The Flowers demo is a hot mess

[kingdomcome]

22 minutes ago, KuroganeHomura said:

Best-case scenario: He hadn't taken a single look at the script at any point before this thing blew up and is now actually taking measures to get it fixed. By which I mean delay the release until the quality is at least decent.

I think the complaining may have done the job in the end. It's possible they'll get it up to scratch before full release. POSSIBLE.

[kingdomcome]

1 minute ago, Zenophilious said:

Doubtful?  They'd have to re-translate a lot, if what people are saying is true.  That takes longer than a month.

mmhm. That's why I think it's only possible, but after a bad response like this the game would be a total failure in sales if they did release a dud.

[LiquidShu]

19 hours ago, Rooke said:

Spoiler

 

I was frustrated that day xD. I let my frustrations out, probably unfairly at the Evangile staff  

Making sense is one of the most important things, grammar is actually not very important ... depending on which bit you talk about. Mostly because some grammar was brought into English because of a latin loving idiot  person who tried to apply the rules of Latin to English. Things like 'don't end sentences with a preposition' are rules you can safely ignore. If you were writing in Latin, you most certainly wouldn't end sentences with a prep, but in English that doesn't apply. You can blame crazy Latin speaking fanboys for its existence though. Grammar is important only when it helps things make sense. 

-------------------------------------------

Don't "like" this post, anyone, because I'm going to be mean and unfair here. And I'm basing this off zero knowledge whatsoever so I'm probably wrong (I'm a writer, not a TL or something ) I just thought people should know a little bit when someone says 'it doesn't sound natural.' What are some ways which make things sound more natural.

Let's go with that sentence. It sounds mechanical. Wooden. What could you do to fix this if you were writing?

1 - Weak words, get rid of them. Every word which doesn't do anything that's in the script saps power away from that script. ‘Let out’ is unneeded. I would say it’s on the verge of filtering, but it’s definitely unnecessary. ‘I scream in embarrassment’ is all that’s needed. You could use ‘let out’ if it modifies the scream ‘I let out a short scream of embarrassment’ but eh, it’s still not nice. Mainly because if you 'scream' something, you're obviously 'letting something out'. Thus, it's redundant.

‘Touch’ is a weak word but could be appropriate. It’s weak because it doesn’t describe much. It conveys ‘contact’ but it doesn’t say what kind of contact. That could be the same in the Japanese, though. ‘Scream’ likewise is generic. It’s a loud sound, but that doesn’t necessarily narrow things down.

2 - The first sentence is pretty mechanical. Probably because it specifies stuff you don’t need to. ‘She tried to take the book,’ well it’s already specified that the protagonist has the book, you don’t need to specify that she’s trying to take the book. You can, depending on what tone you’re after, but frankly how it’s written sounds ... not good. ‘We wrestle for the book’ is more natural sounding, right? It conveys the same information (but I have no clue what the tone is like in the Japanese.) 

If you don't learn to imply, you won't write natural sounding stuff.

Just applying these 2 simple rules is enough to make it sound more natural. 'Flutter' carries more meaning than 'touch', I also rearranged the adverb because you should always be careful of those. Of course I could have also butchered the tone and meaning of the line, but that's not the point of my post. I also don't like the phrase 'grapple me' because it makes the narrator sound like a fighting game fanboy ... *looks at a certain somebody*. But that's just my preference.

 

 

Really wanted to like the post so +1 instead. 

[Marcus]

 

Well then. 

[Decay]

Okay, sure, they can say that, but all they've said previously was that the translation is finished and they're in editing, but they need MUCH more than just editing to fix the translation. And they'll have to do it in 3.5 weeks.

 

Something tells me that they don't have the most sound game plan if they're still trying to contact people who actually know Japanese, desperately asking for help.

[Darklord Rooke]

7 minutes ago, Decay said:

Something tells me that they don't have the most sound game plan if they're still trying to contact people who actually know Japanese, desperately asking for help.

Are they aiming to 'ask for help,' or 'eliminate with prejudice'  

[VirginSmasher]

8 minutes ago, Decay said:

Okay, sure, they can say that, but all they've said previously was that the translation is finished and they're in editing, but they need MUCH more than just editing to fix the translation. And they'll have to do it in 3.5 weeks.

 

Something tells me that they don't have the most sound game plan if they're still trying to contact people who actually know Japanese, desperately asking for help.

They are trying to cover their asses because they know that they didn't translate it properly and now they're contacting people with better Japanese. I hope they can fix their problems or else I'm not buying it because I don't want to support these incompetent translators.

[sanahtlig]

I wonder if Peter is bitter because this is one of the games he translated himself.

[Deep Blue]

leaving parts of translation in rōmaji is not something even an alpha should have, this was the first shoujo ai vn I was willing to read  and pay for but with this quality I'm not touching it, maybe it is an alpha but why would you even release something like this? even as a demo what's the point? you will only get negative feedback.. so why?

 

[Darklord Rooke]

13 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

I wonder if Peter is bitter because this is one of the games he translated himself.

Peter's been living in Japan for ... well over a decade now. It boggles the mind that he would then make such simple translation errors. This is why I'm going to assume it was done by someone else until it's been stated otherwise.

[sanahtlig]

6 minutes ago, Rooke said:

Peter's been living in Japan for ... well over a decade now. It boggles the mind that he would then make such simple translation errors. This is why I'm going to assume it was done by someone else until it's been stated otherwise.

I was mostly being facetious, and I've only scanned the criticisms of the translation, but being fluent in both languages does not automatically make one a good translator.  Translating requires a different skillset than reading.

