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Speaking from the heart, I agree with most of what Aizen-sama said. I also approve of his use of my quote up there. Now, to be clear here... it hurts horribly the first time someone criticizes your translation. I experienced this repeatedly as a fansubber for anime and it only gets worse for VN fantranslators because it is text and not audio. Do you know the reason so many translators experience 'burn-out'? It's a combination of the sheer amount of work they put into what was, to them, a labor of love, only to have some smartmouth jackass publicly insult them for typos, nitpick about word choices, and generally make an ass of themselves... As he quoted me saying above, when you put that much time into something, only to have someone snipe at you over the details, it slowly corrodes your motivation, leaving you apathetic toward translation in general. Moreover, when you are a translator looking for just a few words of encouragement and you get some ****head wailing about how the translation is behind schedule, it pretty much shatters you. Human beings aren't designed to work without some sort of compensation, whether it is a full belly, cash, emotional satisfaction, or social encouragement. With something as time-consuming as VN translation, the pathetically small amounts of money offered by those who want to 'pay' a translator and the emotional satisfaction from a job well done just aren't enough to motivate one to finish one of these projects. If you worked the same amount of hours some people put into fantls in a retail job in the US, you would actually make more money than you could from a 'professional' translation job in many cases. So... for those who think translation is 'easy' or 'pays well', get a clue. Even I never seriously thought companies would willingly pay what that kind of work deserves when I was a newbie, and that was over a decade in the past.

Another thing is that most people in the community will never even try to experience fantl from the other side of things... they don't realize how much time it eats up, that emptiness you feel when you realize you've used dozens of hours of your personal time only to put out a patch that people bash left and right for 'errors' and other shit. If you make a fantl patch good enough to attract a company's interest in a localization, please do cash in. I'll cheer for you with all my heart (this statement is a generalized one directed to all fantl groups).

Dude, I will say I disagree with you, but Im very very glad to find someone like you. In my opinion, all elements of a work of fiction must be treated equally. Writing can be just as powerful as art or cause the same amount of damage, if bad, imo. I also watched that video but what opened my mind about the subject was this post. Before reading that, I also thought that story and characters> everything else. But then, I started searching and studying more and I finally realize art, soundtrack, animation, voice acting, etc. can all bring emotions and be intelectually stimulating just like story and characters. It makes me sick seeing people saying stuff like: "I dont care about art" because that is not an opinion, that is a lie. People 'think' they dont care about art because they never studied how it is used and thus do not realize its impact. Those people tend to think good art is just being pretty and therefore it is easier to make than a good story. Now even if I disagree that writing is inferior to art or soundtrack, it makes me really glad to see people like you, at least to balance the amount of overrate writing gets from the community.

You're much better off just getting someone who knows what they're doing translating it in the first place. Translation checking is a luxury some localization projects have, but at least in fan translations, it's largely there to compensate for the fact that most of the people working in fan translations just aren't very good translators. 99% of the time, if they were passable at translating, they'd get out of fan translation and translate for a living. If the translation is best described as garble, no editor can save it short of going to check every translated line and effectively redoing the work. I think what you're saying here is predicated on a mistaken assumption people often make when talking about localization: that there's some sort pidgin language between Japanese and English (let's call it Fantranslationese). Bizarrely, some people not only believe in the existence of Fantranslationese, but they have even convinced themselves that they prefer to read Fantranslationese over English. But make no mistake: Fantranslationese is not a language, and it does not communicate anything like what the original Japanese did and what a decent English translation would. Fantranslationese is a pale shadow of a language, and an editor can only do so much to fix a "translation" attempting to use it short of retranslating the work because the editor otherwise doesn't actually get an experience like reading the original. Relying on editors to inject flair into a Fantranslationese script means you lost all the flair that was in the original. You're certainly not there yet, but you're well on your way to writing fanfiction instead of a translation, if you go this route. Editors should be polishing a translation, smoothing out rough edges and ensuring consistency. They absolutely should be fixing the translator's mistakes, always with the aid of the translator, because the editor sees the work differently and therefore is going to rarely find translation mistakes due to their different view. This is a given especially because of how ambiguous and context-dependent Japanese is. I never want to work on any project with a translator who believes this.

