Darbury

Everyone is younger than Rooke. Everyone.

As you get older, you'll find the dividing line between these things grows perilously thin.

Good question. And yeah, “senpai” is one of those gray areas where I’d end up judging each VN on its own merits. If the use of “senpai” isn’t a plot point, I’d probably drop it, opting to use deferential language in character dialogue instead.If the use of “senpai” is an essential plot point, I’d probably keep it in the script exclusive of the other honorifics. That is to say, in the world of our VN, there is a rule that younger students must refer to older students as “senpai.” Simple as that, and fairly intuitive. (Much more so than dumping the entire rats’ nest of Japanese honorifics on peoples' heads, at any rate.)If overall use of honorifics (or lack thereof) is an essential plot point, I’d retain all honorifics. Within reason, of course.

Was that her response to reading that sentence?

People prefer dolphins. #truth (I'd point you to our copious H-scenes in KoiRizo, but even MDZ admits he did a meh job translating those. So yeah, never mind...)

I vote geology. Sounds like you're already leaning that way and it's probably the more solid career choice of the two. Of course, I said the same thing to myself when I was in your shoes and decided to major in engineering. One year later, I was fleeing to the welcoming arms of Journalism and Literary Theory instead. So you can see how well that worked out.

Here are the three essential truths of dating life: The hot waitress is never into you. You might think she is, but she isn't.The hot best friend will never date you. Because she has horrible taste in guys, and will proceed to tell you about this at great length.The hot girl at yoga class is never single. Because she is hot. And she does yoga.

That's a very good point. Chuee brought up a similar scenario earlier in the comments. In situations like that, it all comes down to a few factors — e.g., how critical is the discussion in question to the plot, how skilled are the translator and editor, etc? Sometimes, the content might be so deeply embedded that it's impossible to find a workaround, which would be a good argument for keeping honorifics in that particular VN. Other times, it might just be a three-line throwway, like in Chuee's example, which could easily be recontextualized in English. I guess what it comes down to for me is avoiding absolutism. It MUST be this way, or it MUST be that way. No exceptions! Rubbish. There will be times when honorifics are clearly needed. And there will be times when honorifics are clearly not needed. And then there's this whole gray area in between that will probably require weighing a bunch of factors, including your own personal bias as a reader/editor/translator. All I suggest is that we weigh those factors mindfully, rather than taking a knee-jerk stance. Because they like good stories? See my earlier note about self-perpetuating cycles.

Only one? I usually forget at least a baker’s dozen. The same questions would apply. Is the information contained in these honorifics redundant? Is “chan” vs. “san” the only sign there’s a slight formality imbalance between these two? Or does one character consistently act more informally/intimately around the other? If yes, then the information contained in the honorifics might be redundant. If not, we ask ourselves if something so subtle is worth sacrificing some of the readability of our English prose. Culture-seekers will say yes; story-seekers will say no. And that’s my point — there’s no one clear answer. Only questions. I mean, let’s face it — translation is an inherently lossy process. Let’s look at another example, shamelessly swiped from this paper on Chinese translation: If we translate the sentence “早上好，表姐！”into “Good morning, my female-cousin-on-maternal-or-paternal-aunt’s-side-elder-than-myself”, Western readers would find it too absurd and ridiculous to accept, though the translation is exact in meaning. So, in the translating activity, we have to remove the exact kinship and only translate it into “Good morning, my cousin”. Data — in this case, pretty specific and detailed data — is lost in translation all the time for the sake of readability. It’s up to the translator and editor to decide where to draw the line of what’s acceptable compromise and what isn’t. And that decision isn’t always black or white. See my earlier note about self-perpetuating cycles.

While that makes sense on one level, it also becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: VNs are read mostly by otakus. As a result, we won't translate things that otakus already know.We didn't translate things that otakus already know. As a result, our VN tended to be read only by otakus. Or to use a more absurd example: Very few women come to our sports bar. As a result, we didn't bother to add a women's bathroom.We didn't bother to add a women's bathroom. As a result, very few women come to our sports bar.As someone who hopes to see VNs grow and flourish in the West, I prefer translations that keep the largest possible receptive audience for that title in mind. And you know what? Sometimes that's still otakus. But more often than not, it's much broader.

