Just According To Keikaku

This week's update is a late night one. My schedule for the past little while was:

• be released from lockdown
• watch the BLACKPINK movie in 4DX
• immediately return to lockdown

which if I ignore that it also resulted in MIFF, PAX Aus and NYWF moving online, and the anticlimactic cancellation of like half my friends' (and probably my own) birthdays, doesn't seem too bad. It's a good time to retire from the ol' newsletter-writing life.

Then just as I get out, something pulls me back in.

Now, we'll come back to this sugoi mistake in a second. While we're thinking about the Olympics I really want to share this clip. I don't generally describe athletes as "brave", but this really shows tremendous courage.

Nothing quite makes my kokoro go doki-doki than seeing a clip which HAS to be included in a 2021 wrap-up edit. File it away, it's NYE worthy.

Back to the linguistic butchering at hand. When the word arigatō was lit up at the end of the Olympic closing ceremony, someone at Channel 7 got confused between its denotative and connotative meanings. While it means 'thank you', the usage of arigatō in this context is because sayonara—what non-Japanese speakers like myself might ignorantly understand as meaning 'goodbye'—connotes a long, possibly permanent farewell. This mistake was probably not according to keikaku.

The Just According To Keikaku meme is well documented, with its origin in a Death Note fansub, then replicated across other fansubs and online weeb culture more generally. (Incidentally, if you're in lockdown and out of things to watch, Death Note is a great supernatural thriller.)

Fansubs still exist, but through streaming services and more consistent English physical releases, the days of relying on them for access to mainline popular titles are over. Translation is formalised and provided by educated professionals...

...for now. Recently, Japanese book and game publisher Kadokawa announced their intent to research and develop "AI"-led translation and comic panelling.

If I was an author I would be horrified to learn my work had been run through an off-brand Google Translate. From "diversify the expression of comics suitable for the internet", I doubt titles expected to achieve mainstream commercial success would be treated this way—so it would be a case of careful expertise for some readers, miniature American-English bots for others.

Whether automated translating goes according to keikaku or not, I can't imagine that it will result in a competent product any time soon. The original meme stemmed from an over-application of notation usually reserved for explaining jokes or Japanese cultural specificity: good luck trying to make that happen with "the algorithm". It's not that computers don't understand human emotion; computers don't understand human artistic intent*.

*(As anyone who uses twitter too much would know, half the time other humans don't understand human artistic intent. But sure, outsource it to a block of Javascript.)

The company I work for cheerily keeps me updated on how their own efforts to digitally replace my transcription expertise are going. Whilst dealing with Australian accents probably buys me a little more time, I can't help but worry over how long my ears, hands and brain will remain relevant—or how long my employer will think they are, which is not the same but more immediately important.

Which brings us back to the BLACKPINK 4DX cinema experience: a discombobulating, water-spraying, artificial mint smelling evening. While it was an enjoyable way to spend what became my last night out for the forseeable future, I did miss the very start (this performance of DDU-DU DDU-DU) because I left to tell someone the film wasn't framed correctly, cutting off half the subtitles.

Whether print or film, human artistic expertise can't be automated away solely for a corporate bottom line. A computer program might be faster than a human worker, complain less, never quit or have an accident or go on holiday or parental leave or sleep—and it will never understand, or care.