#i was genuinely thrown to see 纔 tho bc ive only ever seen it in older texts

[liu-anhuaming]

So I'm reading this Chinese webnovel that was originally in simplified, but the site had an option for traditional character, so I was curious and decided to switch over.

It's mostly fine, no major issues, but I have noticed a couple machine translation snafus.

First, is the 發／髮 problem.

For those not familiar with traditional characters, 发 is the simplified version of two different characters: 發 and 髮.

In the photo I posted, the sentence reads 攝像頭髮出. Notice that the 髮 used is the one meaning "hair". It should be 發 instead. What appears to have happened is the computer saw 头 and 发 next to each other and grouped this phrase as 攝像 頭髮 出 when translating. The grouping/correct translation should be 攝像頭 發出.

And then there's the other little hiccup: using uncommon alternate versions of characters.

The character highlighted above is 覈, which is an alternate form of 核. When I search up the word 覈算 in my dictionary, I don't get any results. When I search 核算, on the other hand, I get a result that doesn't have any traditional version.

So what's apparently happening is the computer is detecting characters have have alternate forms that are either much less common or just not really used. While reading, I've seen this most frequently with 群 becoming 羣 and 才 becoming 纔.

These little translation hiccups don't really affect my reading (except for 覈, bc I had never seen that variant before in my fucking life). If anything, they give me a second's pause, then I chucked and keep moving.