MoeNovel announcing something Monday 17/11

[OriginalRen]

I disagree with this, actually. While it is only obvious that each language has its quirks and that making a 1:1 transition is nearly impossible - let alone between languages that have close to nothing in common - it is the translators job to localize the product with all the nuances as close to the original as possible. I'm not asking for a word-to-word literal translation, that in itself is a bad translation; what I mean is, if there is a certain nuance in language A, the translator should find the closest thing to it in language B and replace it with that. Every language has different idioms, for example - rather than translating the saying mechanically, you should use the closest one your language has to offer - thus still staying close to the original, in respect to the languages at hand.

 

I'd also disagree that bad English has no effect on the quality of the translated work. Of course it has. You can all me a grammar Nazi, but if I am presented with two stories and one of them is riddled with spelling and grammar errors, I will prefer the well written one. And I'm not even talking about official products here - if you are selling something in a certain language, you'd better make damn sure it's written well. Whether it's your first language or not should be beside the point - if you can't write it in your second language well enough, don't write/translate it into that language at all in the first place.

[Mr Poltroon]

To stay on topic, people bash this translation because they think it ruins the game. While I detest Pulltop (and therefore Moenovel) for other reasons, I give them credit for trying. Having grammar mistakes and word errors represent their group poorly, sure, but it doesn't make the game unreadable; people use context to read poorly written sentences. It's how language works.

[OriginalRen]

Unfortunately, this point is kind of rendered moot when the translation is just plain made up, as has happened in IMHHW. 

[Mr Poltroon]

Are you saying Moenovel wrote their own story and completely made everything up?

[Eclipsed]

I'm siding with both Tiago and Ren on this one, but there's actually two different definitions of "translation quality" going on here:

1) Ren's translation quality argument: how consistent the translation is to the original work. He's right when he says that it's unfair for "Certain individuals to constantly complain about the quality of a translation and how it isn't comparable to the original."

2) Tiago's translation quality argument: how readable the translation is. He's right too: Ageha's route is famous for being COMPLETELY INCOMPREHENSIBLE. The other routes were readable indeed, but man, you cannot understand a majority of what is going on in Ageha's route.

