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I've finished translating the common parts of the main school. Now onto the heroine routes. Ruu \o/

Here we go again. Whenever anybody mentions this topic, it will produce a lot of replies, but not consensus. The reason seems to be there is no single definitive answer. It depends on a number of factors: The VN itself: some VNs makes heavy use of honorifics to tell about interpersonal relationships or personalities. Others just add -san to everybody. Target audience: are you translating for a steam VN where it's the first VN people will read or is it a fan translation for people who read 30+ VNs already. Personal taste: we will never agree on acceptable loss of accuracy vs natural sounding English. Going to the extreme of either is bad, but where is the right balance? We spent a while considering this issue for Musumaker, or in broader terms: what to do about hard to translate contents. We ended up deciding to keep honorifics because they play a role and would result in a severe loss of insights in heroine personalities if they are cut. If honorifics are translated to English in a way to preserve the meaning, the result would be that most of the meaning would be lost anyway and it would sound much worse than keeping honorifics. It does come with a problem though, which is we can't except the reader to know all of them. The answer is a list where each honorific is written and explained. There is a twist to this though. Because the VN engine is fairly diverse, it allows displaying a png in the corner and if you move the mouse to it, it will pop up with another png. This allows adding the explanations ingame the first time a word is used and remove the need to jump in and out of the VN. This system can also be used for other hard to translate words like Tanabata. The goal of a translation is to give the same reading experience to the English speaking VN readers as Japanese get by reading the Japanese version. Diverting too much from the original contents in order to make "natural English" will lose the story while being too literal might keep all the story elements, but results in a written English, which isn't a pleasure to read. It's a question about finding the right balance between those two. Spamming words the reader needs to look up (even in the popup approach) will hurts reading pleasure, but never explaining anything hurts the understanding when some common knowledge about cultural references is needed to figure out what goes on. My conclusion is the same as every thread about a topic like this one: there is no single right answer, which universally applies to every single VN ever released. It is a topic to consider for every single translation project and even for a specific translation we will likely never get everybody to agree on honorifics.

Dal Segno is one of the worst VNs I've ever read, so avoid it like the plague. Never read Evenicle or Maitetsu. Hapymaher so far has been average. So I'd suggest reading Ever17 based off of your favourite VNs.

I can't really suggest anything since I prefer fantasy-romance over pure one so I will only drop my opinion here. Key works does the trick if one wants some emotional moments, but they aren't always related to romance. Another problem is that the majority of them are long and contains a lot of SoL which is not really related with the main storyline. I read LB pretty recently so I remember it quite well. Heroine routes were readable with true route being the best in terms of story, but focused more on friendship rather than romance. As for Hoshimemo, prepare for one of the most annoying heroines ever. If only someone game me a dollar each time I heard onii-chan while playing it... However, IF you want romance, I would recommend this one from those 3 choices. If you ever want to switch to fantasy-romance, go for something like Steins;Gate first.

I'm waiting for Vajra, so only some yolo rolls for me this flashfest. You must be a madman to spark this early... I've done the same thing and I wouldn't recommend to anyone. At least keep Celeste Horn as Holy Saber/Bishop mainhand. Dark doesn't have easy spear options. Sadly Celeste Claws have terrible drop rates. I, for example, got only two from Celesboat(and one from HL version); two from Arcarum chests; the rest... pendants, you know.

700 lines in a week is quite quick. Good freaking job ittaku. Ruuu

Man, there's more people who know about O3 (Ori, Ochi, Onoe)? I never finished it, but it was one of my first VNs, yes, I actually started with some EVNs. It was interesting because, although loosely set in Japan (but fictional city, of course), it was Western through and through, and thus untouched by typical Japanese clichés. I'd say it was more interesting by the themes (there's some obsession, and mental disorders applied to relationships) than by the romance itself.

Hell yes. This is the best take on Watamote. I watched the entire show (or at least the first season, I don't know if there are subsequent ones, and I don't care), and I only loathed it more with every episode. The worst was this one teaser episode where she got a little better and a little happier, and then nope, fucked it all up again, revert back to being even worse than before. This was one of the most upsetting shows I've ever watched, honestly, since I tend to be pretty selective up-front about what I watch, but apparently a lot of people really like this thing that I absolutely hate.

