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... exactly how many times have I mentioned that I'm busy lately...? Seriously. I'm in the middle of VN withdrawal for the first time in over three years... and I'm realizing how addicted I am. I'd be perfectly happy to play a kusoge for the second time, at the moment... if I had the time. The best I can do these days is drop in for a few minutes and maybe a quick post or two. Considering that I originally started this style of work because it made me enough money in a short enough period of time to both support me and my habits (gaming, anime, books, and importing VNs) while leaving me time to actually enjoy them... Unfortunately, my choice seems to be backfiring for the second time in five years. If anything, this time is worse, because I actually failed to deliver for the first time in the last decade. Anyway, enough complaints... While I have the time, I'm going to list up the VNs I plan to read from July's releases, when they are released: Tsumikui (maybe, and only maybe because it is an otomege, and good otomege are rarer than kamige charage) Ojousama no Hanbun wa Ren'ai de Dekiteimasu Senren Banka (obviously) Muramasa: Shokuzai Hen (new Muramasa content? Whoohoo!) Aristear Remain Floral Flowlove (Saga Planets' games since Hatsuyuki Sakura have been much weaker... but I'll probably still give it a chance) Amatsutsumi (Purple Software has been on a roll with most of their releases in recent years... so I'm definitely playing this one) Kimi to Yumemishi (new company... hopefully it will be interesting)

Sometimes, something lands on your plate that makes no sense. If you're lucky, it may be a single line that makes no sense as it is written, but you can figure it out and fix it from context. If you're unlucky, it might be a whole passage that doesn't fit together quite right, or something that just doesn't hang together to present a consistent plot. As the editor, it's your responsibility to turn that line or passage into something that makes sense. Sometimes you can manage it yourself with enough brainpower. Sometimes you should ask the original translator, another editor, another translator, or a TLC to help, if you simply cannot hit on an obviously-correct, logical interpretation. Ultimately, though, you are responsible for seeing it through. You have to land that joke. Nobody else is going to do it for you. I present to you the following independent, unimportant passage from the raw To Heart 2 translation. This is one of the night scenes, which are mostly short throwaway gags featuring the protagonist, at home alone, being silly. Full context for this scene: the protagonist can't sleep and has picked a 'difficult book' off his shelf to try to put himself to sleep. Wat What all needs to be done here: The joke doesn't make sense (at least, it doesn't to me; you might be smarter than I am and able to get it immediately). There's some Engrish to be cleaned up (That "What what...?" line, especially, which sounds like it's straight from an old hip-hop song, not the utterance of a donkan harem protagonist about to read a book on special relativity), and there's ample opportunity to make the phrasing more natural. Once the nature of the joke is understood, it turns out its timing can probably be improved as well. It actually took me a couple of rewrites before I finally grasped the nature of the joke, and then I was able to both clean up the language and land it properly. It's frankly still not all that funny, but hey, a not-that-funny joke is still better than nonsense. Okay, much more readable, and I think you can actually understand the joke when reading it (you can, right? please tell me you can.). Aside from making it understandable: I deferred the idiotic non sequitur to the last line of the text-within-the-text, since it's the setup for the punchline on the last line and I wanted to get them closer together, since any time between these two is time people will spend being confused. Being a geek, I also decided to add a little more to the special relativity explanation to try to make it more clear, mostly so that it didn't look like the idiocy was endemic to the text, but rather was isolated to that final statement. For that last part, I ended up shuffling some text around, but it's not voiced text so this is really no big deal. You'll probably want to shuffle around whole lines, rarely, so be prepared to do that, for reasons like this one. Lastly, and most importantly, I tried to make the whole book-inside-the-VN passage flow as though it were a single logical explanation (you know; like a scientific-minded book normally would deliver). This is crucial for making the non sequitur at the end more jarring, and thus making the joke work (to the extent that it does). That last one is really the key, and it's applicable to more than just jokes or short passages like this. It's easy to get hung up on fixing individual lines and then miss the big picture. Lines are connected to make scenes. Scenes are connected to make the VN. Each level of that chain needs to fit together to make sense, and as the editor, you're on the line for that. As I'm writing this blog post, I realize there's at least one error in the "final" text I delivered up above: inconsistent capitalization of Theory of Relativity. Possibly more problems as well that I'm not seeing, and certainly there's room for improvement. Well, hopefully QA caught that grammar problem. I wasn't delighted with the result, but nonetheless, this was a good time to move on. This joke isn't going to be winning Olympic gold with such a shaky landing, but at least it does land instead of flying off on its own somewhere, leaving us behind and horribly confused. That's good enough for this filler scene. Everything can always be made better, and you can spend an eternity making something a little bit better all the time, but then nobody will ever actually see your work. You need to realize when to step back from something and say "It's good enough; ship it." Bottom line, if you're playing To Heart 2 and you get to a scene where the protagonist is picking a book to put him to sleep, take the science trivia book instead. That joke was funnier to begin with.

What up people. I'm here again with the spicy weekly news as always. Majo Koi Nikki Translation progress has recuperated now, since @Hasa is back again with full force. Alice's route is progressing as well as Mii's and the second part of the prologue after the OP. Regarding the partial patch, it's basically finished at this point (just some buttons left to translate and we're good to go). We decided to delay its release date. Sorry about that, but shit happens. Editing progress has been slow, but now that I'm back from vacation in Portugal (nice country btw) I'll start editing as well. Progress Translation 24% - (9857/40394) Editing 13% - (5234/40394) Witch's Garden Translation keeps progressing and we added a new TLC to the team, making it 4 people checking the translation text at the moment. Editing is progressing slowly at the moment because we want to TLC a big batch of text before letting them work. The most probable thing is that our 50% game patch release will come out by the end of the year or so, and it will contain interface, prologue, common, Ririko and Misumi routes. Progress Translation (yes, there has been a slight progress here) - 63% (42410/67197) TLC - 8% (5354/67197) That's all. Cya next week peeps and have a nice day.

(Still a Work In Progress) This week I was busier than in a long time with the project. First, I must apologise. When I released the prologue patch I was sure that everything from the engine to the buttons would've been translated, and according all common sense it was the case... until I revisited it this week. Let me give you a short version. I resumed my work on the engine since there were a few quirks I wanted straightened out. So I finished my work and gave the interface patch to my proofreaders, assuming that it would more or less go fine. Well, I was gravely mistaken. Hex editing, UTF-8, resource editing and much more. All of these were used in the engine, making some buttons, text, menus and some features to remain untranslated. Since then I've busted my ass ironing out everything and soon I can say that it will truly be completed. Allow me to say it again: I'm deeply sorry for my errors. I thought that just editing the files would be enough, but I was naive, too naive. I intend on finishing it in these following days, but the full interface patch won't be released. Instead, once the full patch comes out, that'll replace everything, and I'll destroy the prologue patch, since it's unfinished in every possible aspect. I hope you understand. One other thing, One of our editor's work was severely lacking and after some serious contemplating, I've decided to kick him out of the team, recruit another QC and move the team roles around according to everyone's wishes. You can see those in the Staff page in the upmost part of the site. As I just stated, because of this unfortunate outcome, editors and QC'ers have had their hands full with fixing the aftermath the one editor left behind, so I once again apologise for the lack of progress this week. But on the bright side, our team is now solid and the progress should be more solid and smooth. Progress: Translation: 100% Editing: 24,3% QC: 14% Proofreading: 0% Until next week, everyone!

Translation errors in English releases often go undetected. Join me as I plunge down the rabbit hole to see how such errors affect the experience. Seinarukana: A compilation of translation errors in the official English release