[Shit I helped translate added]

...there's that thing I helped you with a year ago but which you never released because you were too lazy to make a patch.

[Biman1 tl is shit confirmed]

Bro, that's not even a double space, it's just dot-space-I on a monospace font. lrn2read

[Grisaia Phantom Trigger Vol 5]

Quote

I went ahead and played Phantom Trigger vol 5

Quote

in Japanese

But nah, seriously, I'm glad you at least played it. For me, I find the games are about the right length; I'm usually a little worn out by the time I finish a full-length game, so these shorter installments are actually a breath of fresh air. Longer games tend to also have longer individual scenes, rather than just more scenes, and drawn-out SoL scenes and H scenes especially usually feel like a slog to me.

You're definitely right that the games have a clear formula, but I liked that this one broke from the mold in the second half by featuring a flashback with a lot more character history for Murasaki and her sister, rather than a "mission" showing off the featured heroine and her newly-introduced sidekick.

if your primary concern is $ per length, they objectively are pricey, and though I think that's an absolutely terrible metric (if it was, I'd be exclusively reading free or dirt-cheap books on my kindle), I do agree they still feel pricey for what they are. The bundled deals are a much better offer; I think the first four together are around the length of a normal, medium-length VN, and at $35 that's not bad. But the $15 per individual installment price tag is steep.

Incidentally, your "hour and a half" seems kinda skewed; I know you take pride in your reading speed and all, but it makes throwing out numbers like that deceptive for other people. I'm pretty sure it took me over four hours to read each installment in this series.

[Phantom Trigger vol. 5 is out!]

14 hours ago, Kenshin_sama said:

Is that why you left it out of your title?

Why yes, yes it is

[How good should your translation be before editing?]

On 2/1/2018 at 4:41 AM, Narcosis said:

at least two TLC runs through the entire script

You're much better off just getting someone who knows what they're doing translating it in the first place. Translation checking is a luxury some localization projects have, but at least in fan translations, it's largely there to compensate for the fact that most of the people working in fan translations just aren't very good translators. 99% of the time, if they were passable at translating, they'd get out of fan translation and translate for a living.

On 2/1/2018 at 4:41 AM, Narcosis said:

Editors should never fix the translator's mistakes. Their job is to turn the translator's garble into a Shakespeare's level of prose.

If the translation is best described as garble, no editor can save it short of going to check every translated line and effectively redoing the work. I think what you're saying here is predicated on a mistaken assumption people often make when talking about localization: that there's some sort pidgin language between Japanese and English (let's call it Fantranslationese). Bizarrely, some people not only believe in the existence of Fantranslationese, but they have even convinced themselves that they prefer to read Fantranslationese over English. But make no mistake: Fantranslationese is not a language, and it does not communicate anything like what the original Japanese did and what a decent English translation would. Fantranslationese is a pale shadow of a language, and an editor can only do so much to fix a "translation" attempting to use it short of retranslating the work because the editor otherwise doesn't actually get an experience like reading the original. Relying on editors to inject flair into a Fantranslationese script means you lost all the flair that was in the original. You're certainly not there yet, but you're well on your way to writing fanfiction instead of a translation, if you go this route.

Editors should be polishing a translation, smoothing out rough edges and ensuring consistency. They absolutely should be fixing the translator's mistakes, always with the aid of the translator, because the editor sees the work differently and therefore is going to rarely find translation mistakes due to their different view. This is a given especially because of how ambiguous and context-dependent Japanese is.

On 2/1/2018 at 4:41 AM, Narcosis said:

Likewise, it's not the translator's job to instantly turn their translations into coherent and readable english prose.

I never want to work on any project with a translator who believes this.

[How good should your translation be before editing?]

*simpler

[Reading Ginharu VERY Slowly #5]

Keep fighting the good fight, Flutterz, one day at a month.

[Eep Opp Ork Ah Ah (Editing Onomatopoeia in VNs)]

57 minutes ago, RedK said:

>content-light ad content-heavy

Is this a typo or done in purpose?