Watamote came up a lot in discussions on reddit and it rated pretty highly so I decided to try watching it. I can't stand shows where the writers seem to hate their own protagonists and seem hellbent on spending the entire series making them suffer as some form of entertainment, which is the premise for this show. I abandoned it. 4/10

What needs to be accepted is that translation is a lossy process and will never be a 100% faithful reproduction since it's impossible to convey all nuances, cultural references etc in another language. On that I'm sure most of us agree. What isn't understood well enough, unless you've been a translator yourself, is something that Clephas has said - the honorifics themselves may serve a purpose in the story and often do. To that end, what matters more - to weigh in with my opinion - is how much localisation the original text can "tolerate". Given translation's "lossy" nature, if honorifics are a huge part of the story - and they often are in charage where characters alter their speech according to familiarity and over time - then there will be far more loss in the story should the honorifics not have an English equivalent (and they usually don't.) That still doesn't make it wrong to remove honorifics if that's the style one wishes to go with; it's just much harder to convey the nuance in the original text without them. I've done it both ways now, and leaving honorifics in makes it extremely easy while removing them when they're a big part of the story itself is many many times trickier to get right without losing a significant part of the story. So in my case, I'd say it depends entirely on how important they are to the story as to whether I'd prefer to leave them in. I'm currently working on a translation without them and most of the team discussion is spent trying to nut out what would otherwise be a simple part of the translation as they actually play a big part in this charage. This one doesn't "tolerate" the loss as well as other ones might, so we have to work much harder to try and fill that loss.

Editing only looks at the English the TLer puts out and makes it sound more natural that fits the tone of the VN, whereas TLC looks at the original Japanese dialogue and the edited English and makes sure what has been translated fits the original, and if not makes corrections accordingly. So it takes longer looking at 2 languages and making adjustments accordingly rather than looking at one when compared to an editor.

There really isn't any point in adapting food names, since you'll find that the original names are used more often than not in the West... It is just like borscht is borscht and enchiladas are enchiladas... there literally is no point in translating most cultural food names, regardless of the language (ingredient names it often makes sense to translate, since Western versions will often be under the translated name). In English, most foreign food names are treated as the name for that food in modern times, including in cases where it has a close relative to a food we already know. Chinese food is the one that breaks that tendency almost constantly, since most Chinese food was Americanized a long time ago. However, it is just that... an exception. You'll almost never see that with Japanese food here (ex. tempura is tempura, oyakodon is oyakodon, etc). I'm not going to weigh in on honorifics in general, but I will say that if you are dealing with a jidaigeki type based in old Japan, taking out the honorifics often makes large swathes of the story incomprehensible. In stories based in modern Japan, honorifics can mostly be substituted or ignored, save in ones where the difference in social status and the character's use of a particular honorific effects the events occurring deeply. In cases like this 'Mr' or 'Ms' really isn't an adequate substitute, unfortunately... Not that most people who don't know Japanese will pick up on that level of subtlety, but there are some capable of reading the social cues without actually knowing Japanese. Edit: 70% of all newbie translators will be honorific fanatics... so be tolerant. In the end, the only time a translator is obligated to do anything is when s/he is being paid to do it, so our complaints one way or another are pissing in the wind. Edit2: I am mildly curious about how editors/translators nowadays get around the inevitable 'honorific argument' that occurs in an obligatory fashion in almost every charage in existence with one or more of the heroines, where they converse on how to call one another... I've seen a few really really awkward suggestions for dealing with it, but it gives me a headache just thinking about it. One of the reasons I will never tl a charage. Edit3: ... looking back, it is pretty hilarious to see how viewpoints have changed. Back when I first started translating, anyone who suggested removing honorifics at all (much less categorically) was just ignored or made fun of. Now it has sort of reversed itself... lol

I'm mostly indifferent, I'll not rage either way, but I think honorifics should be removed. Like Kiri and Dergonu said, a translator's job is about localizing the material to fit the target language. Of course this is hard for a language like japanese, since it's so different from english also on a cultural level, but hey, no one said it was supposed to be easy. Leaving parts of he text untranslated because the target language "doesn't have anything like this" is a poor excuse of a translation imo. And people only got hang up about honorifics because it's the only thing they understand. The amount of "original feeling" that got lost on translation of choice of first person pronoun, kanji puns, kanji+furigana wordplay, dialects and keigo is incredible. I once played an untranslated and unvoiced game where, in a ending, we can only notice one character is impersonating another is because he's using 俺 (ore, that said character never used before) instead of 儂 (washi). This will probably have to be severely adapted to even make sense in translation, since both only means "I"? Yes. Should we start to put ore/watashi/boku/atashi the same way we use honorifics to be closer to the original? Hell no.

there are parts that could have better grammer but it lives up to Mangagamer standards

Late to the party here, but I guess it's better late than never lol. Anyway as far as recommendation for non- depressing VN concerned, I would like to recommend both of Wagahigh and HatsuKoi although beware though that the latter MC might be not satisfy you. Those two VNs were more or less full of lighthearted moment, so I think it might be interesting to you. Other than that, you can try both of Noble Works and Dracu Riot in which both of those were pretty much very light hearted VNs despite some drama. Oh and I would like to seconded Fureraba here, and maybe Koiken Otome as well. I hope my recommendations will be helpful to

Clover Day's.

What I hate most is text. Not all text, but rather text, which can be removed or rewritten to be less than 1/4 of the length without losing any contents or storyline. This is particularly true for H scenes, but all age scenes often does this as well. I don't mind long VNs if they have contents to justify the length. Getting the feeling somebody missed a line quota in a scene and then quickly fixed with no contents is not a nice reading experience.

their existence