Surely too many VNs have lead many fans into a form of weird masochism.

There seems to be a similar theme to your answers, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what it is. I think you’re being a little too subtle...

And Nayleen descended from the heavens to smite both bitch and whore (banned his ass for good) and he saw that peace had returned to the lands once more.

Definitely appreciating whatever Ezee has done for the team so far. It's sad to hear that one of your members is leaving, but life goes on. You guys have been doing a good job, imo. More power to your team~

Maybe because he wants to share more games with the world,despite it mostly being a thankless job. People can rant about stuff and still be involved in said stuff. I absolutely hate this aspect of translation as well but i still want to to be a translator.

^ pretty much. People, even if new, should first do some interior or exterior research before posting these retarded posts that have already been done to death. The level of ignorance shown with these posts/threads only comes to show how much people don't know and/or don't care about what happens behind the scenes and just want the end result. And it indeed isn't, if you aren't doing it for: Learning, like say, practicing for better linguistic skills or just overall better understanding of a language. Have huge amounts of motivation and drive for it. Want to get involved more in the scene, or use it as a stepping stone in your future career, or something of that sort. I'm very much triggered that people aren't double-checking on what they're doing on the internet or in general, and donations for fan-translations are a very good example of that. If they'd just dig around for a bit, they'd find pretty easily that paying money for fan-work is in most cases illegal. People honestly should pay more attention before bashing something they don't like, but that part of humans won't change, ever. Things be dumb and unfair to the end, so better get a thicker skin before sliding deeper. Or at all, really.

Meh. I'll stick with not learning Japanese.

In terms of books I sampled (read the first ten chapters at least) the number balloons to 300 or so... the seventy I'm talking about are the ones I was finding the most interesting. Here is a list of the ones I enjoyed the most (even if some were trashy). The Chaos Seeds (think an isekai/other world story with a protagonist who constantly swings back and forth between enlightened self-interest, pragmatism, and lust for power/stat geeking). The Stork Tower (extremely interesting dystopian future with a genius street rat who makes powerful enemies in the virtual and real worlds) Light Online (protagonist starts out as an out-of-luck NEET who is about to be turned into a virtual slave and then manages to rise high by playing a VRMMO in an unusual style). The Ten Realms - Protagonists are an amputee mercenary named Erik and his comrade and best friend Rugrat. They end up in the Ten Realms, two soldiers in a land of magic, and they quickly realize the only way to be themselves is to gain power and challenge themselves. Sort of a blend of Wuxia cultivation, military fantasy, and craft obsessive nation-building with two foul-mouthed soldiers with hidden depths leading the way. The Dark Elf Chronicles- In a future where a 'zombie particle' has contaminated most of the lifeforms on Earth, a few survivors try to live long enough to find a way to copy themselves into an online game while also stabilizing said game so it won't be a pure hellworld when they do so. Tons of ups and downs in this story. The Shadow Sun series- In this one, a mysterious System essentially unleashes massive numbers of super-powered monsters to cull humanity in preparation for aliens bidding on the land and resources. Very much a survival apocalypse story for the first three books. The Silver Fox & the Western Hero - Pure Wuxia with hardcore cultivation and horrid levels of racial prejudice... and a young former American plopped down in the middle who has a stat sheet in his head. The protagonist seems fairly normal, until he isn't. He is intelligent to the point of being brilliant, and absolutely devoted to the path he chooses. However, he is also capable of rising above his own desires at key points. Honestly, I can't wait until the next one comes out. Battleborne- First in a new series about a soldier who dies with his unit and gets reincarnated as a combination of several races by a Valkyrie as reward for his life of war and bravery. All Trades- A former conman goes into a virtual reality game to earn the money to give back to the family that supported him after his term in prison. He really has turned a new leaf, but he quickly finds himself riding the figurative tiger by the tail as he tries to do right by those around him while also earning enough money to pay off his loan shark.