Has to be a typo. Refer to (this one obviously on purpose):

 

[I Should Thank Fuwanovel]

Super duper congratulations on your release! Does it feel awesome? I bet it feels awesome.

[Parallelize And Conquer]

2 hours ago, Zakamutt said:

As a counterpoint to your part on parallel structures, the first example smells a lot like an unrefined rhetorical figure: the tricolon - the easiest example of those might be "I came, I saw, I conquered." In the words of Mark Forsyth in The Elements of Eloquence: "Tricolons sound great if the third thing is longer." I kinda feel like you're either riding a bit hard on the parallel structure part, or not explaining it in enough depth - here's a rewrite that plays with the rhythm of it in a different fashion:

She's got good grades, great looks, and she's very popular among the students.

I kinda cheated with the italics changing the meaning, not to mention removing "all" which might be significant as well, but hey I'm trying to prove a point not be useful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Point is, I make sure to stress very to (imperfectly, sadly) mimic the initial stress structure of each third of the sentence.

...With that said, rhetorical figures are often employed to make things memorable or stand out, which is not necessarily your aim at all times.

I read that book, too, actually, and I firmly agree with your restatement of his point regarding the tricorn: it's a great figure, and it's got a lot of extra magic when you really send the line home on that third element. The point about parallel structure goes more towards avoiding using different parts of speech, and it's actually more commonly a problem with simple pairs of things (like in my second example) than it is with longer lists; I just happened to find that really obvious example of busted parallel structure with three things when I was looking over the notes that led me to writing this in the first place.

Edit: Also, for some reason I didn't read your whole post before responding. The last line is a very good point as well: there are a lot of lines in scripts that really should just be straight and to the point. If your script threw around a hefty figure of rhetoric on every line, it'd start sounding ridiculous before you were even a few minutes in. But they're great to have around when you want to call attention to a line.

[The relativity of inconvenience]

I kind of see where you're coming from with the "annoying adverts and intrusive programs" in Windows versions released within in the last seven years, but I also kind of don't since I'm pretty sure literally all of what you're talking about can be turned off, and since most of the data is anonymized and harmless anyway. I run Windows 10 on all my computers; I turn the data collection stuff off. If you're paranoid and believe that turning it off doesn't actually mean they stop collecting data, well, I can't really argue against conspiracy theories, but you can rest assured that Google is probably collecting 100x the amount of data off your web searches and that they're not even pretending to offer you a way out of that, regardless of what version of Windows you're running.

I also kind of don't get the anti-touchscreen rant. Tablets are nice, man; try playing a VN on one sometime. I hardly play any VNs on my desktop since I got a good tablet. That's not to say I don't prefer a console or a PC for playing something requiring more interaction, like an RPG or an FPS, but there are plenty of games that play great on touchscreens, and it's honestly really nice to be able to curl up on my sofa or my favorite armchair with a VN, rather than sitting at my desk. And if you want to see what great games you can have on a touchscreen, go give Auditorium a try sometime.

I'm not quite as old as you are, but I'm pretty close. I honestly tend to think of myself as being kind of a Luddite at times, as far as technology is concerned, at least compared to the people I work with (I'm a software engineer, so, it's a relative thing). But I promise, when it comes to technology from the last seven years or so, it's really not all bad.

[Permit Me a Rant on the Term "Overrated"]

I'm confused: if it's okay to say something is "underrated' with the intended meaning that not enough people appreciate it for the quality one perceives it to have (that part about appreciating and quality are inseparable from the definition of "underrated," BTW; if you were trying to drop that part of the definition, then I think you're simply incorrectly redefining the word to "not well-known," which in practice isn't what people actually mean when they use it), why is it not okay to call something else "overrated" with the intended meaning that too many people appreciate it for the quality one perceives it to have?

