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Last time I talked about trade-offs in editing and high-level motifs; macro-scale stuff. This time, I want to talk about a micro-scale topic: how to make an individual line better. As before, I'll be demonstrating this with examples drawn from recent editing experience. Before writing this post, I went around looking for other people talking about similar things, and I found this reference: http://kristensguide.com/Writing/powerful_sentences.asp. Frankly, it's great; probably better than what I have, especially in terms of breadth of topics. Give it a read and get your editing learning on. For this post, I'm going to deep dive into one single topic mentioned there, though, for which I've been saving up examples: putting the first and last words of your sentence to good use. The first and last words of a sentence are powerful. They're memorable. Forgetting the middle of a sentence is natural, so put a word at the end of a sentence when you really, really want that one word to be remembered. Okay, so what did you get from that last paragraph. I hope it was "first", "powerful", "memorable", "forgetting", and "remembered", because that's the point of this blog post. Anyway, let's look at some examples from my recent edits to Majo Koi Nikki, some to the prologue patch we're about to release, and some later. I'll point out other things that I changed as well and why, but this one point is going to be the running theme. Original: Looking in the mirror, she pondered for a second and answered with a shy smile on her face. Potential problems: - "on her face" is extraneous - that extraneous phrase is squatting on valuable real estate at the end of the sentence. Mine: Looking in the mirror, she pondered for a second, and then she answered with a shy smile. Changes: - drop "on her face" (for both reasons above - it's less verbose, and now I get "smile" as the last word in the sentence, which is great) - the comma after "she ponders for a second" is intended to give the reader that same mental pause as "she" has, to better set up the last part - "then she" somehow pushes you out of that mental pause and into the most important part: that shy smile, lingering at the end of the sentence. Original: Tokeizaka-san irritatedly flips through the book, but her hand stops suddenly. Potential problems: - With the benefit of spell-check, "irritatedly" => irritably - "suddenly" is often overused I actually really like the original; if you left it alone, aside from the spell-check correction, I wouldn't fault you for it. The verbs are great, "irritably" is a good use of a modifier, and the sentence communicates multiple events very concisely. But there's always room for improvement. Mine: Irritated, Tokeizaka-san flips through the book, until her hand suddenly stops. Changes: - Drop "suddenly." "Stops" is strong enough to carry that feeling of suddenness on its own, so "suddenly" is only making things weaker. I've also noticed a tendency for raw JP translations to overuse "suddenly", which makes me especially biased to remove it. It's the typical problem of overuse: if everything is happening suddenly, it might as well all be happening normally. - Move those good words, "irritably" and "stops" to the memorable points of the sentence. "Stops" we got for free, "irritably" requires a small bit of juggling. Unfortunately, Tokeizaka-san's family name is a bit unwieldy at best; better to bury it in the middle of the sentence and let the nice, emotive words take pride of place. - Swapping "but" for "until" made for a clearer plot to the sentence, I thought. Original: - The colorful beauty article are displayed neatly. Potential problems: - Engrish - Passive voice - Not flashy enough Mine: - Iridescent beauty products dot the shelves, arranged with flawless precision. On that last potential problem: normally my style is pretty spare. My typical goal is to drop adjectives and adverbs, and make verbs and nouns stronger to carry the weight of description, without going overboard on vocabulary. More often than not, I'm trying to make long sentences shorter and punchier. I didn't do that here. For context on why, it would help for you to hear the ridiculously high-brow BGM accompanying this scene and see the gorgeous background art. So, here: Background: BGM: Equally important for context, you need to know about the surrounding narration: basically, the narrator is currently marveling at just how amazing this beauty parlor is. One of the benefits of generally being spare with your adjectives and adverbs is that they then work a lot better when you actually do pull them out. A good mental model is that you have a budget: don't spend your nice words if you don't need to. Only pull them out when you're going for the razzle dazzle. The analogy breaks down fast, but basically, if you're constantly using flowery language and overdecorating the ordinary scenes, nobody's going to be impressed when something extraordinary happens, just like the overuse of "suddenly" I mentioned earlier. Since this actually is an extraordinary moment for our narrator, I'm spending a few nice words now. And again, I want to call attention to the first and last words of the sentence. Those are strong places in a sentence (or, especially in the case of a VN, a line). Previously there were pretty weak words there ("The colorful" and "neatly"); now we've got "iridescent" and "precision". Good words in good places. One last thing to mention. I wrote each of these up in the middle of editing, and then later edited that up into a blog post. I made changes to the edited line itself in the process of writing all this stuff up, which made it better. In fact, I even noticed a problem while writing up this blog post and further refined the line. You'll never know what it was (probably). The point being, simply spending time reflecting on an edit, and especially writing down your observations and motivations for certain choices, will help you do better work. You don't have to be this thorough all the time (I certainly am not), but every time you do an exercise like that, you'll learn from it, and then you can write up your own blog post and teach me something.

