Zakamutt

nyo!

The bundle for Ukraine that they sold a way back had quite a few visual novels worth my time, including Pale Cachexia which is one of the best things I've read in a while. A lot of weird indies in the best possible meaning of that word get in on them.

For forums there is lemmasoft. I heard there might be issues registering there right now, though? idk. For discords, look up LoveVN and Devtalk+.

I played a bit of Despiria (wonder if anyone has a proper dump of the script, I was able to get fragments but not particularly organized... though the scenes with words flying around are probably hell in any case) on a dreamcast emulator (not flycast tho, redream) and it worked pretty well indeed, should be nice. Good luck with the project, haven't played the original game — would you say that's needed?

I believe they eventually (but it took a while) released a patch that freed the shota, but it was a pretty high level move indeed... Generally same opinion as sanah. To add is that they tend to hire translation agencies (to keep up with how much DMM japan side demands they push out? maybe), which makes them unable to credit the translators often (besides the usual bad quality a translation agency offers). When they can credit, they do, however.

Welcome back bro. I think we last spoke in 某 streamer's chat, wonder what happened to him with the... thing. Ah well. Depending on your availability we might be able to use you as a reviewer / guest reviewer again if interested, btw.

Actually it's pronounced "nero". common mistake (skill issue honestly. true nihonjin would 以心伝心 nasu immedia... who am I kidding it's bullshit) Also the name is beast's lair it says right in the window title Also I can totally pronounce nrvnqsr. Maybe I should learn polish... I wonder if the thing where the text is spaced ｒｅａｌｌｙｗｉｄｅｌｙ in Japanese in wide mode was fixed along the way, I remember my buddy's screenshots reading through it were kinda wack

I think you've misspelled the topic's title ("OmOnkeo"). I think you can edit that yourself, so it should be fixable without too much issue. Do you have anything on what the VN is about that isn't in video form? I have a nigh-pathological distaste for video that isn't exactly what I like in videos, so I mostly just don't watch them.

I have 117 discord friends, im practically an influencer

Hi and welcome to Fuwanovel! @HataVNI can probably relate to you given that he's strongly involved in a german-language fansite w. I've had a mixed opinion on the spanish scene, mostly because they tend to do english to spanish translations and then not credit the japanese to english translation team (it happened to me), but I know there are cool people doing jp->es translations and I actually did get credited once when I complained, so it's not all bad. In any case you're not part of any of that, and I wish you luck in growing the spanish scene.

the only good genshit character is kayamori ruka

Man, I sound so fucking llee in that note, but I'll stand behind it I guess. At least I read the full game. And yeah, strongly recommended if you think it seems like your kind of aesthetic. I you bought the itch.io bundle for ukraine a ways back, you already have it.

if necroposting is necrophilia is this a gangbang? the world needs to know

no

1. I am not an official translator but I know some stuff about the business. Mostly on the indie/VN end, not 8-4 or squeenix or whatever level. Most weeb media companies, esp for VNs, work near exclusively with contracted freelancers. There are some exceptions, but those want you to live in the US or Japan. Most companies avoid agencies for niche media; shiravune/johren is a kinda cringe exception. Nobody really wants to hire an agency, it's more expensive. 2. Contractor positions are usually remote. Full-time positions are usually onsite and usually somewhere with crazy cost of living (cali KEKW). 3. Depends a lot on the place. You might be working in Word for LNs, in Google Sheets for a lot of stuff, or with actual CAT tools (especially translation agencies seem to do this, but you don't really want to work for them if you can help it since you usually don't get credited and have an NDA). 4. Actually can't comment since I've never sought employment. It depends a lot on your networking skills + actual abilities... regrettably (twitter bad for you unless you heavily curate) a twitter presence can help here. 5. ...Usually you want at least N2 level proficiency for a translation job. This doesn't mean you need to have the JLPT pass, many smaller companies care less about this than your performance on translation tests. Anyone company takes people at lower skill level than one able to pass N2 is probably a shit company, yes offense. Apart from Japanese ability, English (target language, but English is in the highest demand) writing ability is also important. In general, translation has different components and some of them are hard to learn without actually translating yourself. As such, starting in fan translation is advisable. One risky "in" with translation companies for visual novels is to do a fan translation and sell it to the company. Note that the translation has to be good enough that the company wants to take it, and that you'll likely need to stall and piss off your fans as negotiations progress if you have gone public, plus you need to resolve tensions in your tl group etc etc. If you work with this goal I would be upfront about it to any member that wants to join. It's hard to recommend becoming a weeb media translator if you have any other prospects. The pay is bad, the job security precarious, the outlook grim (machine translation will increasingly be getting """"""good"""""" enough that companies will be more and more tempted to cut costs and do MTL post-editing rather than real translation, with shitty but good enough results). But if you choose to let the void gaze also into you, I can only wish you luck.