Well, of course a prologue wouldn't work in a mystery horror story, but that's not what I was talking about. It's particularly meaningful for high-concept fantasy and sci-fi world that can be confusing to the player if it's not explained properly. Giving just enough context to make it comprehensible at the beginning, and minimize the need for infodumps when the action picks up pace is pretty optimal. In the case of your story, I simply think it could've done with a lot less info in general. I'd like it more being vague than just explaining the lore this way. That is a good point, but if you think of it as another method of "scattering" the infodumps to keep the complexity of the world without creating the walls of info in the middle of the story it should still be worth it. I also don't like encyclopedias if they contain information actually crucial to understanding the story – as you said, it can be cool for fleshing out your world, but it can't be a primary method. ...I might also be speaking from one specific trauma of an EVN with a world that was pretty much incomprehensible because of lack of proper exposition, and with encyclopedia which created more questions than it answered. A good prologue could've done miracles for that game.

Conjueror gave it a bad review, so no thank you.

That's a fascinating way to think about it, I think you're right. I'm hardly well versed in Chuuni but I was also curious as to its meaning at heart. I think it's about greater purpose/meaning, ascending beyond the bounds of everyday thought and society, power to resist shackles and to be able to carve one's emotions upon the world. It differs from power fantasy in that the focus in about escaping society and having purpose, as opposed to masterfully puppeteering the real world.

Does not like pink blood. 0/10 Review. Doesn't get the "essence" of the game.

I wish the community would be a bit more tolerant about translation quality of fan translations, or at least offer criticism in a more constructive manner instead of just bashing it. While I never worked on a fan translation, I worked with a few team members on a mod for a computer game for years. So I do know what it's like to work on a huge project in your spare time. And there are times when just hate it and want to pack it all in. And when you then just get some bashing comments instead of encouragement, you really want to scream out...

Most new VN addicts when I first started were definitely the type to feel 'entitled'. Actually, this applies to some extent to all people who want an excuse to pirate video games... The only way to get past that stage is to realize that you aren't the center of the world and people don't move to your convenience. I guess I can be at ease because I just buy the Japanese versions and play them, but I remember it being harder before I started doing that... a lot harder. Nonetheless, most people who start whining about 'selling out' are morons. Selling fantranslations to localization companies is practically an established tradition in the community now, after all. Edit: I guess it is because I actually had a good understanding of economics combined with having experienced the tug of war between Minori and NNL at a distance over Ef, but I honestly cheer whenever a fantranslation group 'sells out' that way. The jackasses who want their free content can whine all they want, but they, quite frankly, cease to have any moral ground to stand on the second they decide not to pay for the official versions when they come out. I'm not a hard-to-the-bone capitalist, but I still think that if you are going to play a game, you should pay the money if you have money. Edit2: And, what official localizations do, in my mind, is provide a much easier way to purchase Japanese games... especially since a lot of the Steam versions have the Japanese text selectable, lol.

I 100% agree with you on almost everything, and that's the reason we get so well along in this scene in the first place. Anyways, yeah, the scene and groups is getting isolated, and it's pretty damn visible too; I doubt all the lunatic entitlement, putting TL-groups and the members within on a pedestal, and the clear lack of straightforward ways of communicating with the groups helps. Also, don't use IRC as a communication-hub for god's sakes, IRC is terrible. The easiest way to leviate this "chasm" growing between TL-groups and people waiting for patches is just making that easy way of communication. So, if there's any groups and/or group members reading this post, just set up a Discord server, for fucks sake. Takes literally 30 minutes. Joining hands with other groups as a group of your own really is a good way of helping other groups helping themselves and vice versa. Unity's also a really good thing, and the groups get things done more efficiently this way, which s why Aizen and I started that whole Discord server in the first place. As for the entitlement, that's not goin' anywhere anytime soon. People will be salty shitheads until the end of time. All we can really do aside from communicating with them is to wait for quote-on-quote "selling out" to become more common and to more fan translation projects to start cooperating with the official localization companies. As for Fuwa as the hub of translation projects, frankly, it's too outdated to work properly. Sure it gives publicity nicely, but that's basically it looking at what else it does well. Maybe at some point there'll be a better option for a hub, but only time will tell.

