ittaku

I played Tonoko's route first of the three the first time I played the game.  Admittedly, the route is slower-paced than either Miyabi or Shino's routes, but it has its own charm.  On my second playthrough I found Shino's route to be the best of the three, a route that got tastier on the second playthrough.  Miyabi's is a good route no matter how many times you play it.  Playing Tonoko's route the second time was not as good as the first, but it was still a good experience.  
The route that I had the most trouble playing the second time was Yuuna's, because all the shocking revelations were already over with.  It's the kind of route that is godly the first time you play it, but has little to offer on a second playthrough, in my opinion. 

People should just read Miyabi's route already. Heck, I wasn't sure if I should do it considering my limited time, but now I decided, I'm gonna reread it with the English patch (that way I'll read faster). SHino's is fine too. Tonoko's, though, I honestly didn't like it much, but many loved it, so it's worth it too.

I agree with @Clephas. Shino's route is equally as good as the other other main school routes, and the reviewer has conspicuously left out details about Yuuna's route. To me, her is route is also excellent and stands out for being completely different quality to that of the rest of the branch school heroines, and even completely different tone to that of the rest of the game, with quite a dark story by comparison, but still has that uplifting resolution required of a nakige. Lumping it in with the other branch school heroines is ignoring another exceptional heroine route that is on the same quality as the main school ones. The branch school needs to be translated just for her route alone.

Haruuru's translation of the Main routes is long-since done.  I was mostly working with @ittaku in an advisory capacity (details, colloquialisms, other stuff that requires a ridiculously long background).  It is true, and we both agree, that the Main route is much, much better than the Branch route.  Not only are Tonoko, Shino, and Miyabi much better heroines, but everything from the protagonist's personality to how the heroines' emotions and characterizations are handled are so dramatically different in quality that there is no possible comparison.  The only real exception is that Yuuna's route has some good drama/story, probably more as a coincidence than anything else (Misaki and Sumika's routes were... basically somewhat above average charage fare at best).  
I don't quite agree with the reviewer in this case, as I always reviewed based on the Main path and ignored the Branch entirely, simply because my first experience of it was enough to put me off permanently.  The Main routes have some truly epic feels, great character interactions, and are the truest to the 'nature' of the school's purpose, which is confinement and segregation from the larger sister school's population and the general population in general.  This is ironic, since the Branch school girls are supposedly more of an 'embarrassment' to their powerful families, whereas the Main School heroines are supposedly only problem children after the fact.  
Perhaps the way the Branch school's writer screwed up the most was that he quite simply didn't manage to match two of the three heroines to the school's purpose.  Neither Misaki nor Sumika had any business being in the Branch school at all, considering that they were both capable and had personalities that were not necessarily 'embarrassing' to their families (in both cases, they are loved deeply and don't have any traumas or major issues that should have resulted in them ending up there).  
Yuuna's route stands out from the other two Branch routes... to a degree that you have to wonder if the same writer had anything to do with it.  It is also the most overtly morally distasteful of the paths (not in the teacher-student relations sense though), which is probably why it has such impact.  Yuuna's presence there also makes a great deal of sense once you've done her path, which is different from the two redheads.
Miyabi's path tends to get deified by fanboys, which I can understand.  Tsukasa's actions, the characters' reactions, and the feels are all so well coordinated that it is impossible not to cry numerous times throughout the path.  However, it needs to be said that both Tonoko and Shino's paths are of the same level of quality, if having someone different tracks (the last part of Shino's path had me rofling, though).

A couple of us have added some stars to offset that nonsense rating

Then they seriously misunderstood the point of the star system. Then again I don't think hardly anyone uses it...

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.,

Sorry, that's how people around me speak though... Not sure why writing needs to make people who speak sound like they're all writers. It's one of my big bugbears - that people complain about the spoken word by characters not being correct grammar or that it sounds horrible.