This tl is like, totally great 「akatuki no goe」 This review is completely unbiased, and not forced out of me by bee in any way, shape, or fap. So like, I read the tl of this thing and it's amazing. Beyond grisaia tier. Brains sprouted from my groin and I ejaculated pure information (and cum) at least 300 times while reading just an hour of it. You can download it here, and remember, I was not forced to write this by anyone, especially not Bee. Thank you for your cum-operation

>whenever a book has lots of foreign expressions, the publisher just deals with it by slapping a glossary at the last pages you sure about this one fam? maybe in 'fine literature' where the publisher wishes to maintain some illusory purity, but I doubt it in the middle and lowbrow categories. EDIT: This is not to say they might not use somewhat more intrusive techniques on occasion (but likely not TL notes), but so do VN translations sometimes. A lot of the time you might not even have noticed those techniques being used if you're not paying attention. Translation textbooks tend to include descriptions of a variety of methods, see for example Judy Wakabayashi's Japanese-English Translation: an advanced guide p. 5-10. Note how the "glossary" method is not emphasized but the mention-but-likely-explain-first-time method (transcription/load word) is:

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I just took a 5 ECTS law course recently. >has someone done it? there is no english release listed at https://vndb.org/v20003, so no. >is it illegal to hire someone to translate it? Depending on the jurisdiction (I was looking at Swedish law for this, which should mostly match EU law[1]), technically no. What's illegal is to spread the translation to a larger amount of people, so you'd have to keep it private or maybe share it with like two people (consult your local law source!). You would also need to find a translator willing to translate, and the translation job would probably run you a large amount of money (thousands of dollars) at any kind of reasonable price. >will someone else do it? idk fam, generally the best answer is to learn Japanese instead. With modern tools, it's surprisingly possible to be reading VNs after only a few months (not years) of study (if you're hardcore enough, one should be enough). However, you can always pray for luck. Or use machine translation, though das cringe. [1] EU countries generally have strongly harmonized legal systems in important areas these days, with EU law outranking local law. Though Swedish law is somewhat unusual in specifically granting the author of an unauthorized translation a "useless" copyright on their work which means the translator can't publish, but the author also can't publish the translation without permission. Kind of based ngl

Japanese natives are saying it's 30 mins long in reviews, so for normal people it's probably not longer than 4 hours to read (fuck some of these guys read fast).

gay shinimasu reason: it's shinimasu (by shinimasu writer) but gay (doesnt matter since no porn)

