How's the Visual Novel translation/community in your native language?

[Rose]

I'm kinda curious about other VN communities outside of the English language, so I made this thread. The JP>EN translation is what we're mostly about, but what about other languages? We can get an idea from VNDB but we don't know much about say, which VNs are being translated to French, German, etc. I added the "/community" to the title because without a fanbase, translations will hardly happen if at all, so it's something relevant to the discussion as well.

 

I used "native language" instead of "country" because you know, some countries share the same language and all that. Dunno, it felt right for me. 

 

Anyway, how is it in your native language? Are there dedicated websites for VNs? Are there translation groups actively working to bring content for those who can't read in English nor Japanese? For those who are native English/Japanese speakers can also speak their mind here if they feel like it, though it'd be nice if we could avoid having the same arguments that every discussion about this had in the past. 

[Funyarinpa]

The Turkish community is borderline nonexistent. I think only 2-3 VNs were ever fully converted to Turkish (and individually so, and IIRC neither were of particular importance), though I think (not sure) that there were some Umineko and Little Busters projects, now dead. 

 

Me and a friend are thinking of translating Saya no Uta though.

[Yuuko]

I'm only aware of one Finnish translation project https://vndb.org/v8038#main 

 

I don't know any websites only dedicated to only VNs but there are few places were there are visual novel subforums but they are all kinda dead xD

[SilverLi]

We got "Zaka the VN" in Swedish. It is horrible.

 

It is non-existent.

[Nosebleed]

There's actually quite a few Portuguese TL'd VNs, but mostly from Brazillian fans. There isn't a single Portugal Portuguese translation that I know of.

As far as I'm aware, in Brazil there's quite a big number of anime fans, which then translates to a decent number of VN fans, although not a massive number, but a big enough number that would result in translations popping up.

In Portugal that number decreases drastically, with most people primarly caring for anime/manga.

When I talk to my friends over here, they usually disregard VNs are just porn games.

 

Relevant VNs that got a Portuguese translation:

Clannad (Partial)

G-Senjou no Maou (Partial)

Planetarian

Rewrite (Partial)

Shuffle

Saya no Uta

 

It's not a vast array of titles, but it's good to know I could recommend something to someone who doesn't know English at all over here (although to be fair most people around here who get into anime already know English well enough to sort themselves out).

[Rose]

There's actually quite a few Portuguese TL'd VNs, but mostly from Brazillian fans. There isn't a single Portugal Portuguese translation that I know of.

 

As far as I'm aware, in Brazil there's quite a big number of anime fans, which then translates to a decent number of VN fans, although not a massive number.

 

Relevant VNs that got a Portuguese translation:

Clannad (Partial)

G-Senjou no Mau (Partial)

Planetarian

Rewrite (Partial)

Shuffle

Saya no Uta

 

It's not a vast array of titles, but it's good to know I could recommend something to someone who doesn't know English at all over here (although to be fair most people around here who get into anime already know English well enough to sort themselves out).

[Narcosis]

Practically non-existent and I thank gods for that.

[Rose]

Practically non-existent and I thank gods for that.

[InvictusCobra]

 

When I talk to my friends over here, they usually disregard VNs are just porn games.

[Nao_KASUKABE]

I hope Chinese VN community will exist...((´^ω^))

[Nosebleed]

Isn't that a pretty common perception, though?  I never mentioned VNs to anyone I knew again after someone replied with, "Eww," after I mentioned I'd been downloading some (note: I didn't name any specific ones).  They were pretty weeb-y, so I thought they wouldn't be an asshat about it, but I thought wrong, apparently.

[CeruleanGamer]

I'm a pinoy (Filipino) gamer, but since our schools here make learning English as a second language mandatory, it doesn't matter to me if there are no VNs in pinoy language. D:

[Chuee]

Yeah, you'll notice there are a lot of Chinese translations out there. Mostly due to Chinese being an easy translation from Japanese, but they still have a big enough scene to get all the fan-translations they have. 

[Nosebleed]

Yeah, you'll notice there are a lot of Chinese translations out there. Mostly due to Chinese being an easy translation from Japanese, but they still have a big enough scene to get all the fan-translations they have. 

It's pretty insane, not just with visual novels, I often see Chinese translated manga before I manage to find the original Japanese one.

But I guess if you have over one billion people living in your country, it's not hard to imagine how they got to that point

[Yuuko]

Link results in "Page not found" 

Hmm, pretty weird. When I refresh the page it works.

 

Edit: I think I fixed it.

[Nosebleed]

Hmm, pretty weird. When I refresh the page it works. 

There's an extra space in your URL.

[Narcosis]

Why though?

When I talk to my friends over here, they usually disregard VNs are just porn games.

Because of this.

 

Aside from that, there's no real ground to build upon, out of two reasons - polish communities are tightly knit, self-centered groups with a strong disregard towards everything which tries to overthrow their status quo; even then, vn's make a really small niche amongst other points of interest, like manga and anime. It wouldn't make much sense to translate vn's into polish, since those who'd most propably read them already know english and/or japanese; they're more often already a part of the international community. Those who do, don't really feel any connection with the polish scene, because - to be honest - it's just goddamn awful and full of extreme weeb shit... and let's just say I dislike weebs. A lot.

[Diamon]

I know of World End Economica, Higurashi and Katawa Shoujo with french translations so far, but there might be more.

[WinterfuryZX]

Not very good, translations are scarce and mostly retranslations of english fantranslation, there are exceptions, though, Gekkou are finishing Mahotsukai no yoru, it can even came out before the english fantranslation

[Kawasumi]

non-existant. Its not really needed because we are a small country and we learn English in school really early and we use it in our daily life too, so yeah. It doesnt exist and doesnt really need to exist.

[TexasDice]

Sadly, german translations exist. A little over a hundred VNs are available in german, I believe.

[Zantax]

I could count polish translations of VNs worth reading on fingers of one hand, but actually I don't really care. There are very few VNs with targeted audience below age of 18, and if someone older than 18 don't know english enough to read something then it's just laziness, and I don't think we should care that much about lazy people. I guess not everyone have enough time and motivation to learn japanese, but I really don't know how you can live in present world without at least everyday conversation english skills, and basic reading skills.

And so (even if nowadays I don't really care much about english translations as well ) I think it's much better to have 2 different VNs translated to english than 1 VN to two languages.

[XReaper]

regarding japanese guess its fine xd & when it comes to hungarian.vn scene ......hahaha seriously, translating from english into hungarian or otherway round is horrendous and the result often ends up beeing weird when non having learned the language for agood while, but from japanese -> hungarian quite often even weirder, as tons of words simply dont exist in both and noone ever wants to read stuff like "flesh of myself, given birth from the head of house´s beloved one..."

but in short. japanese - without question
                  hungarian - so dead, it wont even come back as a zombie - therefore
                                  english ones only (if you can read)

                  german - community is somewhat small but alive and most prefer english ones though

[Flutterz]

I've definitely seen some VNs be at least partially translated to Russian and there was that Eternal Summer or whatever VN, but since I prefer English anyway and more stuff is translated to English I don't really know much about the Russian VN community.

[Satsuki]

We don't have many translation group in Vietnam, only 3. One group focuses on nukige, another focuses on serious stuff like G-senjou or Narcissu, and the last one, which I'm a member of, focuses only on Key's title.