I'm not saying the word "overrated" isn't overused (which it certainly is) or incorrectly used (which it probably also is); I'm just saying that the statement "Sword Art Online is overrated" is a perfectly rational thing for me to say. Moreover, to be clear, I agree with you that I'm expressing an opinion when I do that; it's not some factual statement. Actually trying to argue over whether or not something is "overrated" would be pretty silly. But having a discussion wherein various people express whether they think something is overrated doesn't really seem fundamentally problematic to me (if arguably a little uninteresting, unless there's further elaboration on why people perceive it that way, and also perhaps arguably somewhat contradictory, since if everybody thought something was overrated, it would seem that, by definition, at least some of them were demonstrably factually wrong).

[Mr. Poltroon's Lack of Vocabulary #3]

14 hours ago, Zakamutt said:

The main character of Midsomer Murders actually uses "motes and beams, sir, motes and beams" at one point. I've sprung this on native English speakers and had them not comprehend, but I actually got the bible quote soon as I heard it. The Swedish translation I was taught is very similar to the English proverb, though funnily enough, it used the word for the "big wooden object" kind of beam. I wonder if it was intentional, or a mistranslation...

Interesting. Didn't have a clue what you were talking about, but looked it up and am familiar with the parable. That said, I'm not much of a bible person — until I looked it up, I couldn't even remember where "through a glass darkly" came from when I encountered it in the last year.

[Mr. Poltroon's Lack of Vocabulary #3]

I'm actually surprised that neither of you knew that meaning of "stiff", but I was raised on a strict diet of American television and whatever books I could get my hands on, so maybe that's really not all that well-known... Don't know if I learned that from Get Smart or from Dashiell Hammett, but if I were ever writing a detective show or something, that word would come to mind immediately at the right times.

[Mr. Poltroon's Lack of Vocabulary #3]

In fairness, I did have to look up nugatory. I've certainly heard it before, but couldn't remember it without any context. The only other stumper this time was that usage of "rum," which is apparently British, old-fashioned, informal speech. Not shedding any tears over not knowing that one.

"Abattoir" is only a good word when you're writing a high fantasy novel and you want to make your carnage-covered battlefield sound fancy, in my experience, but I guess I don't read a lot of horror fiction, which is probably another good place for it to show up.

"Sultry" and "suss" are great words; use them all the time!

[A Short And Sweet Style Guide For VN Editing]

I haven't forgotten you either, @Mr Poltroon, I've just been ignoring you since you asked about stuff that was harder to answer.

On 3/18/2017 at 2:35 PM, Mr Poltroon said:

You are one who finds the individual line especially important and is easily jarred. I can't say I see what you mean when you claim that the inclusion of such effects is jarring or that they interrupt the 'flow'.

And so I wonder, what is flow?
To me, flow is weather or not I can uninterruptedly read through many lines without anything that makes me pause to attempt to comprehend something that should be easily comprehensible. Compare deep, philosophical lines or lines with many meanings to them, where pausing is intended, with lines where the 'that' pronoun is used so many times I have no idea who's referring to what and what that 'what' it is.
Hyperbole aside, the small -- mere milliseconds even -- pauses that arise from certain somewhat ambiguous or oddly structured sentences are what I consider "interrupting the flow", and I must admit: To me, those asterisked sound effects do none of that to my person. I'd bet the odd beginning of the previous sentence/'paragraph' might've made you pause (or just about most lines written by me). That's breaking the flow, the way I see it. Not spotting a few asterisked sound effects.

So I can't say I'm convinced. I think asterisked sound effects can be used for good, especially in more comedic situations; Like a *drowns* amongst a line or a line full of *sob sob*s. Things like Stare and Sob without asterisks make sense when it's something the character is actually pronouncing. When it's a sound they make, not pronounce, I think writing it down without asterisks is a poor solution. And I still don't know what to put when writing a cough down.

So the solution is removing them entirely? Not always ideal, especially when there's no accompanying narration to indicate that a sound was made and/or heard. Assuming you're like me and you can't write a cough down, do you just remove them all?
Oh crap, I accidentally wrote the character's illness out of the translation. Too bad.

