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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/05/17 in all areas

  1. Recent professional English VN releases from known good localization outfits (anything recent from MG, SP, and possibly JAST?) are universally higher quality than fan translation patches. The team that did Dies irae was not associated with any of those, and this was their first project; they likely incorrectly believed they didn't need (or perhaps could not afford at the rate they promised? who knows.) as much QC as is merited. Turns out that when you have hundreds of thousands of words to deal with (Dies irae might even be into the millions?), even if you're pretty damn good, you still make a lot of mistakes. I'd be curious to see a citation of a really excellent fan translation, which some people in this thread seem to be asserting not only exists, but even go so far as to imply it's the norm. Honestly, even the best ones I've read have universally been filled with errors (at least as high an error rate as what you're seeing in Dies irae, given the number of lines you've quoted and the size of the script), and that's to say nothing of abominations like 11eyes. KoiRizo is a great example of a fairly well-written script, for a fan TL, which is again still chock-full of errors, because QC is both hard and hard to prioritize for fan TLs. Or we could go look at, I dunno, the Little Busters! fan TL, which doesn't even have word wrapping in the entire script. I've certainly never read a fan TL with as high a quality as the S;G0 release being called out in this thread, for instance, even though S;G0 does indeed have at least a couple dozen errors that I found when reading it. I think that's nonetheless still pretty solid for a script of its size. I also don't even usually see fan TLs releasing patches; the aforementioned KoiRizo, for instance, certainly had someone who was willing and able to make all those fixes, but the people making the patches couldn't be bothered to take them. Fan TL is a fine thing for getting exposure for stuff that otherwise wouldn't get it, but you're kidding yourselves if you genuinely believe it's higher quality than what you're getting from known good English VN publishers.
    2 points
  2. 12kami

    Birthday thread

    happy late birthday @Kenshin_sama also happy birthday @imnoob92
    1 point
  3. If the missing voices are due to missing voice files in the Japanese release, there is not really anything translators can do about it. However translators can introduce crashes. This would be a crash when displaying a certain line, though this will usually cause a crash even if you try to skip passed it. Not all VN engines are equally friendly towards getting English text and it's can actually be a lot harder to get them working than one might think. Sengoku Rance (the patch, not the MG work in progress) has left some names untranslated because translating them would cause the game to crash. I had to write a program to insert English text into Musumaker because just replacing Japanese text with English will cause crashes and the workaround for that is too tricky to do by hand for each line. It's also worth mentioning that some official translations have been using different engines than the Japanese versions of the same VNs because of engine limitations. For all we know, Fan TLs can crash because of such engine limitations. Fan tls has less freedom when it comes to choice of engine because they can't repack every single data file to match the new engine. Also some VN engines use compiled scripts and moving those to a new engine requires the source code for those scripts. Just like pre-censored CGs, the source code is only available to official translators. In short: yes missing voices and crashes are annoying, but I wouldn't blame the translators for those, at least not without checking that the problems aren't present in the Japanese version or if they are caused by engine limitations. The script errors are due to translators, or rather editors and QC. @Fred the Barber commented pretty well on that part. I was about to write something about how that's not the case and fan tls are progressing etc. (at least those I have internal knowledge of). However your post made me think about this and I have come to realize something. Way back in the dawn of time for English VNs, lets say year 2000, translations were made by a group of people gathering in the same building to work on a translation. Once completed, it was put on CDs, placed in boxes and then the boxes were sold. In other words it was the pre-internet approach. The problem with that approach is that if you happen to live in an area without such a company and you can't or won't move to a location of such a company, the only way to translate is to make a fan tl patch. Sure enough fan tl patches started to appear. Now the one building resulting in CDs approach has died and most (all?) of the companies with it. Today we have some other companies and they have embraced the internet. Suddenly translators can sit in their parent's basement or in some foreign country or whereever they are and work on commercial titles. This means skilled people are no longer forced to only work on fan tl patches. What does this mean for the fan tl patches? Mostly it means brain drain. Skilled people figure why not get paid to do what they currently do for free? Is it the end for fan tls? Not as I see it. The fan tl community will likely shift towards having a bunch of people who does the work to gain experience, which will help them getting a paid job. This means it will not die, but since the official releases will end up with all the skilled and experienced people, we can expect the fan tl quality to drop relative to the official releases. I wouldn't call that dying, but we will likely see fewer masterpieces. Having said that, some people want to translate one specific title and if they can't get paid to do so, they could do it for free, which is likely the main reason why I will say that we might still get masterpieces as fan tls.
    1 point
  4. Happy 27th birthday to our @Kenshin_sama there, and hope you had good year ahead.
    1 point
  5. Don't know who phar is, but as far as I understand, Makoto's, koestl's, and moogy's work are all official releases at this point (at least the ones that are good; ask moogy about the sharin fan TL and see what he thinks...). I've also seen some pretty convincing evidence (i.e., a bunch of screenshots) that the fan releases are not as high quality as the subsequent official release, in the case of Saya no Uta, and I'd be surprised if that's not the case for those same peoples' other works. Regardless, maybe those are good: I guess what I want to argue isn't that there aren't occasionally acceptable quality fan TL releases, so much as that acceptable fan TL releases are the exception, not the rule, whereas I'd say the opposite for recent MG, SP, and JAST releases (that I've seen, at least; I hardly play every VN out there).
    1 point
  6. There's so much wrong with this post that I mentally broke and lifelessly stared at the scared passersby for at least ten minutes.
    1 point
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