It's sad but true: we've finally come to the end of our tour of Japanese punctuation for VN editors. But before we bid adieu, there are a few more types we have yet to cover. None merit full blog posts, however, so I offer them up here in a bit of a punctuation grab bag. Reach in if you dare. The placeholder: 〇 The 〇 is typically used to censor offensive language by replacing one of the characters in a word. It's the equivalent of writing "f*ck" or "sh-t" or in English. Everyone knows what's being said, but we can all pretend we didn't say it. Kumbaya, amirite? Cursing really isn't a thing in Japanese, of course, so these marks get used either for our naughtiest bits — think "cock" and "dick," or "pussy" and "cunt" — or certain other socially offensive terms. You might be surprised to see censoring in the middle of an H-scene that, in all other respects, has spared no detail or volume of liquid, but there you go. Just think of them as pixel mosaics for written text. As for editing these bad boys, you should almost always just go with uncensored English. Fuck yeah. The one situation where you might want to consider doing otherwise is when a VN also bleeps these words in the VO. In that case, you'd also be justified in using the censored English equivalent with either *, -, or _ replacing vowels as needed. Pick only one wildcard and be consistent in its use. Another use for these characters in Japanese is to mask portions of real-life names or places — e.g., Bu〇er King. This is done both out of a sense of propriety and to avoid the wrath of real-life lawyers. You'll conceivably see the names of celebrities, bands, games, movies, etc. all masked in this fashion. Thankfully, there's a long tradition of this in Western literature as well, most notably in the Victorian era — "I sent my butler out to the renowned psychic, Madame G—, to seek her advice on the matter." Our best course of action during editing is to mimic the Japanese, but do so in the English tradition, replacing the omitted portion with an em-dash — two if the excised text is particularly long. Sometimes, rather than use 〇 for masking, a VN writer will choose to come up with soundalike parody names for the person, place, or thing being referenced. And so you'll end up with people talking about anime like Wagonball Z and Tailor Moon. If the VN chooses this option, then so should you. Do your best to come up with witty replacements in English. More rarely, you'll see a double 〇〇 all by its lonesome. This just stands for "word goes here." It's a literal placeholder. If you encounter it in narration, you can usually replace it with a few underscores, like _________. If it appears in voiced dialogue, possible options include "blahblah," "yada yada," "blankity-blank," or whatever else you can think up. Parentheses: ( ) In VNs, these typically indicate a line should be read as internal monologue, or in some cases, a stage whisper. The meaning is clear in both languages, so best to keep these as they are. Unless, of course, your text engine is one of those rare snowflakes that can output English italics. In that case, use those. Bedazzlers: ★☆♪♫❤❆❀✿❁ Okay, they're not actually called "bedazzlers," but it's a good a name as any. You know what I'm talking about, right? That big ol' box of typographical Lucky Charms that gets dumped right onto VN text to provide some wacky flavor to the proceedings. Hearts, stars, flowers, snowflakes, music notes, Zodiac signs, etc. Some common uses include: - A music note at the end of a line to show it's being sung. ("Fly me to the moon♪") - A heart somewhere in a line to indicate puppy love at its most disgusting. ("He's so dreeeamy❤") - A name or term being bracketed by stars to show that it's extrasupervery OMGmagical. ("Aha! I've transformed into ☆Magical Girl Bertha☆") - A tiny gun so we can commit suicide after enduring all the above. These little pretties are self-explanatory enough that I tend to leave them as is. Japan's gotta Japan, right? But use your best judgement; if you feel like they're getting in the way of the of the English narrative, go ahead and prune them back — or omit them entirely. Full stop. Not the punctuation; the whole series of punctuation articles. We're done. If I think of any more oddball Japanese punctuation marks worth discussing, I'll add them to the end of this post. But otherwise: happy f〇cking editing!

