Plus, releasing a beta translation doesn't mean that the project will end with it and that it'll be the final effect of entire project.
There are various factors related to that though. Even if your project isn't finished yet, once it's public on the net, other people will make use or potentially exploit it in some way, whether they have your consent or not. Take a very early leaked version for example, that still has a load of issues, including a crashing issue early in the game. There will inevitably be people who take such content and upload it as a draw to their site. Often they remove all identifying info (such as that it's not a finished work), and just designate it as
"<GAME NAME> FULL ENGLISH DOWNLOAD XXX" .
People will download it and run into the crash, untranslated text, or very poorly translated text that reflects poorly on the project, and write their opinions or actual reviews about it. And possibly come back here to complain about various flaws they noticed, or spread negativity about the project . And all that is about a version
that wasn't even supposed to be public.
I've been following this issue as it's somewhat interesting. For those that think they're helping by using machine translations, nothing could be further from the truth. Japanese isn't a language that works well with conventional machine translations, a big issue is the prevalent lack of pronouns. Without them, it's hard to get a coherent script, and the translator needs a decent grasp on the language to understand what is being said, in order to translate the material.
As many lines in Japanese are often about inferring things, since passive tenses are common, or sentences are cut off, words are omitted, slang, and so on. None of that is transferred in a machine translation.
In short, even if you clean up and rephrase a machine translated script, it wouldn't even come close to the meaning of the original, and before that, it would already be a huge pain in the ass and take a skilled writer, just to get a coherent dialog out of it.
Of course it all depends on how high your standards are, and what you find acceptable. Personally I refuse anything that was machine translated for above reasons, but perhaps others find it acceptable to have a coherent sounding script that isn't too truthful to the original.
But at any rate, by using a machine translation, you're not helping, you're only making things harder for actual translators. So even if you think you're being helpful and it took you a lot of effort to do so, in the end it does more harm than good.