You’re a culture-seeker who would like VNs to be translated with other culture-seekers in mind. That’s perfectly okay. Wear your otaku team jacket with pride. Honorifics contain content. I think we can all agree on that. The question we then need to ask ourselves is: How much of that content is both relevant and non-redundant? If 99.9% of honorific use in a VN is exactly what one would expect of society — people being generally polite to one another, people being deferential to their superiors, people treating little kids like little kids, etc. — then it’s not adding content; it’s repeating and reinforcing it. Same goes for the .1% of exceptions where honorific use becomes important. Let’s say a low-level employee decides to mouth off to his boss and, as part of that, drops all honorifics. Is that omission the only thing showing us that the employee is being a jackass, or are there a dozen other tells signifying the same thing — e.g., has he just ripped off his tie, swept the contents of his desk on the floor, and called his boss a dumb jerkface? If so, then the honorifics are just reinforcing what we already know. To me, a story-seeker, if something in a translation ends up being both redundant and linguistically awkward, it’s a good candidate for the chopping block. Or I'll ask myself if there's a more natural way of capturing that same content in English. Perhaps most employees address the boss with a polite "Mr. Tanaka, sir..." But our employee marches right up and says, "Yo! Tanaka!"

You don't look a day over 3,000 posts. What's your secret?

Only all the damn time. I treat VNs same as I would any other game: first run is blind, remaining runs are done with a walkthrough for 100% content completion. OCD FTW. "Solve the mystery" type games are the sole exception — e.g., Banshee's Last Cry, etc. I play blind until I "solve" it, then do remaining runs with the walkthrough.

