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Speaking from the heart, I agree with most of what Aizen-sama said. I also approve of his use of my quote up there. Now, to be clear here... it hurts horribly the first time someone criticizes your translation. I experienced this repeatedly as a fansubber for anime and it only gets worse for VN fantranslators because it is text and not audio. Do you know the reason so many translators experience 'burn-out'? It's a combination of the sheer amount of work they put into what was, to them, a labor of love, only to have some smartmouth jackass publicly insult them for typos, nitpick about word choices, and generally make an ass of themselves... As he quoted me saying above, when you put that much time into something, only to have someone snipe at you over the details, it slowly corrodes your motivation, leaving you apathetic toward translation in general. Moreover, when you are a translator looking for just a few words of encouragement and you get some ****head wailing about how the translation is behind schedule, it pretty much shatters you. Human beings aren't designed to work without some sort of compensation, whether it is a full belly, cash, emotional satisfaction, or social encouragement. With something as time-consuming as VN translation, the pathetically small amounts of money offered by those who want to 'pay' a translator and the emotional satisfaction from a job well done just aren't enough to motivate one to finish one of these projects. If you worked the same amount of hours some people put into fantls in a retail job in the US, you would actually make more money than you could from a 'professional' translation job in many cases. So... for those who think translation is 'easy' or 'pays well', get a clue. Even I never seriously thought companies would willingly pay what that kind of work deserves when I was a newbie, and that was over a decade in the past.

Maybe because he wants to share more games with the world,despite it mostly being a thankless job. People can rant about stuff and still be involved in said stuff. I absolutely hate this aspect of translation as well but i still want to to be a translator.

Surely too many VNs have lead many fans into a form of weird masochism.

I wish the community would be a bit more tolerant about translation quality of fan translations, or at least offer criticism in a more constructive manner instead of just bashing it. While I never worked on a fan translation, I worked with a few team members on a mod for a computer game for years. So I do know what it's like to work on a huge project in your spare time. And there are times when just hate it and want to pack it all in. And when you then just get some bashing comments instead of encouragement, you really want to scream out...

Thank you for exemplifying the exact reason people give up on translations. I'm glad such healthy mentality as "don't bitch about work, just work or get out" is so prevalent.

TLDR Dear Aizen-sama Some people are not very smart and you can't blame them for not knowing everything.

^ pretty much. People, even if new, should first do some interior or exterior research before posting these retarded posts that have already been done to death. The level of ignorance shown with these posts/threads only comes to show how much people don't know and/or don't care about what happens behind the scenes and just want the end result. And it indeed isn't, if you aren't doing it for: Learning, like say, practicing for better linguistic skills or just overall better understanding of a language. Have huge amounts of motivation and drive for it. Want to get involved more in the scene, or use it as a stepping stone in your future career, or something of that sort. I'm very much triggered that people aren't double-checking on what they're doing on the internet or in general, and donations for fan-translations are a very good example of that. If they'd just dig around for a bit, they'd find pretty easily that paying money for fan-work is in most cases illegal. People honestly should pay more attention before bashing something they don't like, but that part of humans won't change, ever. Things be dumb and unfair to the end, so better get a thicker skin before sliding deeper. Or at all, really.