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Well, one thing's for sure - at least it gives this almost dead forum a topic it can discuss fervently that is actually even relevant to the forum... This discussion should be a sticky that people post to each and every day. I notice everyone says exactly the same things in slightly different ways, over and over. Rinse and repeat. My turn. If quality of final product ranged from 0 to 10, where 0 was completely incomprehensible machine translation along with bugs introduced into the game, scenes butchered, crashing, and 10 was absolute perfect translation and editing of high literary standard which is indistinguishable from the original Japanese, along with all menus translated, songs karaoked, CGs uncensored etc. then it would be fair to say that almost nothing is a 0 or a 10. Let's call a 5 a passing mark where the original story is conveyed with reasonable accuracy and with some typos and editing oversights. So what we get is a range somewhere in the middle and fan translations can fall anywhere in that spectrum, but so can professional releases. Making an incredible generalisation, fan translations are more likely to end up lower on that scale than official localisations, though anything's possible. So what it comes down to is - what is the cut off that you'd be happy with reading? Everyone would accept a 10 (though some of you still want your mosaics) and no one would accept a 0. Some people would be happy with a 3 or 4 while others with nothing less than a 7 or 8. This means that the most flexible amongst us wouldn't mind more fan translations while the more stringent amongst us won't be happy even with half the official localisations. The complaint is that some of those that only accept an 8 get angry when someone releases a 3 because they do a disservice... to whom? The game? The writers? The localisation companies? The readers? It's not a pirating issue, as those who pirate the JP version (to patch it) will likely pirate the EN version too, so the original makers won't be getting anything either way. A shit release doesn't stop a good release from being made later on. If anything, it's a good fan release that makes an official localisation less likely (unless it gets picked up.) The question then is should fan translators be encouraged or discouraged if they end up in the 3 or 4 range? Is it helpful or harmful to the community to have these? Do fan translators use this as a stepping stone towards getting better and/or a paid job or try to get their translation picked up, and is this healthy or not for the VN scene? I think the fan translation scene is an essential part of the past, present, and future of VNs until the day we get simultaneous multi-language releases of VNs the way anime does - and that's actually far less likely to happen due to the sheer volume of VN releases and the turnaround time to translate them, unlike anime. Arguing for the giving and receiving of constructive criticism is great, however there are precious few people who can and will mentor fan translations (as others have pointed out.) The only way to make the fan translation scene healthier is to tackle less projects and have more translators and other staff helping each other. That's not going to happen since there are so few translators and so many things they may personally want to work on, so we continue with the status quo. By the way, does anyone want to help with our translation?

With Halloween fast approaching, we thought it'd be fun to create a list of VNs that fit the season on the Fuwanovel VN rec site. We're creating a list of suggestions and we'd be interested in any ideas anyone has, but we're also interested in the communities' collective opinion and put up a VN poll asking which VNs you think are the spookiest~ The poll is going to be up until the end of the week, with the results posted this Friday evening.

I'd also add Zanmataisei Demonbane which definitely has horror elements (especially Tiberius). And Liar-Soft's Steampunk series could also fit, since they all have Lovecraftian horror elements, even if I wouldn't call them horror VN's.

I wrote about the VBF gameplay trial and the environment that surrounds it here. I found that the gameplay was fun, engaging and complex but it could benefit from an interface upgrade and improved tutorial. Translation is decent, with a couple glaring issues that are a cause for concern. Overall, the demo is certainly polished in comparison with the first one, but it’s still rough around the edges. I also talk about localization mistakes, but the bigger issue is with the original script itself. Would appreciate any feedback or criticism, but either way, it'd be nice to revive this discussion thread. Honestly, it's quite vexing how low of a presence Ninetail have, barely even engaging with the community. It's also surprising how the stretch goals have yet to be revealed, 20 or so days in the Kickstarter. I believe that the initial goal will be reached, but there's a lot of wasted potential. Like, just imagine if the mikandi guy was running the PR campaign. (I know about the issue with a few of the images not loading. I have spent hours trying to fix it but it's probably the plugin that is at fault. It seems to work completely fine with Google Chrome, but try clearing your cache.)