I just had an extra big breakfast, so I thought I'd pull up a chair and solve one of the most hotly debated issues facing the English-speaking VN community today. No, no need for thanks. Just name a stadium or sandwich after me at some point. Or both. Ready? Here we go. Honorifics or no honorifics? Should translated visual novels maintain the traditional Japanese cavalcade of name suffixes — san, kun, chan, sama, and so forth? Or should they adopt a more familiar Western approach, dropping honorifics entirely and/or replacing them with English titles — Mr., Mrs., Sir, etc. — only where situationally appropriate? San? Or sans san? I've thought long and hard on the matter and I think I've finally figured it out. Here's the answer you've all been waiting for. ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE? Haven't you been reading this blog? Did you really think a self-professed amateur VN editor would suddenly crack the code wide open and save the day? I’m quite literally an idiot. My wife will back me up on that one. And besides, this isn't some question with an obvious answer, like "Should I put ketchup on my steak?" (Answer: No. And if you do, you're an awful person who probably pushes elderly nuns in front of buses when you think no one's looking, then steals their mangled nun panties.) In fact, that question doesn't even have an answer, per se; it has a decision tree. Imagine your friend asks you, "Should I get a tattoo?" There are a lot of considerations to run through before you can give an answer. What kind of job do they have? Bankers and bartenders each have different leeway when it comes to full-sleeve tats. What's the context of their question? Is your friend asking you this over coffee? Or looking up at you from a vomit-filled toilet bowl in a way off-Strip Vegas casino? And what's the tattoo of? If it's Tweety Bird, then it's off to prison with them, along with all the steak-on-ketchup panty sniffers. Same for honorifics. There's no one-size-fits-all answer — only questions and considerations. And the first big branch of that decision tree: Who are your readers and why do they read VNs? The Battle Lines Are Drawn By and large, we can break VN readers down into two camps: story-seekers and culture-seekers. It’s an overgeneralization, of course — there’s some drift and overlap between these two groups — but it will give us a useful starting point for our discussion. Story-seekers tend to read visual novels for the plot, for the romance, for the giant mechs, for the faps, and for THE FEELS, MAN, THE FEELS. The fact that these stories are Japanese in origin is kinda cool, but secondary to the overall experience. As a group, they value readability over verisimilitude. They don’t get their stolen nun panties in a bunch because Ixrec’s translation of Rewrite doesn’t capture every last nuance of the Japanese, or even gets a few lines wrong at times. They just sit back and enjoy the ride. And for them, honorifics are often just weeaboo speedbumps that interfere with said ride. Culture-seekers, on the other hand, tend to read VNs not only for the story, but to indulge their passion for Japanese culture. They might speak Japanese, or they might be in the process of learning to do so. Visual novels are often a means to an end: they read VNs in part to practice their Japanese. (And they practice Japanese to read VNs. Loopity-loopity-loop.) Culture-seekers enjoy the inherent Japanese-ness of the medium — seeing the subtle social interplay of honorifics at work, for example — so for them, stripping away “san” to please some Naruto-watching noobs is like throwing away part of the story. As a translator or editor, you will inevitably piss off one of these camps. Sorry, that’s just how it is. You’re dealing with two groups of people who have inherently different motivations for reading the same work. And you can only translate/edit one way. Sucks, right? To extend my steak metaphor, it’s like owning a restaurant that, for logistical reasons, can only cook its steaks to one temperature — rare or well-done. And it’s up to you to pick which. If you go with rare, all the well-done lovers will give your little bistro one-star reviews on Yelp. And if you choose well-done, the folks who like their steaks blue and bloody will come at you with knives drawn. In a way, this becomes sort of liberating. No matter what you do, you will annoy a good chunk of your audience. This is fait accompli. So you’re now free to do what you actually think is right for the work, knowing it won’t really affect the outcome much. Of course, you’re also probably in one of those two camps yourself. (I know I am.) As such, you probably have an clear bias toward a particular approach — san or sans san. And you know what? That’s fine. Recognize your bias. Embrace it. Make friends with the fact that you prefer to translate/edit one way or the other. Then remember the advice I gave a few blog entries back: You are not your audience. Your close friends are not your audience. The message boards you follow are not your audience. Your audience is your audience; its needs may differ from yours. And the novel is the novel; its needs may also differ from yours. So here’s what I propose: Rather than take a one-size-fits-all approach to every VN, just accept that, all things being equal, you will probably prefer one approach to editing/translation over the other. And then leave yourself open to the possibility of changing that approach based on the specific needs of the VN and the audience for that VN. Handle it the same way you would that friend asking about the tattoo. Is getting inked right for them right now? And is including honorifics right for the audience and right for the novel? Let’s walk through some questions you might ask yourself while making that decision: Who’s the primary audience for the VN? Are your readers primarily story-seekers or culture-seekers? Is your VN some niche title that appeals only to otakus, or is it a game with broad crossover appeal? A stronger case could be made for honorifics in the former situation; less so in the latter What's the setting of the visual novel? If your characters are all alien catgirls on a spaceship 23,000,000 light years from Earth, it's harder to justify keeping in honorifics than if you’ve got a cast of high school students in modern-day Japan. Are the honorifics plot-relevant? Is there any good story-related reason for all the sans and kuns to be there? Is the central conflict of the VN about whether the protagonist and his best girl are ready to go first name-only? If so, you have a better case for keeping honorifics than if they're just there as subtle social shading. Is the visual novel voiced? This one's common sense. You’ll have an easier time not including honorifics if the reader isn’t hearing them in VO. And vice versa. How annoying are the honorifics? This one is totally subjective, but it needs to be asked. Some writers tend to favor narration over dialogue, so their scripts will have fewer honorifics to deal with. Other writers love the rhythms of slice-of-life dialogue, so their prose might be a minefield of sans and chans. Read the script aloud. How jarring is it to the ear? Is this an OELVN? Stop it. Just stop it already. You don’t need honorifics. You’re writing a novel in English for an English-speaking audience, for crissakes. Don’t make me come back there. Run down the decision tree. Be honest with yourself. Is there enough evidence to make you reconsider your approach to this novel? Are you an anti-honorific type editing a VN set in feudal Japan, where one missing “sama” could mean the difference between life or death for the characters? Consider keeping them in. Are you a pro-honorific person translating a VN about competitive bread baking in Paris? Consider ditching them. Full Disclosure I’m a story-seeker. Given my druthers, I will choose to omit honorifics from a VN for the sake of more readable English prose. I’m fairly certain that if it’s possible to translate Murakami and Kurosawa into English without honorifics, it should be more than possible to do the same for some random high school moege. I admit you might be losing a certain amount content by omitting those honorifics — clues about the social standing of various characters in relation to one another, not to mention their personalities — but as far as I'm concerned, it’s content that can either be (a) baked into the script via other contextual clues, or (b) written off as redundant — that is to say, most of what those honorifics are communicating will already be apparent through the rest of the dialogue and on-screen action. I also admit that my sans-san approach won’t be the right one in every situation. Same goes for the opposite approach. Every work and every audience demands its own solution. Your job is to stop for a moment and ask yourself what that solution is. And then be willing to listen to the answer.

