTL disliker, but I'm also not super pressed that a primarily-Japanese-facing company is going with the least labor-intensive option when it comes to things they have to handle purely in-house for a niche and tertiary market.
But that's part of why I retranslate the songs, lol. (And because I enjoy it.)
(Interestingly, I think that the official translations of videos that they post on Facebook -- e.g. drama track previews and the birthday videos from last year -- smack definitely more of "a human got properly paid to do this", and this makes me a little more generous about the fact that the song lyrics that go up on the Japanese-facing channel are wonky, since when they're actually English-facing they do seem to have more QC.)
Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting
*italic text*
for italic text
**bold text**
for bold text
[link](https://example.com)
for link