The Freditorial

Very good. Indeed.

I myself tend to complain every time a "that" shows up since they can take on far too many meanings.
When possible, murder it, otherwise, replace it, if you can't, you're probably using it right.

Now that's one long blog post about removing extraneous words

WEE1's translation had a bad case of lack of zero relative pronoun. The translators were actually native English speakers as far as I could tell, so I wonder what they were trying for - just playing it safe? Sounding proper? Being lazy? A terminal case of the YukkuriS? - I guess we'll never know.

Must be a British (or Australian in my case) English thing but the original with the zero relative pronoun sounds more natural to me... I wonder what other Br/Au natives think.

19 minutes ago, ittaku said:

Must be a British (or Australian in my case) English thing but the original with the zero relative pronoun sounds more natural to me... I wonder what other Br/Au natives think.

Australian here, the original sentence is horrible. Like seriously horrible. I don't even like the sentence it ended up at - "I told you I gave you the unburnt piece of toast, right?" Repetition of 'you' is eyecatching. May be replaced with 'said', with the 'to you' implied:

"I said I gave you the unburnt piece of toast, right?"

"Didn't I say I gave you the unburnt piece of toast?"

3 minutes ago, Darklord Rooke said:

Australian here, the original sentence is horrible. Like seriously horrible. I don't even like the sentence it ended up at - "I told you I gave you the unburnt piece of toast, right?" Repetition of 'you' is eyecatching. May be replaced with 'said', with the 'to you' implied:

"I said I gave you the unburnt piece of toast, right?"

"Didn't I say I gave you the unburnt piece of toast?"

Sorry, that's how people around me speak though... Not sure why writing needs to make people who speak sound like they're all writers. It's one of my big bugbears - that people complain about the spoken word by characters not being correct grammar or that it sounds horrible.

2 minutes ago, ittaku said:

Sorry, that's how people around me speak though... Not sure why writing needs to make people who speak sound like they're all writers. It's one of my big bugbears - that people complain about the spoken word by characters not being correct grammar or that it sounds horrible.

Because fiction has different goals to communication. Fiction has different goals to my group's weekly get together at the pub (which usually involves the underside of a table somewhere amirite :3) Genre fiction is about sucking people in and entertaining people with the story, and calling attention to the writing because it was written haphazardly is against those goals.

There have been people who tried writing dialogue exactly how people speak, complete with 'ers' 'umms' and 'ahs', but that was literature, the artsy genre.

While I certainly agree that character dialogue needs to communicate characterization, through diction, syntactical choices, or even using bad grammar, the top priority is always that their dialogue be readable (unless very intentionally unreadable, of course, which should be exceptional).

Here's a completely different example of optimizing for readability, and one which should be near and dear to the hearts of many eroge players: even when the heroine has her mouth full of little protag, the way she slurs her consonants is usually not faithfully recorded in the subtitles, because to do so renders it completely unreadable (I know; I've tried). If you try to actually write down what the dialogue you have would sound like with a large, cylindrical object in your mouth, even though the speech may be completely understandable, the written form of it will usually not be. This, I believe, is because writing is such a low-resolution record of spoken speech. When you're missing all the extra intonation and the assorted sounds made in this circumstance which simply aren't writable in the Roman alphabet, it's hard to try to mimic the actual spoken sounds without going so far off the written version that the brain can no longer recognize the word. That's why, in this instance, most of the time you should massively tone down the consonant slurring, relative to the voice over, in the written text.

That sounds pretty unrelated, but it's still on this same theme of optimizing for readability. The most important thing isn't even if you agree with either of those examples at all, but rather that you understand and agree with the broader principle of which these are just two instances. Throughout most of most VNs, you should generally be optimizing for ease and speed of readability, where you can do so without sacrificing tone, characterization, etc.,

Edited January 3, 2017 by Fred the Barber

1 hour ago, Fred the Barber said:

Here's a completely different example of optimizing for readability, and one which should be near and dear to the hearts of many eroge players: even when the heroine has her mouth full of little protag, the way she slurs her consonants is usually not faithfully recorded in the subtitles, because to do so renders it completely unreadable (I know; I've tried). If you try to actually write down what the dialogue you have would sound like with a large, cylindrical object in your mouth, even though the speech may be completely understandable, the written form of it will usually not be. This, I believe, is because writing is such a low-resolution record of spoken speech. When you're missing all the extra intonation and the assorted sounds made in this circumstance which simply aren't writable in the Roman alphabet, it's hard to try to mimic the actual spoken sounds without going so far off the written version that the brain can no longer recognize the word. That's why, in this instance, most of the time you should massively tone down the consonant slurring, relative to the voice over, in the written text.

Interestingly enough that doesn't appear to be a problem in Japanese where an attempt is always made to do a faithful rendition of what the diction sounds like when orally stuffed. It is also almost always understandable too... but that's probably because Japanese is such a bastard of a language that you end up relying on all sorts of cues to understand it even when it is clearly rendered. What I have seen on occasion is do the rendition in cock-speak and then explain it in parentheses, which could work quite well in English; doing so is also quite amusing.