[Chuee]

5 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

I was mostly being facetious, and I've only scanned the criticisms of the translation, but being fluent in both languages does not automatically make one a good translator.  Translating requires a different skillset than reading.

Well, I assume being able to fluently speak both languages means you can realize when one thing in one language means in entirely different thing than another sentence in the other language. One of the mistakes was literally as basic as confusing "X said __ , I responded with Y" as "I said ___, X responded with Y". I can't imagine that someone making errors like that is fluent in Japanese. 

[Scorp]

Even if they fix translation (while this would be like a miracle indeed), there is multiple tech issues, the most annoying is the music problems, which they would not be able to fix (or this have to be even bigger miracle). So it would be a subpar release no matter what. Btw, I asked Doddler, he told Jast never contacted him about Flowers. Having in mind that KnS2 and Flowers engines are almost identical and he basically could just throw script and resource in his KnS2 port and it would work... Nice decision. Seems JAST USA drastically underestimated the importance of this particular release for fans and thought of it as something liks "another cheap cloned yuri game with low budget".

[Decay]

His KnS2 port probably belongs to MG and they wouldn't be able to use it for Flowers.

[Valmore]

Player Tested, CATS Approved.

[Rainey]

I laugh when I see things like this in official translations and then look at people bashing fan translations (and hoping for official translation by "professionals"). Obviously doesn't apply for all official translations, but whenever I see something like this, it's pretty disappointing.

[Scorp]

27 minutes ago, Decay said:

His KnS2 port probably belongs to MG and they wouldn't be able to use it for Flowers.

Doddler was not even contacted by Jast, so I suppose that's not the case and they were not planning to do any port from the beginning... Anyway, I believe if they wanted - they would be able to find a solution with MG.

[Vorathiel]

7 hours ago, Deep Blue said:

leaving parts of translation in rōmaji is not something even an alpha should have, this was the first shoujo ai vn I was willing to read  and pay for but with this quality I'm not touching it, maybe it is an alpha but why would you even release something like this? even as a demo what's the point? you will only get negative feedback.. so why?

No matter what they say, as long as they talk about us maybe?

[sanahtlig]

9 hours ago, Chuee said:

Well, I assume being able to fluently speak both languages means you can realize when one thing in one language means in entirely different thing than another sentence in the other language. One of the mistakes was literally as basic as confusing "X said __ , I responded with Y" as "I said ___, X responded with Y". I can't imagine that someone making errors like that is fluent in Japanese. 

After reading through some of the examples I see that you're right.  My knowledge of Japanese is pretty elementary (I still have to rely on a parser / dictionary most of the time), and even without context I can spot some of these errors.  These are the sorts of egregious misinterpretations that I was calling the Oyako Rankan fan translator on.  The translator clearly didn't even understand what he was reading.  I've honestly never seen a VN release by an established publisher with such flagrant accuracy issues.  While I can't get an estimate of how frequent these problems are just by looking at a few screenshots, I suspect the critics are right.  The game may have to be completely retranslated from scratch.  It wouldn't be the first time JAST has had to do this.   If JAST hired a different person to translate that demo, they could dodge that bullet.  That's highly unlikely though.

[XReaper]

in light of the fact that mg has been basically ready to work on this particular title, i do asume the fellows at innocent grey are already start loosing hair for ditching them, which resulted in a pretty much subpar outcome as things stand by now :/

[KuroganeHomura]

 

 

[Down]

It seems like they corrected a lot of things, all the while... introducing new mistakes, of course.

 

Not sure how they're gonna pull this off in a month, clearly aside from correcting TL mistakes and nonsense english, they need to do one or two entire QC pass at the very least.

[Dergonu]

5 minutes ago, Down said:

It seems like they corrected a lot of things, all the while... introducing new mistakes, of course.

 

Not sure how they're gonna pull this off in a month, clearly aside from correcting TL mistakes and nonsense english, they need to do one or two entire QC pass at the very least.

Dear lord ...

Why did this have to happen to this title... The one JAST release I'm hyped for

[Decay]

18 minutes ago, Down said:

Not sure how they're gonna pull this off in a month, clearly aside from correcting TL mistakes and nonsense english, they need to do one or two entire QC pass at the very least.

They're not, of course. We should resign ourselves to this being a shitty release. They need a TLC pass, an editing pass, and a proofreading pass, all before release. They are not going to finish all of these. They may not finish even one of them. Actually what they need to do is scrap the entire script and start over again, but that's certainly not going to happen.

My current speculation is that JAST won't delay this release. They can't delay this release. If they do, they may risk losing the license for the next three games. I'm guessing that they're rushing this release out in order to meet a deadline imposed by their licensing agreement. If IG wanted to wait for a high-quality release, they would have just stuck with MangaGamer, after all.

[Darklord Rooke]

31 minutes ago, Down said:

It seems like they corrected a lot of things, all the while... introducing new mistakes, of course.

Not really concerned with typos, they're the last stuff to be dealt with and a month is plenty of time for that. There's a reason proofing is the last (and least important) duty of an editor, and if they're busy proofing at this stage, when there are so many other errors in the script, they have their process around the wrong way. 

If this is BDH then he is nit-picking for other reasons and lost sight a bit of what's important, which is whether the script will be in decent condition come release. Going on about the typos is unimportant at this stage, which is something he should know. Of course there's the whole idea that a demo should be in good condition, but they already showed us how bad the condition of the script is, so at this point a new script with typos shouldn't be a surprise -> more important things to fix. 

EDIT: And at this stage typos should be the least concerning thing for the prospective reader. It's also the easiest thing to fix in a patch compared with accuracy and/or writing problems.