For any fan translators unfamiliar with the jargon: source language/text = language/text being translated from target language/text = language/text being translated into While writing sufficiently well in your target language is important to ensure both that the finished product is a smooth read and that no errors occur because of you being misinterpreted by your editor or audience, it’s all for nothing if you didn’t interpret your source correctly in the first place. Reading a source text without making errors can be surprisingly difficult even with a decent grasp of both your source and target language. Certainly most fan translators, and more professional translators than I’d like, are lacking in at least one of those two areas: personally, I am objectively significantly worse at Japanese than the average native Japanese high schooler¹. There are more ways than one to avoid mistranslations, and often you can compensate for lacking in skill by being more cautious while reading the source text. Personally, I like to focus on two basic principles: always trying to detect possible gaps in your knowledge, and always considering whether your translation actually makes sense. Does It Make Sense? Bar things that are written specifically to evoke surrealism, writers usually try to avoid things that obviously make no sense. This is a pretty general principle and editors and proofreaders can both use it even if the translator does not, so it’s always a bit strange when I see some weird-ass obviously illogical mistranslation pop up. Theoretically QA/proofreading is extra powerful in this regard for games, as they will usually play the game as they work, so they can spot backgrounds or character movements contradicting the text too. For a subtle example of this, have something from a translation I love to hate on, Seabed: Now when I saw this ingame it made no sense at all. Why would it be darker after you turned on the light? Part of this is probably just questionable doujinge graphical accuracy (and maybe needing the emphasize the light / mimicking how it would actually look as your eyes adjusted), but I would still make a note on this line were I QAing this². Now the Steam release of Seabed happens to let you switch to Japanese… 壁のスイッチを押して、ナツメ球だけをつける。 I flipped the switch on the wall, turning on just the nightlight (ナツメ球）. Well, that makes a lot more sense. The second background was probably going for an adjustment effect where everything but the light looked darker, but it wasn’t showing a bright light. Well, that or background 1 was a sort of generic movie-darkness-but-not-really kind of deal. The point is, we have a solution to the puzzle. If your translation is contradicted by other parts of the game, whether it be the situation the characters are in, the lines before it or after (painfully common), or something else, you should look at those line extra damn hard. Writers do sometimes make mistakes, but it’s probably you. If you know someone with higher Japanese ability that can help check your translation of the line, ask them (make sure to give sufficient context if at all possible. I can’t believe how many people seem constitutionally unable to do this, though the worst offenders are learners rather than translators). Until the line makes sense or you’re confident it’s not supposed to, I recommend leaving the line/section blank or at least leaving a strongly worded note to come back to it later. Always Be Suspicious When I was still a high school kid, a freelance literary translator did a presentation at our school³. One thing she said really stuck with me: the principle of always keeping a careful eye out for anything that might not mean what you think it means. The example she used was of a translator that had managed to get toy shaped like a dog from a lady walking her toy poodle, a small poodle breed, in English — leading to a rather surreal mental image⁴. I suspect this line wasn’t very important, but that’s not always going to be the case, and this kind of mistake is always an embarrassment. One key skill to avoid that embarrassment is to grow an intuitive sense of what you don’t actually know — if you’ve hung out in some environments, you might actually already have gotten a slice of this with your English, or another language you know well. For example, did you know that strictly speaking bombastic is only to be used for things that are flashy but have little substance? I myself find myself googling words I only sort of know sometimes (…usually after unwisely pressing the enter key in some chat. At least I edit myself quick!). It doesn’t always go well. Ask me about the time I subtly misused reticent sometime… or don’t, actually. A soul can only take so much. Either way, that same nagging feeling — that maybe you don’t actually know this — can be a valuable ally to maintain the proper level of suspicion when translating. You’re looking for when the structure isn’t quite like what you’ve seen before, or when you’re thinking you can figure out the meaning of something from its parts — look up とてもじゃないが for a real mindfuck of a phrase. And as above, you’re also looking for things that don’t make sense. Always be suspicious of things that don’t make sense Showing the interlinked nature of all your guards against mistranslation, the earlier example with the nightlight might also have been prevented by being suspicious. If it was a translation-side error, going deeper than a cursory google images search might have helped get it right — looking at the page, you’d think to yourself: do I really know this is just a normal lightbulb? Looking at ナツメ fruits they look kind of red, too. I’d better look further… More examples I was going to review Seabed for Fuwanovel, which is part of the reason why I took a lot of screens going through it. It fell through because I simply could not complete it: my examination had turned me hypercritical and practically every line bothered me — mostly for clumsy flow rather than translation oddities, though there were more of those too. But hey, I got some pictures for this post for all the trouble. Anyway, have another example: Okay, so this doesn’t make sense. How are you seeing things in pitch black darkness? Let’s look at the Japanese: すんなりと入国を済ませて空港を出ると見通しの悪い夜ではあったが、コンクリの壁の落書きや広めの道路、湿った空気で異国だと直ぐに分かる。 