ittaku
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Posts posted by ittaku
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I felt it was a good opportunity to pay for some of the JAST games of long past that I may or may not have acquired without necessarily paying what the fee was for the time.. So I bought 16 games yesterday (didn't want to buy the ones I hated.) Now if only mangagamer would accept bitcoin, I might buy something from them too. Shame no one else is having a moeday sale.
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5 hours ago, Decay said:
Either way, starting a week or two from now, I will have 100x as much free time in the day
I'm not sure if that's good news or bad. Probably a bit of both, but good for us.
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41 minutes ago, Toranth said:
You called a 5 'passable'. What's that mean? To me, obviously, 50% is not passable. It seems, from your response here, that you would not consider 50% passable either. However, as you said, some people would consider it passable. And now you're left with not only a non-linear ranking scale, you've got one that depends on the tastes of the reviewer in multiple categories.
Non-linear, subjective on multiple axes, all before getting to the actual source material? So much variance that I simply don't think you can make anything useful out of such a measure. Which means it really isn't worth discussing - it'll just become another argument trigger.
Fine, I've elaborated above then. Passable means... well see above. Passable was probably the wrong word for it. It's just when the story remains intact.
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Okay so since I came up with the scale, I'm making this up as I go to give some sort of concrete description for what numbers from 0-10 would mean. This is a very non-linear scale, and 10 is meant to be impossible. It also covers both translation and editing and obviously some efforts will have better translation and worse editing (and vice versa) so it won't work everywhere.
0: Failed partial machine translation. Half the lines are still in Japanese. No one's edited it. The game crashes.
1: Unedited machine translation. It's a complete mystery what most lines are saying, looking more like a dictionary list of words that were used in the original. There is no semblance of the original story.
2: Edited machine translation. Someone with no knowledge of the original language has tried to edit MTL output into comprehensible English. Very little effort is put into correcting grammar. The story still remains incomprehensible.
3: Heavily edited machine translation/beginner Japanese translator with heavy MTL assistance. Someone with beginner knowledge of Japanese has heavily edited the text to try and make it represent the apparent flow of the story with some effort to make the grammar tolerable. The story can be vaguely followed, though with wild errors.
4: Intermediate level Japanese translator. Someone has made a decent effort to edit the text to represent the flow of the story and fix grammar. The bulk of the story flow remains intact, but with occasional critical plot points being missed or wrong. Grammar sounds unnatural.
5: Advanced level Japanese translator. A reasonable effort has been made to edit the grammar and text. The entirety of the major plot points remain intact, but with many subtle nuances missed. The grammar often sounds awkward and non-natural. Minor typos are scattered throughout the text with the occasional laughably bad typos.
6: Experienced advanced level Japanese translator. A concerted effort has been made to edit grammar and text. The major plot points are intact, and a significant number of the subtle nuances are captured. The grammar sounds mostly natural with the occasional awkward sounding line. Minor typos are scattered but there are no massive blunders.
7: Experienced advanced level Japanese + solid cultural knowledge translator. Generous effort has been made to polish the grammar and text. All the plot is intact, and the bulk of the subtle nuances are captured. Grammar sounds natural and awkward sounding lines are rare. Typos are infrequent.
8: Extensive cultural knowledge. Multiple pass editing. All the plot is intact, all the subtle nuances are captured. Grammar sounds natural and there are no awkward sounding lines. Typos are rare.
9: Brilliant writing. Perfect editing. The writing flows off the screen perfectly naturally in the translated language as though it was never written in Japanese. Cultural references are conveyed effortlessly. No grammar errors or typos to speak of.
10: Did someone stick a babelfish in my ear? I have entered the matrix. Neo: "I know Japanese". You are spiritually transported in time and space as though you've been part of Japanese culture all your life. You are absolutely convinced you are reading Japanese.
- VirginSmasher and Dreamysyu
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10 hours ago, Toranth said:
The problem with the idea of a 0 to 10 scale is defining what's in between.
If zero is incomprehensible and 10 is perfect... is a 5 a 50% understandable translation? Because to me, that'd be as crappy a product as a zero
No, I called it a passable value, meaning it is a good representation of the original story, though with scattered errors that are not critical to the story, and occasional grammar errors and typos. Passable would mean the story is still intact. It's entirely my own made up scale and non-linear, which is why I tried to define what I thought a 5 was in my original post.
