Jump to content

re:Edit

  • entries
    29
  • comments
    284
  • views
    15295

Save the Visual Novels! Eat the Whales!


Darbury

5384 views

AuZxDBr.jpg

How do you eat an entire whale? One bite at a time. Preferably with Cholula.

How do you edit/translate/whatever a visual novel? One line at a time. Preferably with bourbon.

Whether you’re a fan of the final product or not, one of the things that impresses me most about MDZ’s fan translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort is that it got released, period. As in, if you were so inclined, you could download the installer right now, patch the original Japanese game, and go play the thing on your new-fangled Windows Pee-Cee. No demos, no one-route partial patches. The whole damned VN in English, finished on schedule and out there in the world.

The project didn’t stall. It didn’t wind up in no-updates-in-six-months-but-we-think-they’re-still-working-on-it hell. It didn’t climb into that white panel van with Little Busters EX, never to be heard from again. The nice man was lying to you, Little Busters EX — there were no cute little puppies in the back. What were you thinking?!

The KoiRizo team did nothing particularly special to make this happen. We just ate the whale one bite at a time.

The rhythm method

By his own account, MDZ worked very methodically on the project, spending an average of 30 minutes every day translating scripts into English. Not when he felt like it. Not when inspiration struck. Not when enough people harassed him with all-caps emails asking why the HELL hadn’t there been any progress updates on the KoiRizo tracker lately. He made it an expected part of his routine, like brushing his teeth or eating dinner. He scheduled regular translation sessions between classes or before heading out in the morning.

He did a little bit. Every. Single. Day.

There’s a word for that: consistency. That’s what gets things done in the real world, not 48-hour marathons every random.randint(1,6) weekends fueled by Red Bull, Hot Pockets, and intense self-loathing. Consistency keeps you from getting burned out. Consistency lets you make reasonable schedules and estimates, then stick to them. Consistency is like goddamned black magic.

Over the course of the project, MDZ had consistency in spades. If he can maintain that approach to life, I have a feeling he’ll be successful at whatever he puts his mind to after college.

SPOILER: Professional lumberjack sports. You heard it here first. Act surprised when he tells you.

When I came on board as an editor, I kept a somewhat similar schedule. I resolved to set aside my commuting time each workday for editing. And so for 40 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes in the evening, Monday through Friday, I’d park my butt in a train seat, break out my laptop, and just edit.

Weekdays were reserved for my family. If you’re married with kids, you know there is no such thing as free time on weekends. If you’re not married and don’t have kids, please tell me what the outside world is like. I hear they came out with a PlayStation 2? That’s gotta be pretty awesome.

Anyway, that’s what I ended up doing. Edit every single workday. For six months. Until it was done.

(Six months? That long to edit a medium-length visual novel? Yeah, that long. KoiRizo weighs in at 36,000+ lines. Over six months, that works out to about 1,400 lines a week, or 210 lines per hour. That’s an edited line every 17 seconds or so, with most of the lines needing substantial polishing/rewriting. I have no idea what pace other VN editors work at, but I felt like this was one I could maintain over the long haul. Call it the distance runner’s lope.)

6m8zL2n.jpg

Special topics in calamity physics

So why all this rambling about whales and consistency? Because I just got back from vacation a few days ago and I’ve been surprised at how long it’s taken me to get my head back into the various projects I’ve been working on (or even writing this blog). And then I got to wondering how often something small like that snowballs into a stalled or even failed project. A missed day turns into a skipped week turns into a skipped month turns into a dead translation.

Which then got me thinking about the coefficient of friction.

It’s basic physics, which I excelled at (failing repeatedly). In layman’s terms, it’s a ratio (μ) that gives you a sense how much force two surfaces exert on each other and, therefore, how much force you need to exert to get something moving from a dead stop. Wooden block on ice? Low coefficient of friction. Wooden block on shag carpet? High coefficient of friction ... and a senseless crime against tasteful décor. Once you overcome that initial friction, it takes comparatively little force to keep an object in motion.

I can easily imagine there’s a coefficient of friction between us and our work, some quantifiable level of resistance that needs be overcome before we get our asses in gear and be productive. And unlike the one in Physics 101, which is constant for any two materials, this one is different every single day. It depends on a bunch of different factors: how interested we are in our projects, how appreciated we feel, what other projects we’ve got going on at the same time, how much sleep we’ve gotten, what else is going on in our lives, whether or not the Mets are currently in the World Series, etc.