見通しの悪い isn’t pitch black, it’s just the dark of the night making it hard to see. Now it makes sense that you can see the graffiti again, nice. It’s possible this was some kind of botched adaptation due to the background being solid black, but I don’t buy it. For my last example, lets use this line from 新説魔法少女 (Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo), an SRPG/VN hybrid with an ensemble cast of Japanese students, mostly in middle school. Moka is a first-year high school student who used to be in the swimming club last year. Before she graduated she was in the same club as Nagato, who is being discussed here due to her habit of not showing up for things (she still gets good results academically, and is also very strong athletically). 悪化してたか…… 試験だとか総体だとか 大事な時にサボる癖は治したほうがいいよ。 Huh, I guess it’s gotten worse… She should really fix her habit of skipping important events like tests and… 総体? I was actually just reading this right now, and at first it didn’t make sense, or at least sounded extremely strained, with any of the definitions of 総体 in edict⁵. So I checked kenkyuusha (shin waei daijiten) and a J-J dictionary and they still had nothing illuminating. Now I was starting to think it could be some of my more unlikely interpretations. I checked out そうたい without the kanji to see if it might be using the wrong kanji; 相対 seemed more plausible in the sentence, but I was still not feeling it; my Japanese ability was telling me it wouldn’t look like that grammatically and the interpretation felt strained. My intuition told me that 総体 would be an event somewhat similar to a 試験, maybe sports related given who the speaker was. So I googled 総体 and the second result is a Japanese Wikipedia disambiguation page. 全国高等学校総合体育大会の略称の一つ。高校総体、インターハイ、インハイも同義。 An abbreviation of the Interscholastic Athletic Meet. Synonymous with [various katakana words on the theme of “inter-high”].Well, that confirms my suspicions. It’s some kind of sporting event. This definiton actually specifically mentions high school events, but there’s nothing saying you can’t have them in middle school. This interpretation makes sense; a swimming club member would want gifted other club members to be at their competitions. Even if I didn’t use that principle, suspicion could also have saved me and made me actually google the word. But Japanese knowledge also helped me: Japanese often shortens longer terms into a word using some of the term’s kanji; for example 自動販売機 becomes the probably more familiar 自販機, and I knew to suspect this. In the end, the more Japanese you know, the less errors you’ll catch with these methods… but remember, kids: a totally radical book once said that pride comes before a fall. It had a point⁶. To tie this up, I think my soul has recovered from the baring some time ago, so let me tell you of another English-related fuckup: for the longest time I used to think “craven” was related to “craving”, and none of the times I’d read it had disabused me of this notion. I then saw it used in the Tokyo Babel translation in a way that was clearly incompatible with craving anything, so I looked it up… and was enlightened. It was a sad moment, because at the back of my mind I knew I’d misread it like 10 times by now. With that said, I kinda blame the English language for this one. That, and not having dictionary lookup just by hovering over the word. Man, the browser addons we have these days are pretty dang good... Footnotes ¹ The JLPT N1, well known for not being particularly indicative of ability but seen as a decent anchoring point nevertheless, is apparently supposed to be easily passable to any student that has finished Japanese high school. I originally wrote most of this essay in ~2017, when I didn’t think I would pass it — I now think I have a decent chance, with pass/fail mostly down to listening ability (not very relevant for text translation) and if a lot of media-obscure grammar points I don’t know happen to show up. I’m still much worse than a Japanese high schooler, though — you’ll have to believe me on this one. ² It’s hard to know where exactly this went wrong, and it’s possible only QA could have saved it from what could be both a reasonable editing decision or a translation oversight. Maybe the translator used google images and saw the bulbs looked more or less like normal bulbs and just went with that; ナツメ球 is in edict, but edict is unreliable and a professional translator might understandably avoid it (I wouldn’t – it has better coverage on a lot of random more contemporary/obscure stuff, though I if I were truly high effort I would probably get access to more updated online daijirin/shinwaei dictionaries). ³ Among other language pairs she was a JP->SE translator I believe, but I can’t remember if she did it firsthand or second. I also remember the title of one book she worked on, Shine, a localized title she didn’t pick or particularly like and which seems to be entirely impossible for me to find anywhere. I also don’t know if she was entirely a literary tl, it’s not like those get paid a lot, though I guess probably more than VN translators (let it be known that the muffled crying of our industry professionals can be heard in the background of this sentence). ⁴ It’s possible she was actually just holding it or something and I’m misremembering, but this way the example has more of the dimensions I want to discuss in this post. ⁵ At the time, Translation Aggregator with JParser and mecab was my first-line lookup choice. These days I have to look things up infrequently enough that a browser addon that has shinmeikai and shin eiwa daijiten 5th ed EPWING dictionary lookup in addition to JMdict (basically fancy non-boomer edict) serves my needs better. Those did not help me here, though. ⁶ In keeping with the principles of this post, I ended up checking out the origin of the proverb. The passage used to read “a totally radical guy once said…,” since I was assuming it had been directly said by Jesus (also, it was funnier that way). At least it really was from the Bible! Though the fall implied is supposed to be “calamitous”, apparently, so maybe we’re using it a bit lightly here. Then again, a bad enough mistranslation really could cause a disaster… though if you’re translating the nuke launch protocol, I really hope to whatever deity will still give me the time of day that you actually know what you’re doing. The rest of you, feel free to muddle along doing your best like us other mortals. View the full article

