sanahtlig

You realize that most relationships (online or not) don't work out, right? What percentage of romantic relationships do you think lead to marriage? My guess is somewhere in the 10% or less range. I'd like to suggest you're a victim of confirmation bias. Being in the same boat, I suppose I have some expertise in this area. Relationship prospects are pretty bleak for someone on the spectrum. Keep in mind that 50% of marriages in the general population end in divorce. For people with Asperger's, the divorce rate is 80%. So even if you find that special someone, your chances of actually holding the relationship together are very bleak. Sorry for the bad news, but it's important to have realistic expectations. This message has been brought to you by sanahtlig: shattering hopes and dreams, one bit of advice at a time.

The snippet view isn't half bad, but the way they're cut is kind of nonsensical. There's 3 or 4 lines of empty space at the bottom of each snippet. On top of that, lines trail off in the middle, which is just senseless. Is there a way to fill all that empty space and somehow standardize the number of lines displayed for each post? I see some posts cut off at 2 lines and others displaying in their entirety filling half the screen. The cutoffs don't seem to have any rhyme or reason.

It's a 100-page doctoral thesis. I should be finished in 1-2 months. Hopefully.

Sorry, yes I've been busy with other stuff. Fiction writing takes a massive investment of time and creative energy (while I was updating it I literally did nothing else, including playing VNs or blogging). I do intend to get back to the story eventually, but probably not until my dissertation is finished.

You can't expect Tay to shoulder the $50-100 in server fees a month forever. Properly targeted ads could be viewed as a feature rather than a nuisance. People might actually appreciate direct shop links to games they're interested in. And people are always asking for recommendations--I think there'd be actual demand for a widget that could provide automatic recommendations that were actually relevant and user-customized. We already have ads plastered all over the forums. They're called "signatures".

This thread is essentially the definition of purposeless off-topic chatter. It joins the ranks of threads such as this.

I just started playing いたずら狂悪 (Itazura Kyouaku, or Molestation Enthusiast). It uses a 64-bit Unity engine which is completely unhookable, so I've been playing it relying only on my own Japanese skills. I've been a bit surprised how much I can actually understand. I can basically follow what's going on, though the flashbacks are hard to follow, and I miss the details. It's not as hard as I thought it would be, though I'm not sure I'd want to play a non-nukige this way.

JAST stated that both Lightning Warrior Raidy 3 and Shiny Days may release before Anime Expo (July 1), despite the current release dates on their site. Shipments of the physical versions may be delayed by a few weeks, however.

It's kind of pointless to replace perfectly good Japanese text with a raw machine translation. They should've just left the original Japanese. Abyssal Monkey indeed addressed my question, since Crayten had said the machine translation was at the start of the game.

If the new Ikusa Megami translation project is an "edited" machine translation, why are there unedited segments?

Could we make the default view for the blog section "All Blogs" rather than "Dashboard"? I fear the Dashboard might be scaring away new browsers because a single post (they're not interested in) could fill the page. Also, the "Threads you should check out" posts, while useful, get in the way of discovery of the community blogs in the Dashboard view since they're pinned at the top. These posts are already highlighted in the Famous in Fuwanovel widget; they don't need extra attention. Might I also suggest replacing "Today's Birthdays" with recent posts from the community blogs? That would drive traffic to the community blogs section from the forums. And honestly...what purpose is the "Today's Birthdays" feature even serving?

Why not? Let's say a thread is tagged "School Days". That would trigger an ad / affiliate-link for School Days to spawn at the side of the page. It could even be a codified as a widget that displays context-based ads / affiliate links based on various cues. Tags are a very straightforward way to target these, but I'm sure we could imagine other cues as well. People post their VNDB profiles, right? Someone designed a program that makes automatic recommendations based on how you score VNs in your VNDB list. Using that, you could actually make user-specific VN recommendations that could be featured in the ad widget.

It can be purchased for $725 via a customer support request. They're obviously not trying to market this to home users, which is a huge oversight. I bet they could find a thousand or so users that would be willing to pay $100 or so, but instead everyone will just pirate it.