You're welcome. (Still working on the dollarpound.)

Darbury "Ïf prëtty wërë äll thät mättërëd, Ï'd püt ümläüts övër ëvëry vöwël. Bëcäüsë ït mäkës thëm löök lïkë thëy'vë göt lïttlë Mïckëy Möüsë ëärs."

This is a pretty good narrative between @Darbury and @Palas that I'm reading... on my computer screen... with the on-screen text matching their avatars... THIS ISN'T A BLOG! IT'S A VISUAL NOVEL!!!

Just because you failed doesn't mean others can't do it. I'm reading untranslated stuff quite well after a year of learning.

Mate, I have no idea why you even pay attention to people complaining. People don't like that you advertise? Tough. People don't like what you have to say? Tough. People don't like the way you say things? Tough. A significant number of people on the internet need to learn how to ignore shit they don't like without a piece of software to do it for them. It used to be a valuable skill back in the day. On the other hand they are also free to complain, and whine, and bitch, just as you're free to ignore them. Do as you wish within the rules, you're lucky enough to live in a free country. and let people react how they react *shrugs*

出る杭を打つ is drawn from a Japanese saying that is basically the opposite of the American saying 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease'. He is taking an even larger risk than Sanahtlig is hinting at by saying this. Japanese companies in general do not take kindly to their employees putting the company out there on a limb, and the industry already suffered badly as a whole from the infamous Rapelay incident and a number of follow-up incidents. I don't think those of us over here can really comprehend the pressures the average Japanese companies are under. For one thing, social pressure can turn into economic pressure with alarming swiftness over there. For another, Japan is reliant enough on other countries' trade for its survival that these kind of scandals overseas can cause hysterical reactions from their lawmakers. The eroge industry, being a niche industry by nature, is vulnerable to crackdowns in a way that the car and food production industries aren't. Since eroge are basically a guilty pleasure and a luxury, there are plenty of lawmakers that wouldn't see a problem with doing away with them if it meant they could improve their own chances of remaining in office. It isn't like they are universally accepted, even by otakus... so before you criticize eroge-makers for being 'xenophobic', you should at least try to see the bind they are in.

Because it only takes one "scandal" for everything to be destroyed. And trust me the West is the best at coming up with scandals. There's demands by fans, but over here you also have all the people who turn games into a political thing and would likely attack many of Japan's games to fill their political agenda. The west is plagued by people that work for the sole sake of running their mouths over every little thing and turn it into a national issue. Because they have nothing else to do with their lives but to complain, otherwise they have no jobs. Eroge becoming popular here would be like building a huge bait for them. I'll say it again, all it takes is one game to get enough attention to make the whole company come crumbling down. We have nothing but our own culture to blame.

Are Japanese the xenophobic ones or are we the ones that forced them to take action against something that used to be normal for them? I really don't like thinking that the Japanese are just xenophobic, we're a huge part of the problem, we're the ones that overreact and have power over them, that's why they don't want to consider us, because we give them a hard time for it. I really liked seeing this side of a developer, it really goes to show that it's not just because xenophobia, but because they want to avoid legal trouble we western folks give them.

I understand your preference for these type of works (VNs with plenty of choices), as this medium distinguises itself by how much agency is given to the player through forking paths and alternate endings, and it is surely one of the main draws of the medium. However, I believe that agency can be given in different ways other than choices. For example, Umineko is engaging because the many different elements come together to draw you into the atmosphere and it gives you a mystery to solve, while Swan Song forces you to think by yourself by presenting you with the idea of how people and society as a whole would change if they were thrust into catastrophe. How would your own life change if the rules and guidelines that keep society together had no one to uphold them? In fact, I dislike VNs with too many choices. They can often be meaningless and obscure your path towards reaching your desired ending. I'm not talking about games like Canvas 2 where you're presented, with dozens, hundreds of choices, but perhaps games like Clannad and Kara no Shoujo that leave you wondering how a seemingly meaningless choice you made many hours ago happened to lead to a Bad End. Thus, perhaps I'd say I'd rather have no choices than bad choices if that's the alternative. In conclusion, I think a balance is necessary, and choices should exist if they make sense in the story, not just for the sake of being there. Either way, hope you enjoy Swan Song, it's one of my favorites.