For any fan translators unfamiliar with the jargon: source language/text = language/text being translated from target language/text = language/text being translated into While writing sufficiently well in your target language is important to ensure both that the finished product is a smooth read and that no errors occur because of you being misinterpreted by your editor or audience, it’s all for nothing if you didn’t interpret your source correctly in the first place. Reading a source text without making errors can be surprisingly difficult even with a decent grasp of both your source and target language. Certainly most fan translators, and more professional translators than I’d like, are lacking in at least one of those two areas: personally, I am objectively significantly worse at Japanese than the average native Japanese high schooler¹. There are more ways than one to avoid mistranslations, and often you can compensate for lacking in skill by being more cautious while reading the source text. Personally, I like to focus on two basic principles: always trying to detect possible gaps in your knowledge, and always considering whether your translation actually makes sense. Does It Make Sense? Bar things that are written specifically to evoke surrealism, writers usually try to avoid things that obviously make no sense. This is a pretty general principle and editors and proofreaders can both use it even if the translator does not, so it’s always a bit strange when I see some weird-ass obviously illogical mistranslation pop up. Theoretically QA/proofreading is extra powerful in this regard for games, as they will usually play the game as they work, so they can spot backgrounds or character movements contradicting the text too. For a subtle example of this, have something from a translation I love to hate on, Seabed: Now when I saw this ingame it made no sense at all. Why would it be darker after you turned on the light? Part of this is probably just questionable doujinge graphical accuracy (and maybe needing the emphasize the light / mimicking how it would actually look as your eyes adjusted), but I would still make a note on this line were I QAing this². Now the Steam release of Seabed happens to let you switch to Japanese… 壁のスイッチを押して、ナツメ球だけをつける。 I flipped the switch on the wall, turning on just the nightlight (ナツメ球）. Well, that makes a lot more sense. The second background was probably going for an adjustment effect where everything but the light looked darker, but it wasn’t showing a bright light. Well, that or background 1 was a sort of generic movie-darkness-but-not-really kind of deal. The point is, we have a solution to the puzzle. If your translation is contradicted by other parts of the game, whether it be the situation the characters are in, the lines before it or after (painfully common), or something else, you should look at those line extra damn hard. Writers do sometimes make mistakes, but it’s probably you. If you know someone with higher Japanese ability that can help check your translation of the line, ask them (make sure to give sufficient context if at all possible. I can’t believe how many people seem constitutionally unable to do this, though the worst offenders are learners rather than translators). Until the line makes sense or you’re confident it’s not supposed to, I recommend leaving the line/section blank or at least leaving a strongly worded note to come back to it later. Always Be Suspicious When I was still a high school kid, a freelance literary translator did a presentation at our school³. One thing she said really stuck with me: the principle of always keeping a careful eye out for anything that might not mean what you think it means. The example she used was of a translator that had managed to get toy shaped like a dog from a lady walking her toy poodle, a small poodle breed, in English — leading to a rather surreal mental image⁴. I suspect this line wasn’t very important, but that’s not always going to be the case, and this kind of mistake is always an embarrassment. One key skill to avoid that embarrassment is to grow an intuitive sense of what you don’t actually know — if you’ve hung out in some environments, you might actually already have gotten a slice of this with your English, or another language you know well. For example, did you know that strictly