Outside of dialogue it's a free for all. Feel free to rewrite the entire thing if it makes you happier.

For starters, I totally agree with you that asterisked sound effects are less of an interruption than singularly complex sentence structure. Forcing the reader to go back and re-read a sentence just to try to understand what the blazes is going on when all they want is to move on to the next element in the plot is anathema to the goal of most VNs, which is, generally, to offer the straightforward entertainment of a quick jaunt through a story world, rather than the joy of ruminating on a particularly fibrous utterance.

However, *clears his throat*, I would like to point you at the hill you're about to go sliding down. It is, if I do say so myself, a slippery slope *wink*. My own personal experience with trying to use this technique was that use instantly turned to abuse *sigh*. Before too long, the dialogue was filled with all sorts of things that had no business being there; they weren't sounds being made by a speaker at all, but rather related actions which, if they needed to be communicated, belonged more properly in a narration line, and if none was available, why then the dialogue itself would have to carry the meaning *shakes his head*. It simply doesn't make sense for characters to be communicating quite so much in what is, ultimately, a poor excuse for narration *nod*.

In a nutshell, I found that the technique simply did my script more harm than it did my script good. The same is true of the use of italics in scripts I've read: I have seen them used only once that I can recall, in an official translation, and while once or twice they were helpful, much more often they were completely unneeded and simply served to call attention to themselves and look out of place. When a tool causes you more harm than it does you good, it's better to simply force yourself to throw it out and work under tighter constraints. Art has always and will always flourish under constraints, and I personally have not found it particularly onerous to go without this one tool; on the contrary, I've relished the change.

On 3/18/2017 at 2:35 PM, Mr Poltroon said:

On the topic of colons (which is not the topic we were on, but the one I just forced us to be on), I must ask: Is the way I've used them in this post correct? (here's me sneakily trying to get you to do the work for me lolevil)

Aside from their usage to introduce lists of things, you can also use a colon in place of a semi-colon when the half of a sentence after the colon is more like an illumination/rephrasing of some part of the first half, rather than a separate, related, independent clause. It's kind of an advanced technique, I guess? I don't mention it in the guide both because I don't have a solid handle on the rule myself and because I think it's not really a necessary thing to do (there are plenty of other options available), but I certainly do use colons this way myself from time to time without much thought. Your usage looks perfectly cromulent to me.

On 3/18/2017 at 2:35 PM, Mr Poltroon said:

(As an aside, would "Put the seatbelt on yourself" give you pause? I actually stopped to think whether a line like this meant that one should should put the seatbelt by themselves, or that they should put it on their person -- a small redundancy, the sort of thing that pops up in daily speech.)

(I would probably always assume the former interpretation, not the latter, without some strong contextual evidence otherwise, and I would probably only find it not to be a somewhat odd utterance when coming on the heels of a request for help putting on a seatbelt.)

[Use the Oxford comma in speech, too.]

I once witnessed a friend being asked if he wanted "soup or salad" request the "super salad, that sounds amazing!"

[Mr. Poltroon's Lack of Vocabulary #2]

Just like last time for half of these my reaction is, "Really, you didn't know that?" and for the other half my reaction is, "What the hell does that mean?"

That said, so far, every time I look up a word in the second category, I find out it's non-American slang, and then I don't feel so bad.

[A Short And Sweet Style Guide For VN Editing]

@Zakamutt thanks, this is great! Addressed your comments and uploaded a new version of the guide. Here's some line-by-line responses as well:

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

In my experience, there's an exception for the hyphenization-of-honorifics rule when the original Japanese would add a glottal stop. When this happens, it's usually represented using consonant doubling. For a non-translated but salient example, the weeb visual novel Katawa Shoujo uses both "Shicchan"* and "Hicchan" for Shizune and Hisao respectively. For something the old guard will get, look at poor Sacchin in Tsukihime. The same applies to stuff like "Takkun".

*a Hepburn hardliner may argue that this should be "Shitchan", but fuck them, I only write "Matcha" for green tea because normies use that spelling).