You're right, I'm Ranzo The Ultimate Bastard, and I'm the only one enjoying this fic. Oh, this is the soundtrack for this fanfic, don't bother changing it. Thanks babe xoxoxo

One thing that bothers me is that, precisely because they are written by men, the majority of otomege that catch my interest end up with DIDS (Damsel in Distress Syndrome) patient protagonists (which I hate like the plague). A few I have played or tried to play managed to escape this poisonous plague (Sanzen Sekai), but it is as ubiquitous to the otomege genre as the 'average guy/idiot who somehow forms a harem' is in charage.

In another stomach, far far away through Clephas's infinite bowels, two figures that looked distinctly similar to Alden and Jazid came into being. However, no one would have mistaken them for the originals, for their eyes glowed orange, their expressions twisted with blissful glee. Whatever their pasts, their memories, it no longer mattered... all that mattered was the one, fundamental truth they had discovered. "Cannibalism is Love," They intoned in deeply happy voices, as one, their mouths opening wider than they should have been able to to show steel trap teeth and a long, sharp tongue covered with tiny teeth designed to tear flesh from bone. Yet two more Clephas Cultists awaited there, in that place, for the chance to step forth and spread the beautiful truth they had discovered to the universe.

My advice is not to try to match my output... to be blunt, I'm seriously pushing the edges of my own limits just to keep going. Cherry pick your favorite genres and ignore everything else.

Nice review there Calendula, and I think I could said that it was the best entertaining review that I'd ever read up to now. Look forward to your next kamimoege review thing later. PS - To both @Asonn and @fun2novel, here's an article that might help you two to understand the review. Although the score was genuine though, and therefore I would said that it's the best to not question that.

In my experience, there's an exception for the hyphenization-of-honorifics rule when the original Japanese would add a glottal stop. When this happens, it's usually represented using consonant doubling. For a non-translated but salient example, the weeb visual novel Katawa Shoujo uses both "Shicchan"* and "Hicchan" for Shizune and Hisao respectively. For something the old guard will get, look at poor Sacchin in Tsukihime. The same applies to stuff like "Takkun". *a Hepburn hardliner may argue that this should be "Shitchan", but fuck them, I only write "matcha" for green tea because normies use that spelling). - You might want to either linebreak the document manually or use something else than github or, idk, change some setting; lines are currently not automatically word wrapped and reading the text online is thus a pain. I had to copy it to notepad++ to read it personally. - The "other sometimes untranslated terms" heading is confusing when it comes to terminology. On first reading, it seemed to me that you were placing "senpai, sensei, onee-san" in the "not honorifics" bucket, especially since you end with "bento" which actually isn't one. On second reading I realized that you may not have meant this, but it's a mental stretch. I think this section needs to be rewritten. I think the correct heuristic, if you keep any Japanese words, is probability of comprehension. The most common honorifics that people may know about is -san, -kun, -chan, and -sama. -tan, maybe. Knowing about "nii-san" and "nee-san" comes next and is somewhat more dubious, and those terms arguably carry more important information that you may be denying uncomprehending viewers if they are not clued in by other details. "senpai" and "sensei" are slightly further out, but not much. All in all I agree with the position of removing honorifics, however. - This ideological statement needs statistical backing. From what I understand the people you consulted with have been editors, not readers, and honestly preferring to reverse name order is status signalling by people who consider themselves more "learned". For what it's worth, back when I was a nascent VN reader I was bothered by the reversed name order used for the localization of Ever17. Since what you're really trying to do is establish standards, removing the ideological statement and letting the rest remain is also fine. - I disagree with your interpretation of "Uuu" -> "Aww"; the mapping is simply too imprecise and will cause conflicts when lazy people decide to apply the letter of your guideline. For example, part of one line in the wondrously transliterated Koirizo fan translation is rendered as "Uuu, gusu" in its English translation. Gusu is a sob, Uuu is a sound of consternation and unhappiness in this case. Writing this as "Aww, sniff" would not accurately portray the tone the VA used here. I might be mistaken about how Americans interpret "Aww", however - I see it as 1. dejection 2. disappointment and 3. you just saw a kitten do something cute. - Despite what I said about ideology above, I would like some kind of justification for this, hedged unless you have good reasons not to. Reading the comment thread you have done so in the thread, and considering that you made personal remarks further on in the document, you may want to add it for this. - You could make some fairly strong demographic arguments as to why this is a good idea if you wanted to. I guess you might have left it out for a reason, though.