speaking bombastic is only to be used for things that are flashy but have little substance? I myself find myself googling words I only sort of know sometimes (…usually after unwisely pressing the enter key in some chat. At least I edit myself quick!). It doesn’t always go well. Ask me about the time I subtly misused reticent sometime… or don’t, actually. A soul can only take so much. Either way, that same nagging feeling — that maybe you don’t actually know this — can be a valuable ally to maintain the proper level of suspicion when translating. You’re looking for when the structure isn’t quite like what you’ve seen before, or when you’re thinking you can figure out the meaning of something from its parts — look up とてもじゃないが for a real mindfuck of a phrase. And as above, you’re also looking for things that don’t make sense. Always be suspicious of things that don’t make sense Showing the interlinked nature of all your guards against mistranslation, the earlier example with the nightlight might also have been prevented by being suspicious. If it was a translation-side error, going deeper than a cursory google images search might have helped get it right — looking at the page, you’d think to yourself: do I really know this is just a normal lightbulb? Looking at ナツメ fruits they look kind of red, too. I’d better look further… More examples I was going to review Seabed for Fuwanovel, which is part of the reason why I took a lot of screens going through it. It fell through because I simply could not complete it: my examination had turned me hypercritical and practically every line bothered me — mostly for clumsy flow rather than translation oddities, though there were more of those too. But hey, I got some pictures for this post for all the trouble. Anyway, have another example: Okay, so this doesn’t make sense. How are you seeing things in pitch black darkness? Let’s look at the Japanese: すんなりと入国を済ませて空港を出ると見通しの悪い夜ではあったが、コンクリの壁の落書きや広めの道路、湿った空気で異国だと直ぐに分かる。 見通しの悪い isn’t pitch black, it’s just the dark of the night making it hard to see. Now it makes sense that you can see the graffiti again, nice. It’s possible this was some kind of botched adaptation due to the background being solid black, but I don’t buy it. For my last example, lets use this line from 新説魔法少女 (Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo), an SRPG/VN hybrid with an ensemble cast of Japanese students, mostly in middle school. Moka is a first-year high school student who used to be in the swimming club last year. Before she graduated she was in the same club as Nagato, who is being discussed here due to her habit of not showing up for things (she still gets good results academically, and is also very strong athletically). 悪化してたか…… 試験だとか総体だとか 大事な時にサボる癖は治したほうがいいよ。 Huh, I guess it’s gotten worse… She should really fix her habit of skipping important events like tests and… 総体? I was actually just reading this right now, and at first it didn’t make sense, or at least sounded extremely strained, with any of the definitions of 総体 in edict⁵. So I checked kenkyuusha (shin waei daijiten) and a J-J dictionary and they still had nothing illuminating. Now I was starting to think it could be some of my more unlikely interpretations. I checked out そうたい without the kanji to see if it might be using the wrong kanji; 相対 seemed more plausible in the sentence, but I was still not feeling it; my Japanese ability was telling me it wouldn’t look like that grammatically and the interpretation felt strained. My intuition told me that 総体 would be an event somewhat similar to a 試験, maybe sports related given who the speaker was. So I googled 総体 and the second result is a Japanese Wikipedia disambiguation page. 全国高等学校総合体育大会の略称の一つ。高校総体、インターハイ、インハイも同義。 