Good point, I completely missed this pattern. That said, I haven't actually formed a strong opinion about what's the right thing to do with these, assuming I'm following the rest of the guidelines in the style guide; my inclination is to go the same direction you say. It does feel like it goes against the grain of the "drop honorifics" theme, but this casual form with the glottal stop feels more like a nickname than like proper (and thus somewhat less meaningful) usage of an honorific.

Majo Koi actually has exactly one route where, as a running joke, everybody starts calling Takumi "Takkun" (my suspicion: possibly a different writer from the rest of the VN, and the head writer just shrugged it off and rolled with it). Now, honorifics are actually still in the current Majo Koi script, but I'm likely to drop them soon (like... probably today or tomorrow I'll go through the whole script and rewrite them away). When I do that sweep, I expect Takumi will retain that same ridiculous-sounding pseudo-nickname, Takkun.

I've updated the guide to mention this form and that suggestion, but I'm intentionally leaving out the term "glottal stop" from it, since I don't think most people have studied enough phonology to look at that phrase and react with anything but "Wot?"

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

You might want to either linebreak the document manually or use something else than github or, idk, change some setting; lines are currently not automatically word wrapped and reading the text online is thus a pain. I had to copy it to notepad++ to read it personally.

It's now available in markdown format and the blog link has been updated (and I actually deleted the .txt file). Should be much more readable now; apologies for my laziness in not doing so sooner. I actually had had people complain to me about the formatting before, but it wasn't on github so it wasn't quite as bad back then, so I just ignored them... But yeah, the display on github was pretty bad.

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

The "other sometimes untranslated terms" heading is confusing when it comes to terminology. On first reading, it seemed to me that you were placing "senpai, sensei, onee-san" in the "not honorifics" bucket, especially since you end with "bento" which actually isn't one. On second reading I realized that you may not have meant this, but it's a mental stretch. I think this section needs to be rewritten.

I think the correct heuristic, if you keep any Japanese words, is probability of comprehension. The most common honorifics that people may know about is -san, -kun, -chan, and -sama. -tan, maybe. Knowing about "nii-san" and "nee-san" comes next and is somewhat more dubious, and those terms arguably carry more important information that you may be denying uncomprehending viewers if they are not clued in by other details. "senpai" and "sensei" are slightly further out, but not much. All in all I agree with the position of removing honorifics, however.

I did indeed intend to say senpai, sensei, onee-san, etc., are not honorifics (though obviously the "-san" there is). I think I was going into this with the mindset that "English doesn't have honorifics," but of course I was just plain wrong there; it does. They're just less ubiquitous than the Japanese ones. I've brushed up this section a fair bit, and generally went along the same lines of what you have here.

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

This ideological statement needs statistical backing. From what I understand the people you consulted with have been editors, not readers, and honestly preferring to reverse name order is status signalling by people who consider themselves more "learned". For what it's worth, back when I was a nascent VN reader I was bothered by the reversed name order used for the localization of Ever17.

Since  what you're really trying to do is establish standards, removing the ideological statement and letting the rest remain is also fine.

I modified this section a bit to explain the backing reasoning for this opinion: in a nutshell, GivenName FamilyName is the natural order in English, so I honestly expect people to just find the alternative confusing. What it comes down to is, at this point, even if I was given a blanket guarantee that every single Japanese translation I saw from here on out was going to have names in FamilyName GivenName order, I'd still have to think hard about it due to the accumulated weight of experience reading stuff in English.

That said, like I mentioned in the section, this is one where I have a less strong opinion; I mostly called it out just to make sure it was mentioned and that I could drive home the importance of consistency in it, more so than to lay out a single answer.

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

I disagree with your interpretation of "Uuu" -> "Aww"; the mapping is simply too imprecise and will cause conflicts when lazy people decide to apply the letter of your guideline. For example, part of one line in the wondrously transliterated Koirizo fan translation is rendered as "Uuu, gusu" in its English translation. Gusu is a sob, Uuu is a sound of consternation and unhappiness in this case. Writing this as "Aww, sniff" would not accurately portray the tone the VA used here. I might be mistaken about how Americans interpret "Aww", however - I see it as 1. dejection 2. disappointment and 3. you just saw a kitten do something cute.