I find it suspicious that the feature disappeared a few days after I suggested that thread tags could be used to target affiliate links.

Are you sure you're looking at the main pages for the VN rather than the release pages? You have to click through to the main page from the release page if you did a release search.

On the contrary, technical writing with clearly stated information and a formal sentence structure is what machine translation excels at. Vague language, humor, and style are what don't machine translate well; these elements are very common in dialogue, especially colloquial dialogue. Machine language is going to fumble at anything that requires context outside of the sentence to understand.

Ikusa Megami Zero contains a ton of narrative with high informational content. I played Ikusa Megami Zero via machine translation, and it's certainly possible to enjoy it that way without missing much information-wise, but an understanding of the female voices doesn't really add all that much.

That's all I've ever translated, so it's not like there's anything else to misrepresent. I lack basic understanding of grammar and nuance, and the ability to interpret the inherent vagueness of colloquial language. I'm faced with that even reading something simple like the introduction to Monobeno. I understand that I'm not at the level to deliver a good translation of, well, anything. The point of this exercise was actually to demonstrate that even with an extremely elementary level of Japanese understanding one can output a translation that is serviceable (for many but not all VNs). It's highly unlikely I'll ever actually translate something people would want to read. Doing so simply doesn't seem... useful. But thanks for the extra TLC pass. Guilty as charged. To be honest, I still can't read this scene unaided, even after having read it several times with assistance. My reading method necessarily misses stylistic details. I view my translation as I might reconstituted fruit juice. I distill a sentence to its bare essentials and then reconstitute it in my own writing style. The end result hopefully resembles the original, but it may not match up exactly. I'm essentially replicating the process of comprehension that goes on in my mind as I read Japanese. Pabloc, you villain. I really don't see how a bad translation is morally reprehensible. Promotion of VNs in English isn't exactly on the level of issues such as human rights, freedom of expression, public health, or even fostering innovation (through protection of intellectual property). There's simply no support for a moral claim here, and in fact I argued earlier that the value of freedom of information as a principle tends to override the transitory benefits of censorship. I doubt he (they) cares as much as you think, being that he probably doesn't speak English and has little to no contact with English fans.

At best, that proves that fan translations damage the prospects of an official release. That's a general argument against fan translations, not poor fan translations. I don't count Sekai Project's assessment as authoritative. They haven't been around long enough, released enough titles, nor collected enough sales data to do more than speculate. My argument still stands that the Steam VN community and the fan translation community don't show enough overlap for fan translations to significantly impact Steam sales. Until I see data to the contrary, I consider the bogeyman of fan translation sabotaging Steam sales as speculative nonsense. When the companies in question eventually realize this (it could take a while due to risk aversion), they'll change their tune (or maybe they won't, because fan translations still compete with professional releases for people's attention). That's... a highly romanticized metaphor that isn't really applicable at all. Fan translations infringe on copyright and ignore the wishes of creators. There is no moral imperative that makes this defensible. No one has a right to fictional content. Entertainment is not a basic human need. The "starving children" are willingly consuming the eggs being "thrown" at them. At best you can argue that VNs are an art form that deserves recognition. But arguing that fan translations damage the art form is silly. That's like saying that me drawing a crude sketch of a painting and distributing it around damages the original. Any idiot will know that my sketch isn't the original. Any idiot would be able to tell from the voices that the VN wasn't originally in English, and therefore they're not enjoying the original experience! From a basic information freedom standpoint, bad information shouldn't be censored. It should be supplemented with good information, because in the end greater information freedom results in better societal outcomes than suppressing the negative impacts of bad information through censorship.

JAST is and has long been willing to re-release *good* translations when they see an audience. Do you think they'd be any less willing to re-translate poorly translated games, if they saw a market for it and the developer was willing / insisted? The merit of the original game and a relationship with the developer are what matters most to JAST, I think. Mangagamer's stance is evolving. They stated in the past that existing fan translations were a deal breaker that sabotaged the market for an official release. Then Steam came along. Keep in mind that Mangagamer has also stated that nukige didn't sell well. And that sales of all-ages titles were disappointing. And that moege licensing was unsustainable. Let's just say that Mangagamer has a ways to go in understanding their own audience, much less the VN market. I think you've just espoused a very radical viewpoint that might even give pabloc pause, which is impressive in its own right. Besides, information deserves no respect. Only people deserve respect. Do you believe that I should go to jail for burning a book (that I own) too? What about a flag?

