ittaku

Triggered. Note the 'What you want.'

The text is long and presents a lot of unique challenges, the artform is lowbrow, the pay is shitful, the deadlines are punishingly short, and some (not all) of the audience is hypercritical and ungrateful. If you were a half decent translator, of all the translation gigs in the world why would you do it unless you loved VNs? Additionally since the pay is so bad one can only earn a living off it by doing vast chunks of stuff they don't like at all. I know many translators that started out loving VNs and translating them has killed their love of them. Luckily I can afford to just do it for fun and will only work on VNs I find appealing in some way. Not everyone is so lucky.

No, you're correct. Nukitashi is fucking hard to translate because of its puns and memes. I certainly feel like they've thrown me in the deep end. Ultimately the plan is for there to be more translators working on it though and not just myself partially because of the difficulty but additionally because it's quite big and they had planned for it to be completed sooner. You are right though - there are very few VN translators in general.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

Yeah, just the other day I was saying the same thing to someone in private chat. You won't get Jay Rubin to work on 2D porn waifu games, LOL xD
That's true. That's why I said that we are forced to trust localization companies' choices for editors. I am not expecting TLers to fight with editors regarding stylistic choices. In fan-translations - yeah, we can fight all we want amongst ourselves. But in pro scene, it's just not gonna happen. Actually, I think in many of these professional localizations, editor and TLer never get to meet each other xD

That's true, and I find the posts difficult to read and cringe when I see them. Sure if a translation is an edited MTL or doesn't remotely resemble the original text then even for free you shouldn't be happy to get that, but outside of that... the debate shall continue forever on that front. Even the best pros make mistakes is all I can say (and I don't consider myself one of the best pros.) I understand how the armchair experts that have excellent Japanese skills feel when they see a bad translation, but just remember who it was that put the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of their own time in for free for many people to enjoy some rendition of the original art form. The pool is very shallow to draw upon so you're not going to get translators that translate Murakami's works translating 2D porn for either free, or a few thousand measly sales at best.

No, you're correct. Nukitashi is fucking hard to translate because of its puns and memes. I certainly feel like they've thrown me in the deep end. Ultimately the plan is for there to be more translators working on it though and not just myself partially because of the difficulty but additionally because it's quite big and they had planned for it to be completed sooner. You are right though - there are very few VN translators in general.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

That's true, and I find the posts difficult to read and cringe when I see them. Sure if a translation is an edited MTL or doesn't remotely resemble the original text then even for free you shouldn't be happy to get that, but outside of that... the debate shall continue forever on that front. Even the best pros make mistakes is all I can say (and I don't consider myself one of the best pros.) I understand how the armchair experts that have excellent Japanese skills feel when they see a bad translation, but just remember who it was that put the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of their own time in for free for many people to enjoy some rendition of the original art form. The pool is very shallow to draw upon so you're not going to get translators that translate Murakami's works translating 2D porn for either free, or a few thousand measly sales at best.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

I should also point out that people have been very kind with my To Heart 2 translation as I've received almost no harsh criticism, so in that particular instance I did not find people hypercritical nor ungrateful (contrary to my own comment). It seems fair that audiences are more lenient towards amateur translations as the translators are doing it for absolutely nothing. Certainly very low accuracy translations should be unacceptable at any level (and I don't think we need to revisit what people consider poor accuracy) but complaining about stylistic choices means the translation itself is usually more than acceptable in its accuracy, dude.

For what it's worth, when I spoke to TBAC, he said the copious swearing in Fureraba at least was the editor's choice. The style guide for solpress at least wouldn't have allowed it btw. Personally I found reading Fureraba quite funny.

