“It's a real, serious failing of human beings that we take 5 years to translate [Ascendance of a Bookworm,] a series of 33 books, while AI does it in an afternoon,” he said.

If I had to guess, most of those five years were spent on a handful of specially problematic chapters, while the bulk of the books was relatively straightforward.

Quof said he does not take MTPE jobs because “I think I have enough skill in Japanese and English that MTL tools do not currently improve my output. It would make my workflow harder because, as one used to providing 97% or higher accuracy, I would feel compelled to fix the AI's errors up to that high standard, and that would slow me down dramatically.” But over the years, Quof has had a habit of checking his own translations against AI tools.

My experience pretty much matches Quof's: it takes longer to fix a shitty machine translation than to do it by hand. It is however useful to check how ChatGPT or Google Translate would do it, specially for the problem bits.