Looking to learn

[Jérôme]

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum and from Canada. I don't typically use forums, but this one appealed to me because fan translations have always played an integral role in my life and have shaped many of my life decisions. I joined because I want to learn more about how fan translators extract, translate, and repackage text files in visual novels. I also want to know how fan translators organize the translation workflow and which tools they typically employ.

Currently, I speak French and English, but I'm also learning Japanese (at a snail's pace) in my spare time, and I hope to help the community translate visual novels into English once I have reached a high enough level of fluency (I'm legit still a complete n00b at the language).

I hope that I can learn from everyone and help out one way or another.

[phantomJS]

Hi and welcome to Fuwanovel

For information on the processes of fan translations, the replies in this thread will help u a lot:

For any further questions, you can post questions in the forums. Fuwanovel has a lot of experienced people in Fan TL such as @Clephas who is a demi-god in VN related stuff and helped with Dracu-Riot's english translation (a fan group TL, not the official one currently in the works by Sekai Project), and @tymmur who is the head of the Musumaker TL project.

Enjoy your stay here~~

[Clephas]

4 hours ago, phantomJS said:

Hi and welcome to Fuwanovel

For information on the processes of fan translations, the replies in this thread will help u a lot:

For any further questions, you can post questions in the forums. Fuwanovel has a lot of experienced people in Fan TL such as @Clephas who is a demi-god in VN related stuff and helped with Dracu-Riot's english translation (a fan group TL, not the official one currently in the works by Sekai Project), and @tymmur who is the head of the Musumaker TL project.

Enjoy your stay here~~

*smiles dryly* I also, with Decay, processed literally hundreds of fixes to the game as a whole before it was handed to SP.

[Chronopolis]

Heyy, welcome to fuwanovel. It's nice that you're curious~

Quote

I don't typically use forums, but this one appealed to me because fan translations have always played an integral role in my life and have shaped many of my life decisions.

So like anime/manga really had an influence on your life? It's become such a part of life that it's hard for me to imagine what things would be without Japanese media.

[Plk_Lesiak]

Welcome to Fuwa! I'm also curious what you exactly mean when you say that fan translation influenced your life to such a degree.

[littleshogun]

Welcome to Fuwanovel, and as for fan translation process here I'll leave it to the expert one. Regardless of that, feel free if you want to discuss something in regard of VN and I hope you'll have fun here.

[Narcosis]

Don't worry, mate. Translating is easy! You get a bunch of lines in Japanese and then you write the same lines in English 👌

[VirginSmasher]

19 minutes ago, Narcosis said:

Don't worry, mate. Translating is easy! You get a bunch of lines in Japanese and then you write the same lines in English 👌

[tymmur]

2 hours ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

Welcome to Fuwa! I'm also curious what you exactly mean when you say that fan translation influenced your life to such a degree.

I know why fan translations have affected my life, but I too would like to know how it have affected @Jérôme

1 hour ago, Narcosis said:

Don't worry, mate. Translating is easy! You get a bunch of lines in Japanese and then you write the same lines in English 👌

That's like saying winning a marathon is easy. You just have to run faster than everybody else. It's not wrong, but you need to do some training and apply some strategic approach to what you are doing in order to actually being able to do it. If it is as simple as you make it out to be, then machine translations would rule.

7 hours ago, Jérôme said:

I joined because I want to learn more about how fan translators extract, translate, and repackage text files in visual novels. I also want to know how fan translators organize the translation workflow and which tools they typically employ.

I have written much about at least some of those topics lately and some have already linked to some of those threads. Read those before asking more specific as I don't feel like repeating myself.

7 hours ago, Jérôme said:

I hope that I can learn from everyone and help out one way or another.

My advice would be to figure out what each task is supposed to do and then figure out which task(s) you will train yourself to do. Trying to train yourself in all tasks will likely result in not reaching a good level in anything as you spread your skills too thin. Translation projects are about teamwork. The most required type of person is translator, followed by editor. The rest are important, but due to often requiring less hours on each VN, some of them can run through multiple projects for the time it takes to translate one and as such fewer people are needed.

[☆Ayase☆]

[Fiddle]

Yo yo yo, J-dawg!

Here's a list of VNs with (relatively!) simple Japanese for when you get to practicing your madd skillz:

 

[tymmur]

7 hours ago, Narcosis said:

Don't worry, mate. Translating is easy! You get a bunch of lines in Japanese and then you write the same lines in English 👌

5 hours ago, tymmur said:

That's like saying winning a marathon is easy. You just have to run faster than everybody else. It's not wrong, but you need to do some training and apply some strategic approach to what you are doing in order to actually being able to do it. If it is as simple as you make it out to be, then machine translations would rule.

Apparently I need to explain this a bit better. Perhaps I was thinking a bit too much of the recent thread where the topic is about translators looking up every single word vs machine translations. What I was thinking when I wrote this is that some people have the idea that you can translate if you know the dictionary well and perhaps some grammar. However there are expressions and other cultural/historic references, meaning you can encounter text where you need to know more than just the words in order to translate.