Edit: Hmm, I'm not sure if Ren's point is true regarding that the reason for Ageha's incomprehensible route is due to the quantity aspect of the translation (aka removing lines/scenes) or if it really is due the quality aspect (as Decay mentioned via Pabloc's excerpts) but I'm leaning towards quality.

~~~
So while Ren's argument may be true to those that are bashing Moenovel for not being 'consistent to the original' in its translation, I think those of us that are bashing Moenovel for having an 'incomprehensible' translation are justified~
 

[OriginalRen]

I am saying that there are sentences which literally have nothing to do with how they were originally. Either that, or they don't grasp the meaning of "context" or how it is necessary on a game like this.

 

Have you played "If My Heart Had Wings"? 

I'm sure if you did, you also spotted some lines which are completely out of context. I can load my game a search for examples at a later date.

 

Person 1 says something and Person 2 doesn't even reply, or if he does, he says something not at all related to what person 1 said. This is the reason why I was unable to continue Ageha's route in particular, as after 2 hours, I had no idea what was happening in her route. (I will give it to you I understood the rest of them decently enough, save for the occasional random line)

 

Doesn't this relate to the fact that lines were literally removed from the game? If that's the case, it would make sense that things jump around and are completely lost, which again relates to the point about quantity.

[Vokoca]

Your statement can also be argued the other way. Since when do editors whose 1st language isn't English think they have the right to decide what proper grammar is? Anyone in their mother thinks that because they speak English they can edit it as well. No, they can't. Until people get off their high horse and learn to accept that fact editors will continue to ruin translations that may have already been good in the 1st place. I never said bad English is acceptable, because bad writing in any language is not acceptable for story telling, but honestly who are any of us to say that we are professional English majors who have edited books thousands of times? Just because I teach English doesn't mean I can edit full length books properly, let alone a book originally written in another language. What bothers me the most is that editors and/or someone who is learning Japanese thinks they are entitled to edit and have some massive knowledge about how grammar works in the English language, when in reality half of them have no idea what the fuck they are talking about.

 

To stay on topic, people bash this translation because they think it ruins the game. While I detest Pulltop (and therefore Moenovel) for other reasons, I give them credit for trying. Having grammar mistakes and word errors represent their group poorly, sure, but it doesn't make the game unreadable; people use context to read poorly written sentences.

But I haven't said a word about that either. Just like I wrote in my previous post, if it's not your native language, then you shouldn't work with the text at all - definitely not at the official level, at the very least. I'm just looking at this from the consumers' point of view - we shouldn't readily accept something as bad as the "translation" MoeNovel pushed out. Being badly translated is one thing, but being horribly written too... come on, no one should pay a single cent for that.

 

Translating is a job like any other, and we shouldn't be paying for a shitty job.

[Decay]

I will say it again: Moenovel's quality of translation did not ruin this game. It's lack of quantity did. Removing scenes which were crucial to character development in the routes and removing dialogue are what destroyed the game, not the choice of words they used.

I disagree with this entirely. I think you're understating just how bad the translation was. Some parts weren't actually readable. Some parts were actually incomprehensible. And I definitely think it was bad enough to ruin the game. It was THAT bad. 

[OriginalRen]

But I haven't said a word about that either. Just like I wrote in my previous post, if it's not your native language, then you shouldn't work with the text at all - definitely not at the official level, at the very least. I'm just looking at this from the consumers' point of view - we shouldn't readily accept something as bad as the "translation" MoeNovel pushed out. Being badly translated is one thing, but being horribly written too... come on, no one should pay a single cent for that.

 

Translating is a job like any other, and we shouldn't be paying for a shitty job.

 

Nobody should pay money on Steam for the preorder of Aliens: Colonel Marines or Watchdogs either, but we all know what happened with those games.

 

Money back? I say nay.

[OriginalRen]

I disagree with this entirely. I think you're understating just how bad the translation was. Some parts weren't actually readable. Some parts were actually incomprehensible. And I definitely think it was bad enough to ruin the game. It was THAT bad. 

 

Again, does this not relate to the fact that lines were literally removed from the game in certain routes? They didn't fix the lines, they took them out and didn't even both to edit the lines around them. Of course that would cause things to be unreadable.

 

Example:

 

Ibuki: "What should we do Taiyou?"

Taiyou (via open window): "I want to see Ibuki-chan's panties. I love panties!"

Ibuki: "Taiyou is such a pervert!"

 

Example with the line literally taken out of the game, because panties:

 

Ibuki: "What should we do Taiyou?"

Ibuki: "Taiyou is such a pervert!

 

Does that make any sense? No.

[Mr Poltroon]

Doesn't this relate to the fact that lines were literally removed from the game? If that's the case, it would make sense that things jump around and are completely lost, which again relates to the point about quantity.

One could argue with that, at least on Ageha's route. Unfortunately, the restoration patch which adds back these removed sentences does not fix this inconsistency or lack of coherency.

 

But I feel these appear too randomly. And too often. 

[Decay]

Again, does this not relate to the fact that lines were literally removed from the game in certain routes? They didn't fix the lines, they took them out and didn't even both to edit the lines around them. Of course that would cause things to be unreadable.

 

Example:

 

Ibuki: "What should we do Taiyou?"

Taiyou (via open window): "I want to see Ibuki-chan's panties. I love panties!"

Ibuki: "Taiyou is such a pervert!"

 

Example with the line literally taken out of the game, because panties:

 

