The Emaqi translations aren't terrible - but they do start from AI as a base. Supposedly their translation LLM has been tuned specifically for Japanese manga, but there's no way to determine what that means exactly since it's proprietary. They don't use an open-source model or one of the public-access models like Gemini or Grok.
The "proofing" is done by ESL Japanese people. That's not a bad thing by itself, but ESL people tend to struggle with the vast amount of nuance in English vocabulary. There are like a dozen English words for every Japanese word, and they all have slightly different connotations ("tabi" is one I reference a lot, English has a dozen ways you can translate it depending on the tone you want to set). I've seen East Asian people commenting online about learning English, and they have often talked about the breadth of English vocabulary and what a struggle it is. It's not much different to how english speakers struggle to memorize more than a few hundred kanji.
There is no way to tell how skillful these Japanese ESL people are. It's possible the LLM is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and the ESL checker is just reading the output and deciding whether it's "good enough" before moving on to the next panel or page. It's possible that they make minimal to zero corrections for nuance.
That said, I did read the first two volumes and it's perfectly readable. It's better than what you would get from most fan scanlations in the late 2000s.
They also have a guy (again, Japanese) who does the English lettering and typesetting. So it looks better than you might think.
And for what it's worth, AI output never spells anything wrong in the target language - at least not that I've ever seen. So that's a big help for staying immersed while reading. Typos are like speedbumps for the eyes - annoying.
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