It's really weird, as it's almost like another language. Because I'm so used to seeing American spelling as well, I easily switch from one mode to the other. As you're likely not used to seeing regular English spelling, you wouldn't have been fluent in it so I can understand why it would be so hard for you. Yes, quite a few still needed to be corrected after your edits, but I've mostly automated that process with my own programming scripts since the bulk of my editors use American spelling.
For what it's worth, I was quite pleased that I was able to translate the explanation of the theory of relativity and am sorry it didn't flow to your liking But then, that's why I paid you all those peanuts to improve it.

It's really weird, as it's almost like another language. Because I'm so used to seeing American spelling as well, I easily switch from one mode to the other. As you're likely not used to seeing regular English spelling, you wouldn't have been fluent in it so I can understand why it would be so hard for you. Yes, quite a few still needed to be corrected after your edits, but I've mostly automated that process with my own programming scripts since the bulk of my editors use American spelling.
For what it's worth, I was quite pleased that I was able to translate the explanation of the theory of relativity and am sorry it didn't flow to your liking But then, that's why I paid you all those peanuts to improve it.

It's really weird, as it's almost like another language. Because I'm so used to seeing American spelling as well, I easily switch from one mode to the other. As you're likely not used to seeing regular English spelling, you wouldn't have been fluent in it so I can understand why it would be so hard for you. Yes, quite a few still needed to be corrected after your edits, but I've mostly automated that process with my own programming scripts since the bulk of my editors use American spelling.
For what it's worth, I was quite pleased that I was able to translate the explanation of the theory of relativity and am sorry it didn't flow to your liking But then, that's why I paid you all those peanuts to improve it.

I'm glad to see your enthusiasm for editing continue after cutting your teeth on my project. Just like translating, you will keep getting better with every editing task you do, and then you'll look back on your earlier works and be disappointed by what you did. In your case, it's clear how much you've been thinking about this based on your further research towards improving your editing and I'm glad to have had you as an editor. The community should welcome any competent volunteer and be even more grateful when they're as thoughtful as you're being about the process.

I'm glad to see your enthusiasm for editing continue after cutting your teeth on my project. Just like translating, you will keep getting better with every editing task you do, and then you'll look back on your earlier works and be disappointed by what you did. In your case, it's clear how much you've been thinking about this based on your further research towards improving your editing and I'm glad to have had you as an editor. The community should welcome any competent volunteer and be even more grateful when they're as thoughtful as you're being about the process.

I'm glad to see your enthusiasm for editing continue after cutting your teeth on my project. Just like translating, you will keep getting better with every editing task you do, and then you'll look back on your earlier works and be disappointed by what you did. In your case, it's clear how much you've been thinking about this based on your further research towards improving your editing and I'm glad to have had you as an editor. The community should welcome any competent volunteer and be even more grateful when they're as thoughtful as you're being about the process.

I see the inclusion of 「」 Japanese quotation marks as simply an extension of fan translation weabooism that thinks including as much Japanese in the translation as possible makes it somehow more authentic.

I see the inclusion of 「」 Japanese quotation marks as simply an extension of fan translation weabooism that thinks including as much Japanese in the translation as possible makes it somehow more authentic.

I married one so there's only 3 left. Where they may be, I don't know...

/me smiles
 
Nice article again. For the most part I usually translate onomatopoeia to their equivalents or explain them out, exactly as you've said... apart from H scenes. While your "translated" sounds are great for the H scene in that example, the problem I encounter is simply running out of equivalents. So I translate the obvious ones (slurp, suck, etc) and transliterate the rest. Good thing there are great editors out there like yourself to "fix" this problem

This is a great article. It is missing one vital discussion though IMO - having translated lots of H scenes now - and that is a discussion about what to do about onomatopoeia. H scenes contain obscene amounts of onomatopoeia. Japanese love their sound effects and they read and sound perfectly normal in their language, but in English they are, for the most part, downright childish and stupid. I tried to translate them to meaningful sound equivalents in English for a while and then gave up in disgust after running out of sounds we actually use in English. After that I just transliterated the sound effects and these days I'm wondering if all of them should just be dropped entirely and only the dialogue and text translated, leaving only ellipsis for the sound effect only lines.