Ibuki: "What should we do Taiyou?"

Ibuki: "Taiyou is such a pervert!

 

Does that make any sense? No.

No, this is a different issue. Even in parts with no removed content, there are really difficult to understand segments. The most notorious badly translated part of the VN is in the Ageha route when Hotaru is hanging all over the MC. There are no removed lines here, yet it's still impossible to understand what's actually happening or why anyone is doing what they're doing. In many cases, each line seemingly has nothing to do with the last. The translation is an incredibly inaccurate hot mess that is very confusing to read. 

 

edit: I should say that the version I read was one with all of the content restored in its entirety. It did not improve understandability of the bad parts.

[Nosebleed]

Oh my god, it's being released on Steam. This is the greatest annoucement ever!

 

[OriginalRen]

Oh my god, it's being released on Steam. This is the greatest annoucement ever!

 

 

For some reason, all of my concerns and worries are gone. You win.

[Decay]

To elaborate on this issue, and why it's not just a matter of removed content but the translation being inherently bad at the core, here are some excerpts from Pablo, who is attempting to fix the translation: https://vndb.org/t5268#11

 

Here are some more excerpts, this time in the twins route: https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/1461-kono-oozora-h-scenes-porting-project/?p=190114

 

It's easy to look at each individual example and say "eh, it's not a big deal", but when you realize that there's stuff that is that bad multiple times in every scene, it makes for a very confusing read overall. The script becomes contradictory, and you have to stop and try to piece things together every so often.

[Darklord Rooke]

Your statement can also be argued the other way. Since when do editors whose 1st language isn't English think they have the right to decide what proper grammar is? Anyone in their mother thinks that because they speak English they can edit it as well. No, they can't. Until people get off their high horse and learn to accept that fact editors will continue to ruin translations that may have already been good in the 1st place. I never said bad English is acceptable, because bad writing in any language is not acceptable for story telling, but honestly who are any of us to say that we are professional English majors who have edited books thousands of times? Just because I teach English doesn't mean I can edit full length books properly, let alone a book originally written in another language. What bothers me the most is that editors and/or someone who is learning Japanese thinks they are entitled to edit and have some massive knowledge about how grammar works in the English language, when in reality half of them have no idea what the fuck they are talking about.

 

Ahaha, you've touched on a pet-irritation of mine. I was involved in a translation project not long ago as an editor, and I can tell you that the amount of people who actually know how to edit a piece of work is tiny. You had all these people rock up to be an editor when all you could use them for was proof-reading duties. It isn't even about grammar, quite a large number of people know grammar (not I but there are plenty of references you can refer to) it's about style (and other stuff, but let's keep this post a reasonable size.) If all you're doing is correcting spelling or grammar you're proof-reading and not editing. So you had all these people rock up to be an editor, take a script, hand it back half a day later with just spelling and a couple of grammar errors highlighted. Some of the translators didn't care, the amount of frustration it caused me was immense. It took a number of months to find ONE other person who could edit at an acceptable level.

 

The group leader once asked me if I wanted a team of editors, in frustration I told him I wanted a team of writers. Editors know style, editors know how to write, if you can't write you can't edit. The only reason I can edit to an okay level (not great but acceptable) is because I've spent the last 10 years informally studying writing styles, I like to write and that's how you learn basically. You read a lot and examine how they do things, both the good and the bad.

 

Some translators know how important editing is, some are unaware though. One translator told me he could edit himself because he was a 'native english speaker,' I felt like putting my head through a wall *sigh*... To be fair he is okay at it, his reasoning really ticks me off though. 

 

This is a pretty interesting discussion :3. Not many of these on Fuwa

[Pabloc]

@Original Ren

Do you even know what we are talking about here?

 

MoeNovel's translation is unreadable, and by "unreadable" I mean - several lines make little to no sense, are completely out of context, contradict each other, mix up which character is speaking, etc. etc., up to the pure gibberish that is especially frequent during aviation/aerodynamics infodumps (and there are plenty of those). Again - it's not about removed lines. Absolutely nothing was removed from infodumps, and during the entire common route and Kotori's route I bumped merely into 4-5 errors caused by missing lines - but that wasn't censorship. Their poor excuse of a translator just couldn't handle the line length properly, so he split one line in two (to fit it into the textbox) and skipped another line entirely.

 

So no, it's not about grammar mistakes, word errors or translation being slightly different from the original. It's about stuff making absolutely no sense whatsoever on a regular basis. It's just a charage and it doesn't have a complex plot, so you will roughly understand what is going on most of the time...  but, is this really your idea of an acceptable translation?

 

And yeah, I was going to link my examples, but Decay ninja'd me.

Of course, I'm not a native English speaker and I'm learning Japanese entirely through self-study to boot, so I definitely have no right to correct or edit anything. But hey, I provided the original JP text - feel free to show those examples to someone perfectly fluent in Japanese and then to a native English speaker with superb writing skills if you want. They will explain you which version is an utter garbage and why.

[Nosebleed]

But isn't "stuff making absolutely no sense whatsoever" bad editing and censoring rather than translation in the true sense of the word?

 

We all aknowledge MoeNovel did a bad job, but what Ren is saying is they failed in the censoring/editing of it rather than the translation aspect.

 

At least this is what I got from reading this convo.

 