Let's take this example. "Bob wants to join the team, but it turned out that he is really green". If you know English expressions, you will know it's not a reference to Bob being a green skinned alien. It's actually about experience even though the word experience is not mentioned.

As a result of this, Canadians will require more training/studying than just the language itself while this is likely not an issue at all for native Japanese speaking people.

I suspect I make it sound worse than it is though. If you study like most people here, you will at some point read untranslated VNs by extracting the script and look up words, kanji etc and in addition to learning the language itself, such references will appear, allowing you to get a feeling of those and when they are used in addition to the general language learning.

 

From a technical point of view, it's true that the translator don't have to do anything other than read one line and then write the translated line. Other people should be in charge of extraction and all that. In other words the technical skills required from the translator is to do online research about a word, kanji, reference or whatever you need to look up.

[Weiterfechten]

Welcome to Fuwanovel!  

[Chris J. Cinders]

Welcome Jerome, I hope you enjoy your time here. And good luck learning, I can’t help you but I’ll be rooting for you!

 

[Jérôme]

Thank you for the warm welcome everyone.

On 5/10/2018 at 10:12 PM, phantomJS said:

Hi and welcome to Fuwanovel

For information on the processes of fan translations, the replies in this thread will help u a lot:

For any further questions, you can post questions in the forums. Fuwanovel has a lot of experienced people in Fan TL such as @Clephas who is a demi-god in VN related stuff and helped with Dracu-Riot's english translation (a fan group TL, not the official one currently in the works by Sekai Project), and @tymmur who is the head of the Musumaker TL project.

Enjoy your stay here~~

Thanks! I will definitely give it a read.

On 5/11/2018 at 3:05 AM, Chronopolis said:

Heyy, welcome to fuwanovel. It's nice that you're curious~

So like anime/manga really had an influence on your life? It's become such a part of life that it's hard for me to imagine what things would be without Japanese media.

Yeah, I can't imagine life without anime; the stories in anime have always sort of shaped my worldview and values growing up by exposing me to culturally relative concepts that I never would have encountered.

 

On 5/11/2018 at 3:15 AM, Plk_Lesiak said:

Welcome to Fuwa! I'm also curious what you exactly mean when you say that fan translation influenced your life to such a degree.

 

On 5/11/2018 at 6:01 AM, tymmur said:

I know why fan translations have affected my life, but I too would like to know how it have affected @Jérôme

That's like saying winning a marathon is easy. You just have to run faster than everybody else. It's not wrong, but you need to do some training and apply some strategic approach to what you are doing in order to actually being able to do it. If it is as simple as you make it out to be, then machine translations would rule.

I have written much about at least some of those topics lately and some have already linked to some of those threads. Read those before asking more specific as I don't feel like repeating myself.

My advice would be to figure out what each task is supposed to do and then figure out which task(s) you will train yourself to do. Trying to train yourself in all tasks will likely result in not reaching a good level in anything as you spread your skills too thin. Translation projects are about teamwork. The most required type of person is translator, followed by editor. The rest are important, but due to often requiring less hours on each VN, some of them can run through multiple projects for the time it takes to translate one and as such fewer people are needed.

Well, in response to @Pik_Lesiak and @tymmur, if it wasn't for fan translators, I don't think I would have been exposed to translated media and consequently decided to learn a second language and study translation in university, albeit in a different language pair.

 

On 5/11/2018 at 8:07 AM, Fiddle said:

Yo yo yo, J-dawg!

Here's a list of VNs with (relatively!) simple Japanese for when you get to practicing your madd skillz:

 

Ayo! Totally down man once I get further along. Gotta get that VN xp! I'm learning from this Living Language Japanese box set, but i'm still in the first book (beginner) of the three, lol.

 

[Fiddle]

I have returned to this topic to inform you that your recently implemented avatar is both fantastical and fantastic, and I commend your superior taste.

[Kirashi]

On 11/05/2018 at 4:12 AM, phantomJS said:

Hi and welcome to Fuwanovel

For information on the processes of fan translations, the replies in this thread will help u a lot:

For any further questions, you can post questions in the forums. Fuwanovel has a lot of experienced people in Fan TL such as @Clephas

No offense but in which way clephas is experienced in fan TL? The only fan translation he worked on was his first own project "Ikusa megumi zero" and he was the first to give up after the very first month x). And I don't think Dracu riot is a fan translation...

[Kurisu-Chan]

On 11/05/2018 at 3:59 AM, Jérôme said:

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum and from Canada. I don't typically use forums, but this one appealed to me because fan translations have always played an integral role in my life and have shaped many of my life decisions. I joined because I want to learn more about how fan translators extract, translate, and repackage text files in visual novels. I also want to know how fan translators organize the translation workflow and which tools they typically employ.

Currently, I speak French and English, but I'm also learning Japanese (at a snail's pace) in my spare time, and I hope to help the community translate visual novels into English once I have reached a high enough level of fluency (I'm legit still a complete n00b at the language).

I hope that I can learn from everyone and help out one way or another.

Time to give a variation to my typical welcome and bienvenue thingy.

Bonsoir et bienvenue sur FuwIssouNovel, Bon, à part ça, t'aurais de la poutine à filer?

 

Welcome to Fuwanovel.