Good point! I should call out that my list here is not intended to be prescriptive. "Uuu" is often more of a slightly disgusted "Ugh," for instance, and probably some other things as well. I've updated the section to drive home that these are examples and not a blanket gospel answer, and also to mention the "ugh" translation of "Uuu."

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

Despite what I said about ideology above, I would like some kind of justification for this, hedged unless you have good reasons not to. Reading the comment thread you have done so in the thread, and considering that you made personal remarks further on in the document, you may want to add it for this.

Done

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

You could make some fairly strong demographic arguments as to why this is a good idea if you wanted to. I guess you might have left it out for a reason, though.

I always feel a bit like I'm making an argumentum ad baculum when I say "you should use American English because there are more of us," and I don't think there's really any better rationale than that one. So, while I do religiously hold to this style myself and get annoyed when anybody else doesn't (looking at you, Chrono Clock), I don't think I really have a leg to stand on, so I prefer to leave it as a somewhat petulant statement of personal preference. It's my way of saying, "You can do something else if you really want, but personally, it'll make me sad."

[A Short And Sweet Style Guide For VN Editing]

Thanks, @Fiddle, for all the feedback. Addressed it all and updated the document. Still need to look through Zaka's feedback... Line-by-line comments on Fiddle's comments.

7 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

I suggest you use another example instead of the second one, considering that "I'm" is capitalized regardless of whether it begins a sentence.

Insanely enough, I actually noticed my previous example had exactly the same problem today before I posted this, and so I rewrote it... but apparently I rewrote it to another sentence with exactly the same problem. FML. Fixed.

9 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

Typo.

I edited this myself today and fixed up all the little problems I saw, but of course I couldn't stop myself from rewriting some sections entirely, so naturally I introduced more typos. Like, say, this one. FML. Fixed.

10 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

In American English, commas and periods always go inside quotation marks (even when there's a quotation within a quotation). Meanwhile, everything else (exclamation points, question marks, semicolons, colons) can go outside of the quotation marks as needed. In contrast to what you say ("I diverge from typical style guides and recommend you move the punctuation outside the inner quotation"), your examples are in conformity with American style guides.

You may know this and not have said it, but the above applies only when the quotation is an independent clause. For example, each of the following is correct:

• He said to me, "Give back the cat."
• He told me to "give back the cat."

Each of the following is incorrect:

• He said to me "Give back the cat."
• He told me to, "give back the cat."

I can offer segments of the Chicago Manual of Style for the things above, because it appears that they don't want to make it freely available online.

Your guidance is very much appreciated, thank you! I've fixed up this section with all these recommendations.

10 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

Lastly, TELL EVERYONE TO USE THE OXFORD COMMA, YOU HEATHEN.

I figured it went without saying, but sure, I've added a whole section devoted to the superiority of the serial comma, just for you. Plus there was a funny news story about it recently, so adding this section gives me a chance to share that.

[A Short And Sweet Style Guide For VN Editing]

1 minute ago, Darklord Rooke said:

I was about to say we should find some way to get this pinned, but then I saw this:

As an American, I strongly recommend you use American English.

And my opinion changed  

Not all opinions presented in the style guide are universally held. They are, however, all indisputably correct.

[A Short And Sweet Style Guide For VN Editing]

Regarding asterisked sound effects, I kind of used to think the same thing: what am I supposed to do with this weird sound anyway? So I used them. Then I looked back and the script was just littered with them. They were everywhere, and they really interrupted the flow of reading. So, I went through in one day and gutted them out of the script, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Since then, I came around to the conclusion in the guide, that it's best to just universally avoid the asterisk thing, and judging from the recent official localizations I've read, I'm not alone on that opinion. I only see them in fan TLs nowadays, and they're always jarring, especially in speech lines. Once you force yourself to avoid them, you find both that it's not really all that hard and that it massively pays off in terms of readability.