Thank you for exemplifying the exact reason people give up on translations. I'm glad such healthy mentality as "don't bitch about work, just work or get out" is so prevalent.

It's really weird, as it's almost like another language. Because I'm so used to seeing American spelling as well, I easily switch from one mode to the other. As you're likely not used to seeing regular English spelling, you wouldn't have been fluent in it so I can understand why it would be so hard for you. Yes, quite a few still needed to be corrected after your edits, but I've mostly automated that process with my own programming scripts since the bulk of my editors use American spelling. For what it's worth, I was quite pleased that I was able to translate the explanation of the theory of relativity and am sorry it didn't flow to your liking But then, that's why I paid you all those peanuts to improve it.

Just to add fuel to the fire, I will add that "" can be problematic. It's a quote in English and in the dawn of time (computer time, that is), programmers figured it would be a good sign to quote strings. This mean "This is a line" will leave out the "" in the string itself. Writing ""This is a line"" will end the string at the second " and cause an error. The way to write the line in a way the computer would understand would be "\"This is a line\"". However it could also be written "「This is a line」". However this only goes for " and this would also be accepted by the computer "“This is a line”". For easier comparison: "\"This is a line\"" "「This is a line」" "“This is a line”" Next problem is that most VNs use Japanese locale and as such use the shift-jis encoding (or rather Microsoft's codepage 932, which is virtually identical). This mean that not all characters are available. More specifically whatever is used should be available here Microsoft's cp932 page for 0x81 leading byte. Being aimed at Japanese text, they didn't include “”, but row 60, column 05 to 08 looks useful, or at least as close as one can get to what you asked for. Leaving technical reasons aside, I do actually like the 「」signs. I think they look decent. I just wish they were available with a character width, which didn't provide so much whitespace around them. However they seem to be made to match a default kanji width to make kanji line up vertical. There is nothing we can do about the width, other than making a custom font.

Zaka 「I honestly think Japanese quotes are prettier than the Roman version, though.」

Now the only ones who haven't fought are the GM's aaand ....... Me Yep this definitely means that I'm gonna come with full on OPness spreading Chaos everywhere. All the dark rituals (watching animu) that I've been doing all this while shall finally bear fruit.

A good review of a mediocre game. Classic Derg

BOOOOOOOO! Go back to reviewing yuri, you has been!

No, no, you are entirely mistaken. My interest in male genitals increases threefold per giant, blurry pixel. As for the translation choice, I'm not a native, tricky sounds as English as any other word to me. Same goes for useless. If anything, I found it curious how it had been translated as "tricky", which I hadn't seen before, but that's about it.

Mom, I told you not to stalk me on Fuwa.

Oh how I've fallen trap to this so many times when I typeset manga. I tell myself "Well, I've typed it out and seen the lines with my own eyes, it can't be wrong, I know my spelling", after which I proceed to upload the work without even reading it over once, only to then be met with comments pointing out 2 or 3 typos in different pages and forcing me to OCD and turn my computer back on at 2AM to photoshop those pages again. For shorter things (definitely not applicable to big VNs), when you don't have someone to QC/Proofread (as in, someone qualified for said position), my suggestion is to at the very least read the entire finished product a couple times yourself and show it to one or two people, chances are they'll spot a lot of the basic errors pretty easily. I've found that just having a couple people review my work before I upload it has significantly decreased the amount of typos I make.

Is this one going to be canceled since you can't talk about lolis in a Christian Approved board?