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Welcome to this week VNTS Review, and as for the title I'm simply combined 'Melty' word from Melty Moment and 'Reflection' word from Summer Pockets Reflection Blue so we have 'Melty Reflection' as this week VNTS Review title. As for this week, release wise it's not as active as the last week although the updates was still manage to make up for it though. For the updates, we have usual one from fan translation and monthly one from Nekonyan, and most importantly we manage to have Irru fulfilled his goal to release Momiji's patch at June today. In any case, let's see what I can write for this week as well here. From Sol Press we have Irotoridori was fully translated along with the editing was almost completed at 90% edited. Looking from the progress of their other VNs, looks like it'll be next release. No much to say for now other than I'll look forward for the near future release from Sol Press if possible. From Frontwing as expected they'll release Phantom Trigger Volume 7 in English language as well, and for the release date, it'll be at July 22nd later according to the Steam page. What I know for now is that it would be the last volume for Phantom Trigger, and that it'll be longer compared to the previous volumes. If anything, at least I can accept this as the conclusion of Phantom Trigger more easily compared to Rakuen seeing that Phantom Trigger here is more or less a linear VN compared to Kajitsu (Although there's no sex scenes though). As for Nekonyan's updates, currently we have Hello Lady was at 40% in QA and apparently it's already completed the editing progress for the fandisc part as well. While it mean that Hello Lady should be next Nekonyan's release, it's still not determined as of now because we also have two projects that was in QA as well. Those two projects are IxShe Tell with the current progress was at 85% translated and 80% edited along with 35% in QA, and Riddle Jokers in that it's been at a quarter in QA. In any case, I'll look forward to see whether Nekonyan's next release would be one of those three VNs above or not. For the rest of their updates, we have Kirikoi was at three quarter translated along with a quarter edited, Aokana EXTRA 1 was at 45% translated along with 15% edited, and 1st secret project was at 30% translated. Lastly we finally have Melty Moment start the progress after more than two years in hiatus, and currently it's at 30% translated. That's all for Nekonyan's updates at this month. Since the new fragments for PS3 version of Matsuribayashi translation was finished, it mean that the work on Miotsukushi Ura was resuming. As for the current progress of Miotsukushi Ura, it's at 54% translated. For more updates from fan translation, we have Taimainin Yukikaze 2 was at three quarter translated, Kud Wafter all age version was past three quarter (77.38%) translated, and Eustia was at 90.37% translated with side stories was at 37.52% translated. Since we have Summer Pockets Reflection Blue released, of course Alka decided to translate it and since they already translated the original version it mean that at least they already finished a substantial part of Reflection Blue itself (Apparently more than halfway). Also this time they decided to work on this until they finished unless they got C&D from VA seeing that the official version of Summer Pockets did have some flaws (ie typo and some broken word-wrap), so let's see if they can finished Reflection Blue here. For the last update, we finally manage to have Momiji's patch released today, and the patch did cover 62.57% of Ginharu. So if you already interested with Momiji ever since Ginharu being released and can't wait for Mizuha's patch release, go get Momiji's patch and have fun. As for the next plan while it should be obvious that they'll translate Yuzuki's route next, Irru still don't know what's Trip's plan for that yet. Irru also hope that they'll be able to go back to weekly update starting this week, so let's see if Tsurezure can do it later. That's all for this week VNTS Review, and see you next week.

I wrote earlier about how I thought when translating a few lines in Shinimasu. This series is going to be in that vein, with an eye to explaining translation decisions and highlighting unusual takes. I’m going to try to make it interesting for people not knowing Japanese, but to save effort I’m not going to be providing literal translation equivalents to lines. Why am I doing this? Because my brain is a fuck and producing blog posts is an interesting motivation for doing a second pass on my translation. Unfortunately for those expecting worthwhile content I feel like digressing a bit into history and methods for this first post, though. This is what my TL setup has looked like for most of the time I’ve worked on the project: I started out doing 64 lines in December 2017, this got Asonn involved, and he introduced me to Porygon, who set up a git repository* and provided the tool you see. My brain swears I tweeted this pastebin, and I know I at least got some comment, but twitter search can’t find it so who the fuck knows? Anyway, I probably did 129 lines just copying from the game or script (can’t remember), then I copied them to the tool and worked there. One of the joys of working with porygon is that he has highly motivating auto-updating progress pages for you to fap to after pushing your new lines. This probably helped me more than I’d really like to admit. Either way, apart from being convenient for reinsertion later**, the tool has rudimentary edict-lookup of the (autoparsed) tl lines, which is convenient if you’re extremely fucking lazy. I’m not going to say I never used it (I am extremely fucking lazy), but going j-j definitely was needed more than once. Other than that I guess it’s ok, though it does have a still-unfixed bug where it’ll fuck up and display too few lines of text in a box due to some miscalculation. It’s certainly missing some features my dream tool would have, though. Personally I’d love to be able to see the script commands surrounding a line through some UI element to expand, as this could partially substitute for actually having the VN open for visual/scenographic context. It doesn’t have EPWING lookup, but that’s high effort since the format is bullshit apparently. It also doesn’t let you play voiced lines associated with spoken lines, though Shinimasu is unvoiced so I guess it doesn’t really matter for this project. Today I had to contact pory since it had stoped working properly; it turned out my build of the tool was old enough that a bug with java 9 (I had recently updated) was making it unusable. He quickly got a fix for the tool, but it took enough time that I lost the energy for revising my tl. Or that’s my excuse, anyway. See you next time for actual tl discussion w *What’s a git repository? Well the long answer is long and full of programmer-speak, but basically it lets you keep an online backup of your files, preserving older versions each time you decide to add a newer version to the server. You can do this while multiple people are working on the same file sometimes, though it can get hairy. I ended up not needing this much, but it’s been good insurance against data loss (and I have changed laptops at least once during translation, also had to reinstall windows once…). Really if you don’t have a backup for any translation of length, you’re probably doing it wrong (but also I am a CS student so it’s… not as hard for me w) **By virtue of saving the line number in the original script where the Japanese line was and associating that with the eventual translated line. I used a simplified version of this myself based on google sheets columns when I did tech for the ichigo & kyuugo tl. View the full article