See, that's exactly what I was talking about. I can already tell that based on what you said here, you definitely aren't gonna be a fan of either Nukitashi or, for that matter, the VN that's coming out in just a couple of days, Sankaku Renai. I can already tell you right now that both of these are gonna be full of "idiotic humour", "shitty 4chan memes", and maybe some "low class american idiots swearing" (not sure about the third one, but with TBAC being the main TL for both Fureraba and Sankaku Renai, it's quite possible he may have used that style of swearing again... that is, if he considered it appropriate for the VN in question). That's just how comedy VNs work. I don't know how else you could properly localize these. They are pretty much dumb in Japanese, and so I don't see any problem with them sounding dumb in English too (and hence one of the major reasons I avoid moege with accent on comedy like a plague - they are a huge pain in the ass to work on, and whatever you do, someone's always bound to consider your comedy writing "idiotic").
Also, that last piece of advice I marked in your comment... Man, do you even realize what "make it as widely acceptable as possible" even means? I hear that all the time and I am really starting to believe you people have no idea how many disagreements among everyone on this there are. "Widely acceptable" implies that whoever's working on VN translations should go out and always measure how many people want translations to be in one or the other style (I've seen some folks trying to measure this by doing surveys) and then act according to the results. Do you realize how unfeasible doing this all the time really is? First of all, even the fans themselves don't really know what they want. I see so many disagreements between people who want honorifics/no honorifics, who want liberal/non-liberal translations, who want dumb memes/no dumb memes, who want masterful prose writing (LOL at this one!)/no masterful prose necessary... etc, etc. How's one to decide on what to do?! Who's able to satisfy all these contradictory demands?! I don't know anyone who has ever seriously tried to measure what the VN fans want, and it's probably for a good reason. Even if they could, there's just no way you would be able to satisfy everyone, or for that matter "as widely acceptable as possible" size of community. "As widely acceptable" is just a myth. You don't know what's really "widely acceptable" as you're often gonna see complaints from a sizeable portion of community no matter what you do. There's just no way to accurately measure this, especially if you consider the new fans who might be coming in and who aren't necessarily gonna be weebs.
And that's one of the major reasons why I believe translators like Arunaru and his ilk do what they do. They don't bother with "as widely as acceptable as possible". There's no such thing to begin with. So... what's a TLer gonna do then? Simple. They judge according to what sounds good to them and how they imagine the VN should read like. This sort of bias in translation... you get it all the fucking time, no matter who's at the helm doing the translation. I can tell you that every TLer out there has his own fucking way of translating something, and that's why no 2 translations are ever the same. No, I don't approve of translators who overlocalize and invent up silly shit just for the sake of novelty (no, I definitely don't approve of random Spanish lines that feel forced and out of the setting at hand), but that's just how things in this industry go. I don't let my "preference on style" cloud my judgement. Otherwise, I'd have to start despising the so-called "rewriting" that so many translators do. In fact, all the translations that we read are in fact nothing more than re-imagining of the Japanese works they are based on. Even the most literal translation you could dig out is still a re-imagining of the original work at hand (just remember that Japanese doesn't really have accurate English equivalents for many of its words and expressions and you'll understand what I mean by this).
So you can recognize the inclusion/exclusion of honorifics as a style choice, but not "idiotic humour", "shitty 4chan memes", and "low class american swearing"?
Tell me, have you read anything in pure Japanese so far? And if yes, imagine you were a TL. How would you translate this commonly used simple phrase from Japanese "よろしくおねがいします"? I'll tell you... if you have any sanity as a translator, you won't ever TL it as "Please treat me well.", no matter the context (I've yet to see a crazy-enough TLer who would do that). Basically, what all TLers do here is, they "rewrite" it every time they see it, depending on the scene, character, tone, etc. You people have to understand that translation work is more art than science. What you refer to as "rewriting the entire fucking thing" is exactly how all translations in a nutshell are. They are essentially someone's rewriting (I called it "reimagining" earlier in my post) of the VN at hand. Unless you're reading VNs in Japanese, you are always gonna be reading someone's reimagination of the VN based of its original. And while we can criticize a TLer's accuracy of translation, his creativity to carry over the Japanese lines, etc, etc. I would never go and say that TLers are "void of rationality and critical thinking" for just being liberal with their reimagination of the work at hand. In fact, I think totally opposite here. If they didn't do this type of stuff, then I'd question their sanity and rationality.
I am in no way endorsing what NekoNyan did with Fureraba. I didn't even read it myself to judge their work yet. That said... if the biggest complaint one can make about a translation work is "swearing", then I don't really believe that translation was as bad as some are making it out to be. We have far, far bigger problems with translations nowadays. Personally, I am more pissed off about poor grammar, typos, and overall QC issues plaguing so many of official releases coming out nowadays. I consider that to be real shoddy work and that's what I am more worried about than some localization choice. Also... "people at large complain about this" - how many people? Did you measure? I am asking you this because I tend to see a lot of pro and anti-sentiments regarding this. I've seen a lot of praise from some of the more casual VN readers, loving Fureraba's localization. And then there are more weeb-oriented fans who absolutely abhor the localization of Fureraba. So which one is the right way? The casuals? The weebs? How do you satisfy all of these people at once? Is it even doable? No, I definitely don't think so.
 

I suddenly remembered our chat on Discord.
And yeah, all your points stand true. Knowing all these things that I've come to realize after following this scene for so long, I dare not to publicly speak ill of any VN translation's quality nowadays, whether it be official or fanTL. The situation has really gone for the worse. It saddens me to say that most English-only VN readers will never understand what it looks like to be the one having to work on this stuff. The stuff you said are things only someone who has worked on visual novel translations can truly understand. All the time, I see VN fans complaining about the minorest of shit that they don't like in some translation works out there (from honorifics inclusion to whether there's too much swearing used in the translation and other types of silly shit), not realizing how difficult it really is to fulfill all of their selfish demands.
The people they are looking for to do those "proper translations"... those people don't work on visual novels. I'd really like it if they could stop deluding themselves into expecting amazing translation works done by anyone who's working on VNs nowadays. Only hardcore VN fans and hobbyist type of freelancers work on VNs nowadays. Nobody who has any semblance of self-respect won't come anywhere near VNs. That word you just used in your post... "ungrateful"... that's exactly how I would describe working on VN translations. Ultimately UNGRATEFUL.

The text is long and presents a lot of unique challenges, the artform is lowbrow, the pay is shitful, the deadlines are punishingly short, and some (not all) of the audience is hypercritical and ungrateful. If you were a half decent translator, of all the translation gigs in the world why would you do it unless you loved VNs? Additionally since the pay is so bad one can only earn a living off it by doing vast chunks of stuff they don't like at all. I know many translators that started out loving VNs and translating them has killed their love of them. Luckily I can afford to just do it for fun and will only work on VNs I find appealing in some way. Not everyone is so lucky.

No, you're correct. Nukitashi is fucking hard to translate because of its puns and memes. I certainly feel like they've thrown me in the deep end. Ultimately the plan is for there to be more translators working on it though and not just myself partially because of the difficulty but additionally because it's quite big and they had planned for it to be completed sooner. You are right though - there are very few VN translators in general.

Try explaining this to people who don't believe me. When I say that, everybody looks at me like I said something impossible.

No, you're correct. Nukitashi is fucking hard to translate because of its puns and memes. I certainly feel like they've thrown me in the deep end. Ultimately the plan is for there to be more translators working on it though and not just myself partially because of the difficulty but additionally because it's quite big and they had planned for it to be completed sooner. You are right though - there are very few VN translators in general.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.

Whoa, congratulations!

They ended up employing a number of new translators, 5 I think (including me). I know they're doing LNs, manga and VNs, but I don't really know what the experimental titles are as I've been put on a regular VN translation which suits me perfectly since that's all I'm interested in.