Visual Novel Translation Status (07/09/2016) For this week VNTS Review title, I'd already came up with it from Hakuai release announcement back at June iirc, before it got delayed. The title was meant to parodying Marimite shoujo ai anime here, and the Nightingale was because there was an award called Nightingale in Hakuai games. Anyway, welcome to my VNTS Review for this week, and I think for this week I will also trying to elaborate on Decay thought here (By the way, it was me that posting Tyrosyn thought here in regard of Princess X. Glad now that Decay pay attention to it). As for podcast, not watching but congratulations for the first podcast here. For the release this week, Towako was nukige with big breast (Good for anyone else who had big breast fetish) and it was Black Lilith game. I'd tried play Yukikaze, and the sex scene was quite long. For Umineko, even if Mangagamer release it with same modding capability as Higurashi, it's redundant release if I said. The reason was we already got PS3 Graphic and Voice mod for Umineko since 2013 (First Umineko mod was released at May 28th, 2014, and for Chiru it was released at June 25th, 2013. Yes, there's an explanation in regard of reversed release date), and even if there's some opinion like Witch Hunt translation was quite bad, I think there's also no problem in regard of the translation too for me at least. So, the good release here for me was Hakuai, and for the premise it was quite sweet yuri VN here with nurse school setting. Looks like Dergonu like this very much, just as I expected here. This time, only fan translation and Sekai Project that give some update here, while Mangagamer was apparently had some staff too busy with AX and couldn't made in time for their usual update (Well, what I knew is that I must wait for another week if I want to see Mangagamer update). For Other segment, other than Hakuai release we also had ChuSinGura Chapter 2 and 3 will be launced at Steam in July end, Corona Blossom Chapter 1 was finally funded with more than 47.000 gathered (I'd already report it last week, only to be swept by rollback). JAST, well there's still no update from them. Sekai Project 2236 was fully translated, Memory Dogma 73.03% translated, Chrono Clock translation progress touching a quarter here (25.11% here), and Maitetsu was 15.28%. There's nothing special in regard of the progress other than good job to both of Maitetsu and Chrono Clock for giving stable update here. Oh, and SakuSaku was moved to here. Okay, to be very honest here I was slightly disagree with Akerou decision, but I'd also realize that it's his choice, of course. I tried to visit Akerou page, and what I did find was very worth to facepalming that in few days the comments in his article was growing from around 35 to 132 comment. I'd already read some of 35 comments, and majority was quite upset with Akerou decision. So obviously I didn't need to read the comment in order to knew the content, and by the way, Chuee also confused that there's one comment that complain about H-Scene cut while Sekai already announced that there will be 18+ version. But at least Akerou didn't do something like OriginalRen here. In regard of Akerou group, I suspect the reason that AstralAir need at least in 2017 release was because it'll be announced by Sekai. What I want to said that hopefully to lessen fan's wrath it'll be better if Chuee announced that they working together with Sekai from the very start, since I'd read that if the translator working together with the company, it'll be allow us to had some access to more difficult stuff. And I think the most difficult thing to deal for them would be technical thing. Oh, by the way for now AstraAir will entering QC. As for Irotoridori, I think if this is announced by Sekai my reaction wouldn't be as shocked as when Sekai announced SakuSaku, because even if Sekai announced it right now, it'll be still a long way before all of the translation progress was completed. And therefore I think the announcement will not made fans too salty like SakuSaku (Although in regard of H-Scenes was another matter though). Oh, for Irotoridori translation progress it's at 17%. I think even if I'm heavily suspect that Sekai will announce all projects from Akerou's site, I'll still report AstralAir and Irotoridori progress in Fan Translation for next weeks. Fan Translation After AstralAir translation was completed, there's another project that will be completed next week (Hopefully), and it was Koiken Otome. Right now they preparing for the patch, and right now I could only comment that this project was already there since 2013 iirc. And they state that they'll not sell it to Sekai or Mangagamer, so at least there's some comfort for now. For other roundup, Bishoujo Mangekyou was at 8.5% QC-ing, Tsui Yuri was 50% translated and 43% edited, Hanasaki had Hikari's route 29% translated, Majokoi had 23% translated and 13% edited, Witch Garden was 63% translated, 7% TLC, and 4% edited. and finally or Kanobito progress we had 106 scripts left to be translated (By the way, Mitch decided to localize Kanobito as 'My Girlfriend, My Lover, and I'). Overall, I think fan translation update was had some nice usual progress here. I think that's all for my VNTS Review this week, and see you next week. PS - For Trionline, no comment as there is no content here other than it'll be released in Japan at 2017 (Obviously it'll be translating by Mangagamer). For Nora, I checked VNDB and find out that Harukaze company was originally from Minato Soft, but the main staff was from WagaHigh. I didn't knew about translation potential, but I guess it'll allow us to had Majikoi game officially released (Maybe, and even if it's true it's already redundant).