Okay so since I came up with the scale, I'm making this up as I go to give some sort of concrete description for what numbers from 0-10 would mean. This is a very non-linear scale, and 10 is meant to be impossible. It also covers both translation and editing and obviously some efforts will have better translation and worse editing (and vice versa) so it won't work everywhere. 0: Failed partial machine translation. Half the lines are still in Japanese. No one's edited it. The game crashes. 1: Unedited machine translation. It's a complete mystery what most lines are saying, looking more like a dictionary list of words that were used in the original. There is no semblance of the original story. 2: Edited machine translation. Someone with no knowledge of the original language has tried to edit MTL output into comprehensible English. Very little effort is put into correcting grammar. The story still remains incomprehensible. 3: Heavily edited machine translation/beginner Japanese translator with heavy MTL assistance. Someone with beginner knowledge of Japanese has heavily edited the text to try and make it represent the apparent flow of the story with some effort to make the grammar tolerable. The story can be vaguely followed, though with wild errors. 4: Intermediate level Japanese translator. Someone has made a decent effort to edit the text to represent the flow of the story and fix grammar. The bulk of the story flow remains intact, but with occasional critical plot points being missed or wrong. Grammar sounds unnatural. 5: Advanced level Japanese translator. A reasonable effort has been made to edit the grammar and text. The entirety of the major plot points remain intact, but with many subtle nuances missed. The grammar often sounds awkward and non-natural. Minor typos are scattered throughout the text with the occasional laughably bad typos. 6: Experienced advanced level Japanese translator. A concerted effort has been made to edit grammar and text. The major plot points are intact, and a significant number of the subtle nuances are captured. The grammar sounds mostly natural with the occasional awkward sounding line. Minor typos are scattered but there are no massive blunders. 7: Experienced advanced level Japanese + solid cultural knowledge translator. Generous effort has been made to polish the grammar and text. All the plot is intact, and the bulk of the subtle nuances are captured. Grammar sounds natural and awkward sounding lines are rare. Typos are infrequent. 8: Extensive cultural knowledge. Multiple pass editing. All the plot is intact, all the subtle nuances are captured. Grammar sounds natural and there are no awkward sounding lines. Typos are rare. 9: Brilliant writing. Perfect editing. The writing flows off the screen perfectly naturally in the translated language as though it was never written in Japanese. Cultural references are conveyed effortlessly. No grammar errors or typos to speak of. 10: Did someone stick a babelfish in my ear? I have entered the matrix. Neo: "I know Japanese". You are spiritually transported in time and space as though you've been part of Japanese culture all your life. You are absolutely convinced you are reading Japanese.

@Decay I messaged Tay about it over the summer. I just checked the message and he still hasn't viewed it yet so he probably hasn't even logged in since before I sent the message. And yeah, I honestly wasn't actually expecting to be allowed to write the posts because no one really knows who I am, but I thought it was worth a shot. That said, if you're ever looking to expand the team, I'm ready and willing to learn.

Hello. If it was me you were contacting, then sorry for never getting back to you. I know somebody contacted me about VNTS a while ago that I never got around to responding, and I feel bad about it. There are a couple factors here. One, our VNTS system is not the most intuitive in the world and it takes time to teach someone how to do it, as well as all the quirks of what we do and don't report, and how we report it. If we don't have time to do a single update, then we don't really have time to teach someone the ropes, unfortunately. The other factor is that I'm generally uncomfortable handing the baton off to someone I don't know very well, which is admittedly up for debate if that's what's best for the site. Maybe if someone is volunteering, then should we just accept their help without question? Either way, starting a week or two from now, I will have 100x as much free time in the day, and I plan on getting back into the groove with VNTS. I'll also see if I can get some other site content rolling as well. Very sorry for the extended absence, everyone. But hopefully things will be slightly less dead soon.

What conclusion we draw about this? Regardless of translation quality people will never be happy, period.

Happy Birthday to You, @Arcadeotic!