We should probably go back to MoeNovel's failure at delivering an annoucement though which was this thread's original purpose.

A new thread should be opened to discuss stuff related to anything else.

[Darklord Rooke]

But isn't "stuff making absolutely no sense whatsoever" bad editing and censoring rather than translation in the true sense of the word?

 

Definitely bad editing. To edit means to make something ready for publication, so the editors failed in their primary task. 

[Chifuyu-chan]

Why can't we people just be grateful that we've had our share of Asa and Yoru. And I bet those who are complaining about the quality of the translation are better off reading it in Japanese.

[Pabloc]

@Nosebleed and Rooke

Nope. Editing cannot fix something that was utterly butchered by incompetent translators. We're talking about stuff like:

1) Asa put on an upset face, pretending to cry. She was fun to talk to, reacting honestly to what I said.

That's a contradiction, you'd have to rewrite it completely to turn it into something sensible. And that could damage the already mistranslated script even further.

2) Akari: Wow, I'm impressed. What else should I expect from a club that has motivation comparing to a club that doesn't.

Ageha: Thanks to you Ms. Kumoi. Really, thanks so much!

Akari: Here is a club with motivation, however a little strange I thought.

Akari is basically babbling some nonsense in the last line. What can be edited there? You could try to rewrite it into something more sensible, but it would still miss the original meaning completely.

 

Don't get me wrong - proper editing (not just proof-reading) is absolutely vital for making good translations. But, when the translation is awfully inaccurate and messy, it's simply unsalvageable. Editing garbage is a waste of time.

[Decay]

Yeah, when the translation is frequently outright wrong, editing can't fix it. You need a retranslation. We aren't just talking about bad english here. The translation is wildly inaccurate and the inaccuracy leads to confusion. A "good" editor could maybe just make shit up in order to get the script to make sense, but if it doesn't mean the same thing as the japanese script, that is still bad translation. And if you take it too far, you start to heavily contradict the actual story. You can only massage a bad translation so much. It should be obvious that the single most important part of the translation lies on the translators' shoulders. It is their job to provide not just accuracy, but something sensible an editor can work with. Moenovel failed on both counts.

[sanahtlig]

Poor editing results in awkward lines, e.g., a native speaker would never say something like that.  Editing is important because a long written work that doesn't flow smoothly becomes a chore to read.  Well-written sentences with occasional grammar errors are more acceptable than poorly written sentences that are technically correct.

 

Poor translation results in the original meaning being lost, e.g., you can no longer follow the conversation.

 

It sounds like there's a lot of the former and a bit of the latter.  But because loss of meaning is much more serious than awkward lines, it garners more attention.

[OriginalRen]

@Original Ren

Do you even know what we are talking about here?

 

MoeNovel's translation is unreadable, and by "unreadable" I mean - several lines make little to no sense, are completely out of context, contradict each other, mix up which character is speaking, etc. etc., up to the pure gibberish that is especially frequent during aviation/aerodynamics infodumps (and there are plenty of those). Again - it's not about removed lines. Absolutely nothing was removed from infodumps, and during the entire common route and Kotori's route I bumped merely into 4-5 errors caused by missing lines - but that wasn't censorship. Their poor excuse of a translator just couldn't handle the line length properly, so he split one line in two (to fit it into the textbox) and skipped another line entirely.

 

So no, it's not about grammar mistakes, word errors or translation being slightly different from the original. It's about stuff making absolutely no sense whatsoever on a regular basis. It's just a charage and it doesn't have a complex plot, so you will roughly understand what is going on most of the time...  but, is this really your idea of an acceptable translation?

 

And yeah, I was going to link my examples, but Decay ninja'd me.

Of course, I'm not a native English speaker and I'm learning Japanese entirely through self-study to boot, so I definitely have no right to correct or edit anything. But hey, I provided the original JP text - feel free to show those examples to someone perfectly fluent in Japanese and then to a native English speaker with superb writing skills if you want. They will explain you which version is an utter garbage and why.

 

What you fail to understand is that people expect translations to be universal, and in these arguments you literally edited stuff from those examples that honestly did not need to be edited.

 

OL: "Minase, you just said you're dating Habane?! Seriously?

Your Line: "Minase, you're dating Habane-san?! Is that true?

 

This is a perfect example of what I'm getting at. This is what I like to call "the otaku translator/editor mindset." In your example, you added a honorific because you wanted to stick to the original Japanese text as best as possible. By doing this, you actually made that line worse. If any English speaker used honorifics when speaking, they would get made fun of on the spot. If you want to translate into English, don't use a honorific, otherwise you sound like you don't know what language you want to speak in; let's put it in English, but keep it Japanese in meaning. What? If that's the case, don't even write the story in English!

 

But to finish my end of this discussion because I can see it won't go anywhere and we are discussing something that has long been removed awhile ago in another thread similar to this one, Moenovel ruined a game. End of story.

[Pabloc]

^ Errr, you kinda missed the part that actually was fixed there.

Aoi did NOT say he was dating Kotori. His friends bombarded him with questions as soon as he showed up at school (they were confirming the rumors). That translation error made it seem like Aoi ran into the classroom and declared that he is dating Kotori or something ("you just said"), which is out-of-character and completely messes up the entire conversation later on.

 

As for honorifics and such, let's move the further discussion to that thread:

https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/7375-what-do-you-look-for-in-a-translation-project/