Welcome to the Allied team. We more or less agree. I believe a resource ought to exist that allows people to judge the quality of a translation at a glance and determine if they want to buy/play a given title or not. I may or may not protect you from pabloc's divine wrath, so be forewarned. It's also important that we establish that persecution of subpar translation projects is conceptually similar to Nazi persecution of the Jews, and that poor translation projects that proceed despite the best advice of the community are like morbidly obese people that don't take proper care of themselves. Only by showing that everyone on all sides is an idiot will these debates finally die down. Allow me to quote a comment I made on the relevant blog post: You're right, I might not be very happy that someone was making unauthorized translations of my work and sullying my name in the process. But the problem is that it was unauthorized and I had no say in the matter! Nowadays fan translations don't necessarily spoil the opportunity for an official release. As long as the game can be released on Steam or promoted on Kickstarter, it's still marketable to a different audience than the one that typically uses fan translations. Let's face it: fan translations are used by a pretty exclusive audience, most of whom have little or no interest in supporting official releases. If you're a "wizard" who can figure out how to patch these games and set your system locale correctly, you're already pretty far down the rabbit hole. You're interested in VNs, and one or two flops probably won't be enough to deter you. In addition, your argument about the image of VNs as a genre being potentially sullied by poor translations only applies in an information-sparse or attention-sparse situation. The availability of poor translations in itself poses no threat; the threat is ignorance of good titles (the value of the original work modified by the quality of the translation). The solution isn't forbidding poor translations, but rather making titles people would want to play more accessible. See my comments to Decay about a translation quality resource for one potential solution to this issue.

Maybe you weren't. But I'm pretty sure that's what pabloc was saying, at least. And I'm pretty sure most of the people complaining about the Monobeno project would agree. If you choose to disagree, then your opinion on the matter shall be registered as such. Just beware that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The posts you all made were much more detailed than I was expecting, and they were quite interesting to read. Now here comes the twist you likely saw coming. The games you listed in the Unacceptable category--based on your statements, I take this as a declaration that these translations should not exist. But why? What harm are they doing? The original Japanese version still exists. Another fan group could come along and retranslate the game, if they wanted to. The availability of these poor translations simply gives readers more options. Who are you or anyone else to limit the choices of others based on your own preconceptions of what constitutes a "good enough" translation, no matter how objective your criteria might be? VNDB catalogues all VNs (as far as I know), regardless of their quality. It doesn't exclude titles no matter how bad they are, and the vast majority are actually being sold to unsuspecting buyers. Why should translations be any different? I'll at least buy the argument that simple unedited machine translations deserve no recognition; that doesn't add any value for anyone over what could be achieved by simply installing a machine translator oneself.

It seems like you place much more emphasis on literal accuracy rather than how well the text reads in English. I feel that if someone can quickly glance at the text and tell that it was originally written in another language, the translator / editor have failed their audience. With an excellent translation, the text flows so clearly that you would never know it was a translation in the first place. I feel that writing quality of the English is far more important than accuracy to the original Japanese for most readers, and not just because most readers can't tell the difference.

先に私は日本語のメッセージを忘れたごめんなさい。 さぁ、これは悪く書いた文がある。 鶏は道を通りだと、鶏の通りの意味は何ですか。 訳しましたけど、問題の意味が分かりません。 ＠Ｒｅｎｕｍｎｕｍさん：まあ、そうでしょうねえ。ちょっと粗相かも知らないです。気おつけます。 ＠ａｓｔｒｏ様：わあ、ミスいっぱいありましたねえ。本当に有り難うございます。ご苦労様でした。貴方のお陰でLEVELUPの感じがします。多分。とにかく、LEVELDOWNはしません、死になければ。