Let’s call it the coefficient of slackitude.

Once we get started on a project and make it part of our everyday routine, we can largely ignore this number. We’ve overcome the initial slackitude and, with moderate effort, can keep things rolling along fairly smoothly. But each time we let things coast to a stop, even for a few days, we’ve got to overcome the slackitude all over again. And since that value is variable, it might be much harder the second time around. In fact, it probably will be.

Eventually, we’ll fail to do so. And our project will die.

The takeaway

So other than the fact that I had no business being anywhere near a physics classroom, what can we take away from my incoherent ramblings? A couple things:

  1. The easiest way to make sure your project gets finished is to stick to a regular schedule. Eat the whale a little at a time — every day if you can. Minimize the gaps. Avoid having to face off against that nasty coefficient of slackitude more than once.
  2. The easiest way to make sure your project gets started at all is to pick a time when that coefficient of slackitude is low — when you’re excited by the prospect, when you’re well-rested, when you have relatively few competing interests. When you can focus. Use that time to build your momentum, so when your interest wanes or real life intrudes — it always does and it always will — the project is so embedded in your routine that you can just ride it out.

We need more finished translations in the world. So pull up a chair and eat your whale. Do it for your team. Do it for yourself. Do it for poor Little Busters EX, drugged and ball-gagged in a basement somewhere, forever wondering when it’ll finally get to see the puppies.

SPOILER: Never.

35 Comments


Recommended Comments



You very literally (which, of course, means figuratively) killed me with this sentence: "That’s what gets things done in the real world, not 48-hour marathons every random.randint(1,6) weekends fueled by Red Bull, Hot Pockets, and intense self-loathing."

As for the rest of it, I've got to agree. Mostly because I take most of my outside work projects in bursts, and I know just how bad productivity is like that.

Link to comment

Cholula sauce is from my country! :D
Not the best hot sauce tho. If you want the best go for Valentina (the black label one)
stomach ulcer guaranteed or your money back ;)

Okay, I need some of this Valentina stuff.

The hunt begins... 8)

Link to comment

Too bad the translation/editing was trash tier.

Not really. The average fan-translation is garbage, and I'd say this was a lot better. Far from perfect, but you should probably stop getting so incredibly anal over a single word. 

Link to comment

Too bad the translation/editing was trash tier.

Not really. The average fan-translation is garbage, and I'd say this was a lot better. Far from perfect, but you should probably stop getting so incredibly anal over a single word. 

It's not a single word. Even then, the overuse of a single word can greatly ruin the experience. It did in my case for Umi's route.

Link to comment

Too bad the translation/editing was trash tier.

Not really. The average fan-translation is garbage, and I'd say this was a lot better. Far from perfect, but you should probably stop getting so incredibly anal over a single word. 

It's not a single word. Even then, the overuse of a single word can greatly ruin the experience. It did in my case for Umi's route.

You can always start your own translation and then do the editing yourself or gather a team to do it, if you don't like how others do their work you can easily fix that by doing it yourself and better, complaining about something that was giving to you for free is really easy but actually "eating the whole whale" as Darbury said is not that simple.

Link to comment

You can always start your own translation and then do the editing yourself or gather a team to do it, if you don't like how others do their work you can easily fix that by doing it yourself and better, complaining about something that was giving to you for free is really easy but actually "eating the whole whale" as Darbury said is not that simple.

I can critique it if I want though. It's not like it's free from criticism just because it's a fan translation.

Link to comment

Definitely not trash tier, not to mention that "tricky" was not the only word they used to translate ずるい to begin with. What mostly bothers me is the apparently MDZ-mandated transliteration-only onomatopoeia policy, but there's nothing you can do about your work parameters at times. The typos would bother me if I didn't find it so fun to screenshot them and post them with slight mockery for all to see on Twitter.

Link to comment

The typos would bother me if I didn't find it so fun to screenshot them and post them with slight mockery for all to see on Twitter.

Yeah, sorry about those. We ran into some last-minute issues with our QC team. *cough* :P:D

Link to comment

:jinpou:

I find this offensive to my kind. 