An abbreviation of the Interscholastic Athletic Meet. Synonymous with [various katakana words on the theme of “inter-high”].Well, that confirms my suspicions. It’s some kind of sporting event. This definiton actually specifically mentions high school events, but there’s nothing saying you can’t have them in middle school. This interpretation makes sense; a swimming club member would want gifted other club members to be at their competitions. Even if I didn’t use that principle, suspicion could also have saved me and made me actually google the word. But Japanese knowledge also helped me: Japanese often shortens longer terms into a word using some of the term’s kanji; for example 自動販売機 becomes the probably more familiar 自販機, and I knew to suspect this. In the end, the more Japanese you know, the less errors you’ll catch with these methods… but remember, kids: a totally radical book once said that pride comes before a fall. It had a point⁶. To tie this up, I think my soul has recovered from the baring some time ago, so let me tell you of another English-related fuckup: for the longest time I used to think “craven” was related to “craving”, and none of the times I’d read it had disabused me of this notion. I then saw it used in the Tokyo Babel translation in a way that was clearly incompatible with craving anything, so I looked it up… and was enlightened. It was a sad moment, because at the back of my mind I knew I’d misread it like 10 times by now. With that said, I kinda blame the English language for this one. That, and not having dictionary lookup just by hovering over the word. Man, the browser addons we have these days are pretty dang good... Footnotes ¹ The JLPT N1, well known for not being particularly indicative of ability but seen as a decent anchoring point nevertheless, is apparently supposed to be easily passable to any student that has finished Japanese high school. I originally wrote most of this essay in ~2017, when I didn’t think I would pass it — I now think I have a decent chance, with pass/fail mostly down to listening ability (not very relevant for text translation) and if a lot of media-obscure grammar points I don’t know happen to show up. I’m still much worse than a Japanese high schooler, though — you’ll have to believe me on this one. ² It’s hard to know where exactly this went wrong, and it’s possible only QA could have saved it from what could be both a reasonable editing decision or a translation oversight. Maybe the translator used google images and saw the bulbs looked more or less like normal bulbs and just went with that; ナツメ球 is in edict, but edict is unreliable and a professional translator might understandably avoid it (I wouldn’t – it has better coverage on a lot of random more contemporary/obscure stuff, though I if I were truly high effort I would probably get access to more updated online daijirin/shinwaei dictionaries). ³ Among other language pairs she was a JP->SE translator I believe, but I can’t remember if she did it firsthand or second. I also remember the title of one book she worked on, Shine, a localized title she didn’t pick or particularly like and which seems to be entirely impossible for me to find anywhere. I also don’t know if she was entirely a literary tl, it’s not like those get paid a lot, though I guess probably more than VN translators (let it be known that the muffled crying of our industry professionals can be heard in the background of this sentence). ⁴ It’s possible she was actually just holding it or something and I’m misremembering, but this way the example has more of the dimensions I want to discuss in this post. ⁵ At the time, Translation Aggregator with JParser and mecab was my first-line lookup choice. These days I have to look things up infrequently enough that a browser addon that has shinmeikai and shin eiwa daijiten 5th ed EPWING dictionary lookup in addition to JMdict (basically fancy non-boomer edict) serves my needs better. Those did not help me here, though. ⁶ In keeping with the principles of this post, I ended up checking out the origin of the proverb. The passage used to read “a totally radical guy once said…,” since I was assuming it had been directly said by Jesus (also, it was funnier that way). At least it really was from the Bible! Though the fall implied is supposed to be “calamitous”, apparently, so maybe we’re using it a bit lightly here. Then again, a bad enough mistranslation really could cause a disaster… though if you’re translating the nuke launch protocol, I really hope to whatever deity will still give me the time of day that you actually know what you’re doing. The rest of you, feel free to muddle along doing your best like us other mortals. View the full article

Ok well if you've tried everything I said in thread I can't think of anything else. rip

you can't really most of the time (people don't usually publish hashes for their vn installs...), better to just redownload and see if problem fixed