Happy birthday to @Arcadeotic.

https://www.mirrored.to/files/XDPMCU2O/maitetsu-18-restoration--bandaid-removal-patch.7z_links

I'm sure there are legitimate complaints to be had about the biman 1 translation that cummed out today, but who has time for that shit when you see THIS? PLEASE IGNORE THE FACT THAT THIS IS A MEME PATCH WITH THE NAMES WRONG RIGHT (thanks @HMN), THE OTHER TEXT BITS WILL BE THE SAME OKAY. YES THAT'S RIGHT, THAT IS THE MOTHERFUCKING DOUBLE HYPHEN STANDIN FOR A PROPER EM DASH. THIS IS POSSIBLY THE UGLIEST PUNCTUATION SHORTCUT IN EXISTENCE. WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD USE THIS MONSTROSITY RATHER THAN EVEN A TECHNICALLY NOT APPROVED BY LIKE ANY STYLE GUIDE SPACED DASH? THE BIMAN 1 TL IS CONFIRMED SHIT. THANKS FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK ON LIVING IN A MOTHERFUCKING SOCIETY BOTTOM TEXT: UPDATE: MORE CRIMES AGAINST TYPOGRAPHY HAVE BEEN FOUND: BEHOLD THIS RIDICULOUS DOUBLE SPACING:

Ah, it may be so. Also, I agree with your 0-10 scale. Nice description. As for reasons somebody gets angry with poor TL released - it may be kind of "disservice" to such reader. I mean - if translation is hard to read, it may serioulsy dampen enjoyment and impact of the story, yet if one decides to wade through it to the end, the story may be "spoiled" for them, so then even if improved release would come out, damage is done and they may lose interest in a game. But yet again - my experience was different. I experienced only one such case - Konosora. I read Kotori's route from the initial release, then dropped it in the middle of Ageha's route. But when retranslation was released, I reread the whole thing, and enjoyed it. Ironically, in this case it was the official release that was bad, and fan-TL patch that fixed it, so the other way around Also, since I enjoyed Kotori's route even with bad original translation, and wasn't sure then when the patch would be released, that prompted me to start learning Japanese So, what can I say - when you detect signs of poor translation to the point that it gets in your way, better to drop the title and hope for better release in the future? Or, learn you-know-what-language

To be honest, it feels that a lot of "poor translations" could have been avoided if the team (or individual) were more open to constructive feedback and were willing to redo some of their work. It's definitely time consuming, but isn't it worth it knowing you did your best and learned a thing or two from it?

There's Sakura Halloween if you feel like to add some joke VN out there. For more serious VN, maybe you can chose to add Tsukihime along with Chaos Child. Oh, and Bishoujo Mangekuou as well seeing that we'll gonna have a lot of sex scenes with the vampire, so I thought it might be fitting for the Halloween. Hope it'll help you there. PS - I knew that Chaos Child here is the same series as Chaos Head, but still those two VNs were quite different and from what I see Child here is the improvement of Head. But in case you still didn't want to add that, then I'll change my recommendations to Dies Irae.

Once again thanks for the patch, and also happy 20th birthday to you there @Arcadeotic. I hope that you'll have a good year ahead.

it doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to not be terrible if anything. People here needs a serious reality check with this literature phd requirement to translate a vn. Especially if it's a fan tl group who spends their free time translating because they enjoy it and doing you a serious favour in the process. You will get a handful of people whining about a sentence being written a bit differently than how it actually is in Japanese or complain about some typos here and there, but then you have the silent masses who enjoy the translation and is overjoyed that they can finally read a vn that will 99% sure never see an official translation. And who's to say an official translation would be any better? I see plenty wrong with super delayed official releases. Mistakes so obvious that it makes me not believe all those checks and rechecks actually took place. But for a fan tl it doesn't bother me one bit as i appreciate the time and work being done.

Old VN's.

The only truly horrifying thing about Killer Queen is that it had a death game setup and decided to still dedicate half of its story to the protagonist having sex with a 10 year old

Keeping the cringe ball rolling:

Since I got explicitly called out here, I feel somewhat obligated to comment... I don't think of myself as a purist at all, nor do I think there's such a thing as a perfect translation. I do still think there are both good translations and bad translations, and it doesn't look like that's really being debated here either (though I imagine the defining characteristics of a good translation would be very hotly debated!). Just to offer two common arguments for "good" translation over "bad" translation which I haven't seen mentioned here: I think a bad translation is an insult to the original writers. VNs are in fact written by professionals, and the vast majority of those professionals work their ass off to produce something worth reading. I think it's unfair to them to produce a translation which is obviously lower quality than the original. And, why is that...? A good writer makes the story beats land, makes you giggle at the jokes, and occasionally reduces you to a blubbering mess of tears. If you're basically just reading VNs to see the CGs and the sprites, to listen to the music, and maybe to kind of understand what's going on overall, well, you're entitled to enjoy things the way you want to. But me, I really like reading, and I want to get the same full-color experience when reading a game in English translation that the Japanese readers got reading the original. That means, at a high level, that the logical flow from line to line needs to be maintained, that the result needs to be true in spirit and in content to the original. My go-to example is always that the jokes need to still be funny. Look, everyone can believe what they want to believe, and I don't think anyone here is going to change their mind. But regardless of what some readers may think, I do think that translators should care about their writing quality. If you think you're translating something and you're not worrying about delivering an equivalent experience, then I think you aren't doing your job.