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22 minutes ago, adamstan said:
But that was kind of OT for this thread, so please excuse me, and back to our regular programming
Nah I think it's related as we have to understand the reasons someone might go on the attack with poor translations and this is one potential reason...
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Well, one thing's for sure - at least it gives this almost dead forum a topic it can discuss fervently that is actually even relevant to the forum... This discussion should be a sticky that people post to each and every day. I notice everyone says exactly the same things in slightly different ways, over and over. Rinse and repeat. My turn.
If quality of final product ranged from 0 to 10, where 0 was completely incomprehensible machine translation along with bugs introduced into the game, scenes butchered, crashing, and 10 was absolute perfect translation and editing of high literary standard which is indistinguishable from the original Japanese, along with all menus translated, songs karaoked, CGs uncensored etc. then it would be fair to say that almost nothing is a 0 or a 10. Let's call a 5 a passing mark where the original story is conveyed with reasonable accuracy and with some typos and editing oversights. So what we get is a range somewhere in the middle and fan translations can fall anywhere in that spectrum, but so can professional releases. Making an incredible generalisation, fan translations are more likely to end up lower on that scale than official localisations, though anything's possible. So what it comes down to is - what is the cut off that you'd be happy with reading? Everyone would accept a 10 (though some of you still want your mosaics) and no one would accept a 0. Some people would be happy with a 3 or 4 while others with nothing less than a 7 or 8. This means that the most flexible amongst us wouldn't mind more fan translations while the more stringent amongst us won't be happy even with half the official localisations. The complaint is that some of those that only accept an 8 get angry when someone releases a 3 because they do a disservice... to whom? The game? The writers? The localisation companies? The readers? It's not a pirating issue, as those who pirate the JP version (to patch it) will likely pirate the EN version too, so the original makers won't be getting anything either way. A shit release doesn't stop a good release from being made later on. If anything, it's a good fan release that makes an official localisation less likely (unless it gets picked up.)
The question then is should fan translators be encouraged or discouraged if they end up in the 3 or 4 range? Is it helpful or harmful to the community to have these? Do fan translators use this as a stepping stone towards getting better and/or a paid job or try to get their translation picked up, and is this healthy or not for the VN scene? I think the fan translation scene is an essential part of the past, present, and future of VNs until the day we get simultaneous multi-language releases of VNs the way anime does - and that's actually far less likely to happen due to the sheer volume of VN releases and the turnaround time to translate them, unlike anime. Arguing for the giving and receiving of constructive criticism is great, however there are precious few people who can and will mentor fan translations (as others have pointed out.) The only way to make the fan translation scene healthier is to tackle less projects and have more translators and other staff helping each other. That's not going to happen since there are so few translators and so many things they may personally want to work on, so we continue with the status quo. By the way, does anyone want to help with our translation?
- adamstan, snowbell55 and SaintOfVoid
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8 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:
I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't love Toradora is that I don't care for Taiga. Ami and Minori are both fantastic characters to me, and the way things ended up left me unsatisfied for both of them. I think this is one of those things where, in spite of me liking almost everything about the show, I'm too annoyed by the guy ending up with the "wrong" girl (absolutely subjective judgment, obviously). This is probably similar to why Nosebleed hates NagiAsu...
Can't get past that, I understand... I love NagiAsu too by the way.
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12 minutes ago, adamstan said:
Yeah, found it, and while searching for it, I stumbled upon your mention of Ranma1/2, which also looks like funny thing to watch - on the list it goes
The final opinion on Ranma wasn't so great though, so long as you take that into account.
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36 minutes ago, adamstan said:
Well, with so many episodes no wonder it's slow
But slow pace in itself isn't a problem for me, so maybe I'll go with it now - especially since you say that ending is great. I've made it through 200 episodes of "Sailor Moon" (and enjoyed it ) so 96 is nothing If you scroll back a few pages on this thread (maybe somewhere in the last 20?) I actually have a full review of Maison Ikkoku.
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1 hour ago, adamstan said:
For now I'm thinking about either "Hachimitsu to Clover" or "Maison Ikkoku". Or maybe "School Rumble"?