You don't see us writing about how to eat humans bit by bit! 

You should watch Hannibal. You'd like it!

Link to comment

You can always start your own translation and then do the editing yourself or gather a team to do it, if you don't like how others do their work you can easily fix that by doing it yourself and better, complaining about something that was giving to you for free is really easy but actually "eating the whole whale" as Darbury said is not that simple.

I can critique it if I want though. It's not like it's free from criticism just because it's a fan translation.

Of course you can call it "trash-tier" for the use of a certain word, much like the rest of us can laugh at you for it.

Now, I'm sure there's more to it than a word, but the comments you're leaving here are so incredibly nonconstructive that there's nothing to take from them.

Link to comment

Too bad the translation/editing was trash tier.

Not really. The average fan-translation is garbage, and I'd say this was a lot better. Far from perfect, but you should probably stop getting so incredibly anal over a single word. 

It's not a single word. Even then, the overuse of a single word can greatly ruin the experience. It did in my case for Umi's route.

I'd much rather take that than having to reword sentences constantly in my head while reading something or having to deal with transliterating dots (god this annoys me so damn much now). I've had problems with the way certain words or phrases were translated in official translations, even phrases that were reoccurring. Though maybe I just didn't care that much about the tricky use of tricky because I lost interest in this game after like an hour in the first route. Oh well.  

Edited by Chuee
Link to comment

Sure. But "trash tier" is a fairly pompous (and unconstrucive, I might add) way of critiquing.
One would expect some levels of credential from someone willing to make such statements.

I'm just a person that likes VNs. What kind of credentials are needed? Cause I think that's enough to criticize it.

Link to comment

You can always start your own translation and then do the editing yourself or gather a team to do it, if you don't like how others do their work you can easily fix that by doing it yourself and better, complaining about something that was giving to you for free is really easy but actually "eating the whole whale" as Darbury said is not that simple.

I can critique it if I want though. It's not like it's free from criticism just because it's a fan translation.

Of course you can call it "trash-tier" for the use of a certain word, much like the rest of us can laugh at you for it.

Now, I'm sure there's more to it than a word, but the comments you're leaving here are so incredibly nonconstructive that there's nothing to take from them.

It's not just because of zurui. It's been a week since I finished playing it so I don't really remember much about it besides that word. I highly doubt I'm the only that's criticized it so you can just look up bad reviews and find the faults with it.

Link to comment

Sure. But "trash tier" is a fairly pompous (and unconstrucive, I might add) way of critiquing.
One would expect some levels of credential from someone willing to make such statements.

I'm just a person that likes VNs. What kind of credentials are needed? Cause I think that's enough to criticize it.

I would expect you to be able to produce a work of the same magnitude and of greater quality.
Otherwise, what I expect from you is a "hey, thanks for doing the translation/editing, but I think you could have done better", not "trash tier".

Edited by storyteller
Link to comment

I'd much rather take that than having to reword sentences constantly in my head while reading something or having to deal with transliterating dots (god this annoys me so damn much now). I've had problems with the way certain words or phrases were translated in official translations, even phrases that were reoccurring. Though maybe I just didn't care that much about the tricky use of tricky because I lost interest in this game after like an hour in the first route. Oh well.  

I understand what you mean but for some reason this one translation is the worst I've ever seen imo. I'm not saying there aren't worse translations out there but this one suffers from choosing weird word choices. Sometimes I even had to look up uncommon words used. They're not hard words but uncommon enough that I forget what they mean.

Link to comment

Sure. But "trash tier" is a fairly pompous (and unconstrucive, I might add) way of critiquing.
One would expect some levels of credential from someone willing to make such statements.

I'm just a person that likes VNs. What kind of credentials are needed? Cause I think that's enough to criticize it.

I would expect you to be able to produce a work of the same magnitude and of greater quality.
Otherwise, what I expect from you is a "hey, thanks for doing the translation/editing, but I think you could have done better", not "trash tier".

Not to sound ungrateful but trash needs to be called trash. This is why fan translations and official works aren't exactly the best. If more people complained then they'd release a more polished product.

Link to comment

Guest
This blog entry is now closed to further comments.
×
×
  • Create New...