Huuuuuuuuh... I see many things that are absolutely wrong with your statement. First, really there's no translation quality/choice drama in other otaku niches? I've seen people going apeshit over minor details in anime translations and inconsistencies between the fan and official versions. On the one hand, there'll always be purists that are demanding top quality every time and on the other, there will be botched or poor-quality translation on both the fan and official side of things. The more choice and comparison people have, the more likely they are to criticize underperforming projects - when fan translators were your only hope for playing pretty much any VNs, you were less likely to complain about their work than now, when they compete with a fairly rich selection of professional releases. I things it's even somewhat legit to argue that nowadays there's little sense in translating a VN unless you can do it well. The second, do you know about many EVNs being translated to Japanese? People actually caring about those? It's a non-topic, but I would be surprised if Japanese VN fans didn't have a problem with poor translations - they aren't used to awful localizations and don't treat them as "facts of life" like Western otakus were forced to by turd-quality products offered to them on a regular basis. Demanding quality seems like a pretty reasonable standard, especially for commercial products. And the VN fandom today is not reliant on fan translations anymore and people's attitudes towards those are not any kind of "crucial barrier" for its growth. Also, there are many other reasons why fan translations are pretty much dying out - people that once done them professionalizing or moving on with their lives is the main one and there's no going back from this. What's left is the official publishers, and if you suggest we shouldn't take those up to highest scrutiny as their clients, that's pretty much saying you want them to screw you over with subpar services. Well, you're allowed to act against your own self-interest of course, but that doesn't look like a healthy narrative.

Holy s***, when in a bad mood, trust in anime... I've checked all of the shows I was interested in minus Bloom Into You and while I don't think there are many actually GOOD shows in the fall lineup, I was amused to no end. First, Zombieland Saga is just pure, unadulterated absurdity, nearly at Pop Epic Team levels of dumb. But so far, it's outlandish enough to be funny and if it can keep up a similar pace, it'll be a joy to watch. The opening scene was even something of a small masterpiece - got me completely by surprise and set out the tone perfectly. :3 Second, Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san is simply adorable - probably the first shoujo-ai after Yuru Yuri to give me a similar feeling. Its extremely cute and relies on silly character humour, but makes it all highly amusing and relaxing to watch. It won't be for everyone, but I was smiling like a complete moron the whole way through and can't wait to see more. Third, the Reincarnated as a Slime isekai is surprisingly well-written and fun and for once does not seem to shoehorn pointless fanservice, which is so rare in the more lighthearted shows of this kind... It seems like it's going to be a lot of fun, even for those that are generally fed up with this kind of anime. Fourth, Xuan Yuan Sword Luminary is not that horrible... Just clunky and uninspired. Quite similar to other Chinese anime I've seen and I think those get a bit more shit than they deserve. Going to watch it further out of curiosity. In general, this is going to be a fun season, even if no one will remember about any of these shows a year from now. I approve. ^^

It looks like Ms. vampire who lives in my neighbourhood/Tonari no Kyuuketsuki-san is also a yuri. It's a 4-koma adaptation, so I'd expect more random jokes than any kind of romance, but it definitely goes on my to-watch list (will probably give it a try tomorrow and share my impressions). Along with the Zombieland Saga because that one just looks too weird to not give it a try. EDIT: Oh and it seems that Xuan Yuan Sword Luminary will be this season's epic trainwreck, so this goes on my Crunchyroll quoue as well. That's decent enough lineup, I guess? Won't have too few things to watch after all. :3

I have played nekopara 8 times already. This isn't counting the time I open it to virtually pet my favorite Nekos.

Oh lawdy lawd