I've seen (or tried to watch) all of them. Those three are very different from each other, and none are as satisfying as Toradora. Hachimitsu to Clover is one of those meandering angsty romance shows where no one ever gets what they want or need. Maison Ikkoku is a classic romantic comedy that moves at a glacial pace by today's standards before a final extraordinarily satisfying finish after 96 episodes. School rumble is pure no-progress situation romantic comedy.
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56 minutes ago, Idescrany said:
Why does my install show both Japanese and English for the dialog?
That's an option in the English release by Sekai Project. You can choose in the settings to have subtitles or just plain text, and you can switch them around too.
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1 hour ago, adamstan said:
In the meantime I finished "Toradora!". It was amazing for me, 9/10 - it had great comedy in the first half, some drama and feels in the second, great characters, who managed to escape their stereotypes and have some nice development... really, I had nothing to complain about it and totally enjoyed it. Taiga joins my tsundere-top-list, together with Kotori Habane (Konosora) and Mirai Mochizuki (Koiiro)
Toradora is fantastic. It's so good that it's beyond that point where people like it - they hate it because it's so good that the popular opinion can't possibly be right. No, the characters are great, the romance is very different, and it has some absolutely magic moments that it'd be hard not to feel anything while watching it. Some scenes still make me catch my breath today. Flawed characters? Who cares when that's what makes the show. But like everything, it either works for you or it doesn't, and Toradora is exactly the opposite of what I just watched.
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5 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:
I think Rumbling Hearts hits a few different notes than most things, and people find it refreshing for that reason. The biggest is surely the fact that things get a bit more "real" than in a typical romance anime, in a variety of ways (the melodrama and the sex, particularly, in your terms). I'm a fan of it, and if we do see a localisation of the game someday, I'll be grabbing it immediately... but in the meantime, there's always Muv-Luv.
Yeah I don't know why, but nothing seemed to click. I just couldn't care less about any of the main characters... I didn't mind watching it, I just didn't really feel anything for any of them. Being different is perfectly fine but if I can't empathise with any of the characters, I don't get anything out of it. Compare it to, for example, White Album 2, which has some similar themes where I absolutely hated how it ended because it didn't have my favourite nice happy ending for everyone, but I felt so much more for the characters and was suitably shattered.
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Looking for some classic older romances I might have missed, I picked up Rumbling Hearts - Kimi go Nozomu Eien. It was mostly predictable, very slow, melodramatic, and the MC was boring as batshit with the now overworked "nice guy but otherwise useless" personality. Even though it had a happy ending, and people actually have sex in it (unlike most modern romances), it scores too low for me to put it into my ultimately satisfying anime. It's hard to believe it got a 9/10 mode score. For me it's a 6/10 .
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High score girl ended up being surprisingly good. I lived through that gaming era so it was rather nostalgic. The 3D cgi didn't detract from its ability to convey the story and emotions through facial expressions. Really looking forward to the OVAs, there was also rumour of a second season (looks like it depends on how many buy the BDs.)
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Added Gosick.
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Just finished Gosick. This is a troubled series that took me many goes to get through for various reasons. It gets very high ratings, but I found a lot of the WWI era science fanciful, there were too many virtually supernatural themes to make it feel like a mystery/science thriller, and the mysteries were often too obtuse to make sense even after their resolution. Though it was still a fun ride, with a simply tremendous ending, which is something I value above virtually all else so I certainly don't regret watching it, and it is ultimately a romance of sorts which I always have a soft spot for. The animation quality was certainly a cut above. Ratings seem to hover around the 9/10 range but I still only give it a 7.
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14 hours ago, Kurisu-Chan said:
Today is the day...
The end of steins;gate...
Fuck i want to cry.You should go to reddit where they're mad crazy about it. I thought it was only okay. If I said this on reddit I'd lose 3 years worth of karma...
I'm hoping the OVA/EP24 will make it feel more complete. -
Yuma as heroine in To Heart 2 fits into that category, though the competition is all trivial slice of life stuff like gaming.
- adamstan, Deniz and snowbell55
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VN with a well developed childhood friend heroine
in Recommendations
Posted
If you'd prefer something on the more ecchi side, there are 3 osananajimi in 幼なじみと甘～くエッチに過ごす方法 fighting over who is the one true osananajimi.
Okay, probably not the best for character development, but one of my all time favourites for osananjimi ecchi.