[One Weird Trick for Writing in Past Tense]

6 hours ago, Darklord Rooke said:

Also there's really no reason you HAVE to have present tense in a past tense story, except for dialogue (and for internal dialogue if writing in the third person.) The aside you mentioned can easily be written in past tense:

Last month I went to an amusement park with my girlfriend. I hadn’t slept the night before, so when we arrived I was already dead on my feet. We still managed to have a great time, though. They had great thrill rides, so we had a blast hopping from roller coaster to roller coaster, and we even hopped on some of the more cheesy rides like the merry-go-round and laughed our heads off about it. When night came we were so tired we both tumbled into bed and went right to sleep.

EDIT: I also completely agree with you, I don't like how some VN translations mix their tenses xD If it were possible to give your blog entry 2 likes, I would  

For sure, it's by no means hard to do, so I always write around the need for a present-tense aside like that because it brings a lot of fourth wall-breaking baggage along for the ride (unless it's intentional to break the fourth wall, in which case, an aside is exactly what I'm going to use). That said, it's a pretty natural thing to do when you're relating a story in person, so I wanted to drop it in there to use as a negative example of how the "trick" doesn't always work, and you may have to think a little further.

 

[Chrono Clock - English phrases I didn't understand]

Aside from the Larry reference, which I guessed to be a Three Stooges thing but couldn't be sure without context until I saw Decay's confirmation, and the "It's a fair cop!" which I guessed to be a strange use of the phrasal verb "to cop to" (http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/cop-to) but was wrong since apparently it's common British and Aussie slang (though the usage looks pretty similar to that phrasal verb; probably related?), everything in here is common English speech that you would pick up from watching English TV or movies, reading English novels, or speaking to native English speakers. Moreover, all of it is common American English, aside from the "barmy" and the aforementioned "it's a fair cop". It's kind of weird to me to see a localization into British English, TBH, but it's fine; I deal.

Localizations into English are written for people who speak English, so, while I think you're trying to cast the fact that you don't understand all this stuff as a negative of the localization, it's falling on deaf ears because, well, we speak English. I'm sorry you apparently don't speak it very well. If you want to enjoy stuff written in English, you should probably take an attitude that you should learn more of it, rather than that you should criticize the stuff you read for not dumbing down the content to what you already know.

Edit: Forgot the "mi amor", too. Not English, but it's not uncommon to borrow extremely well-known and easily comprehensible phrases like this from Romance languages when speaking in English, mon cheri.

[Readability And Eliminating Unintentional Ambiguity: That's Where It Starts]

While I certainly agree that character dialogue needs to communicate characterization, through diction, syntactical choices, or even using bad grammar, the top priority is always that their dialogue be readable (unless very intentionally unreadable, of course, which should be exceptional).

Here's a completely different example of optimizing for readability, and one which should be near and dear to the hearts of many eroge players: even when the heroine has her mouth full of little protag, the way she slurs her consonants is usually not faithfully recorded in the subtitles, because to do so renders it completely unreadable (I know; I've tried). If you try to actually write down what the dialogue you have would sound like with a large, cylindrical object in your mouth, even though the speech may be completely understandable, the written form of it will usually not be. This, I believe, is because writing is such a low-resolution record of spoken speech. When you're missing all the extra intonation and the assorted sounds made in this circumstance which simply aren't writable in the Roman alphabet, it's hard to try to mimic the actual spoken sounds without going so far off the written version that the brain can no longer recognize the word. That's why, in this instance, most of the time you should massively tone down the consonant slurring, relative to the voice over, in the written text.

That sounds pretty unrelated, but it's still on this same theme of optimizing for readability. The most important thing isn't even if you agree with either of those examples at all, but rather that you understand and agree with the broader principle of which these are just two instances. Throughout most of most VNs, you should generally be optimizing for ease and speed of readability, where you can do so without sacrificing tone, characterization, etc.,