(alternatively please inform us of the circumstances surrounding these confessions) The first two are surprisingly boring job-related things. The then-governor of Hawaii thought an ad campaign I worked on had made a mockery of the people and traditions of his state, so he made a big announcement that the team and I were persona non grata there. Just trying to score a few political points, really. Same goes for the second one: a random senator attacked a different campaign I'd directed, and said a few choice words about what an awful person I must be. I do a lot of work for regulated industries — alcohol, tobacco, pharma, finance, etc — if that explains anything. The last one is still a mystery to me. First year of college, there was a late-evening Student Council meeting. (I was VP of the incoming class.) There were about a dozen of us, and we were the last people in the Student Union. At some point, someone says, "Um, do you smell smoke?" And yes, yes we did. Another person heads down the hall to see what's up, then comes back two minutes later, white as a sheet. "Guys, we have to get out now. Go now." We ran downstairs, saw the situation I described — burning building, blocked exits, cut fire hoses — and started looking for a way out. Eventually, we found a back door that was unblocked and only kinda sorta on fire. Someone got that open, we jumped over the flames, and out into safety. The police never figured out who did it or why they targeted us. I suspect a yandere.

Three true confessions: I was, for several years, banned from the state of Hawaii.I have been publicly denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate.I once had someone lock me inside a building, pile couches in front of all the exits, disable all the fire alarms and extinguishers, then set that building aflame.At what point should I start questioning my life choices?

I fell down the slippery slope of VN-like games: Phoenix Wright --> Hotel Dusk --> Danganronpa --> 999 --> Ever17 --> everything else

Just one more week till the new SCLL album drops. Hope it's worth the wait.

++ You can never go wrong with Mark Kozelek in any of his incarnations.

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document. But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road. And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it. The Basics of Kerning I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart. And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off. To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type. Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words. And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right? Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed. Kerning Pairs The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project. That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff. I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted: The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below. In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. Like The Sands Through The Hourglass One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach. So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after: It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.) The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4. Mind Your Gaps So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

Okay, you're pretty much begging me to ask you at this point. Fine, I'll bite: What's the other band and why isn't it There Will Be Fireworks?

VNs? Gaming? Anime? Feh. We want the real dirt, like how you feel about the new CHVRCHES album or why malt vinegar is the only thing that should ever touch a fried potato. Anyway, welcome to Fuwa.

Totally agreed. The early overreaction was not the best thing they've done all day. The funny thing is, though, sometimes you don't even know if you're allowed to say anything about not being allowed to say anything. Which is about the most frustrating thing ever.

Lmao what the hell!? They deleted his thread too! Free speech and criticism isn't a thing anymore, didn't you hear? Yeah! 1984! Fahrenheit 451! Other books with numbers in them! This is the way business works, guys and gals. It's not always pretty, but it's how the sausage gets made. It's a combination of SP being unable to talk about certain things because of contractual/legal obligations PLUS them not wanting to embarrass their partners and thereby endanger future projects. I've done several ad campaigns for game releases involving Japanese developers and/or Japanese IPs. I've lived it. There are layers after layers after layers of red tape to go through before you're allowed to say just about anything. (And for the record, I'm not a fan of cropping CGs either.)

This has officially turned into the most entertaining thread of the week.