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Darklord Rooke

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Blog Comments posted by Darklord Rooke

    Clephas

    Posted · Edited by Rooke

    Yay, you made it :3

    'Dole' is British slang, also it's used all the time in Ozzie-land. Not used in America?

    This is the exact sort of story I wish someone would make as a VN. Deep world-building, characters, political, awesome space opera. I suppose anyone capable of writing something like this would be put off by the small fanbase that is open to reading VNs :(

    Cause of your recommendation, I'm currently reading the first book :). It's damn good.

    Darklord Rooke

    Posted

    I can't wait for self-driving cars.  Travel will be a lot safer without humans in control.  People blow the dangers of automation out of proportion.  What they're complaining about isn't risk; we take calculated risks every day that could cause us harm.  What they're complaining about is the feeling of powerlessness of entrusting their safety to a machine.  The machine could be safer, but they'll feel less safe because they're not in control.

    That's definitely true, there is a certain ‘if I’m going to die from a cock-up, then it darn well better be my cock-up’ aspect to those fears, a decent dollop of 'I don't trust Terminators' going on. But at the moment, not at this very moment but a fairly general sort of moment, I’m driving a car where one of the windows no longer goes down because the electrics are screwed, every so often my dear vehicle will choose to remain locked for a couple of days due to a problem with the electronic unlocking mechanism the mechanic has no explanation for (‘it just doesn’t like you, mate,’ isn’t a valid explanation,) and not too long ago the computer chip was telling the car to change gears at the wrong speed (I drive an automatic.) I really don’t want to add complex decision making and navigational tasks to its responsibilities. And if the mechanic is right and my car actually doesn’t like me, it will be a very cold day in hell before…

    But anyway, I’m sure you're right and one day it will be an incredibly safe way to travel, but I’m going to wait at least a decade or two after it's introduced before I go anywhere near it. Because seeing facts and figures is all well and good, but certain real world experiences indicate there's some significant problems to overcome first. And if this does become a ‘thing’ in the near future, and all cars become driverless, I swear to God I’ll bike everywhere. And I’ll do so in really tight and inappropriate shorts. Because if I have to be inconvenienced, then I’m going to try my darndest to ruin everybody else’s day also.

     It's not the newfangled machinery that's going to make this phenomenon much worse than it already is. I'm going to be at risk either way. Might as well be the thoroughly tested and bug-fixed machinery than to make a point of never driving at night lest I run into the next national car race championship candidate.

     

    Oh I see, a glass-half-full fellow. Your optimism and good faith will have no impact on my stubborn and irrational pessimism, good sir :P 

    Darbury

    Posted · Edited by Rooke

     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.

    Uncommon word usage, in comparison to other VN translations, is actually a good thing. This is because most VN translations use incredibly basic and rudimentary language, to the extent that it sounds like it was written by somebody still in school. I've heard people complain about complex language usage in VN translations before, but when I had a look the language use was quite normal. 

    When something's bad the first place to jump on it is 4chan. ESPECIALLY when the 'bad' thing originated from Fuwanovel, because they love to put the boot into Fuwa. But not even 4chan complained about the editing found in this game. And (imo) there's been far worse translations than this *shudders*

    Also, you're free to complain, I do it all the time. You should keep in mind though that a lot of people (not on 4chan) will get ticked if you complain without providing reasons. So if you don't provide any, you should expect one of the first questions thrown back at you to be 'how so'?

    Darbury

    Posted

    With obvious exceptions (Planetarian, etc.) most VNs have little trouble crossing this threshold — the casts are almost entirely female, and slice-of-life scenes are a staple of the genre. Meanwhile, nearly half of all American-made films don’t meet this same standard.

     

     

    Partly due to comparative time constraints - packing a story into a 2 hour time frame means a limited time for characters to meander around. There'd be a greater percentage of American television shows that pass this test when compared to American films, for example. Of course it indicates a problem with Hollywood, but you can't really use the test to compare two different media.

    Darbury

    Posted

    "but in English, Spanish, Portuguese etc etc (most of the western languages) if you repeat something you are labeled as a kid or that you have poor writing skills, why is it that for a culture repetition is something normal but for another is a bad thing to do."

     

    Depends on what kind of repetition you’re talking about. Some repetition in English is good, some is bad, it’s merely a language technique people use. Most language techniques differ from language to language, for example the Japanese use a lot of adjectives, ellipses, and passive voice whereas these things are discouraged in English. The author would use these language techniques in Japanese to create a desired effect in the reader, whereas these same techniques used in English create a completely different effect. And now, like Chrono said, you can choose to provide a similar experience for the English audience that the Japanese audience receives, or to preserve techniques as accurately as possible. The latter is more common in literature than entertainment.

     

    Regarding repetition specifically, sometimes in English repetition reads like you’re hammering away at an idea which can be considered disrespectful to an audience, it could showcase a poor vocabulary, and sometimes repetition is just redundant. Poor vocabulary and plenty of redundancies are hallmarks of childish writing in English, so yeah sometimes the two (repetition and juvenile writing) are connected.

     

    Why do different techniques mean different things in different languages? Culture and the language’s evolution I suppose. Languages evolving in two completely different regions of the world being influenced by two different cultures and with the languages themselves following two different methods (Japanese relying in part on logograms while English do not, for example) will naturally encourage different properties in writing. It’s just something to be aware of. Editors and authors (in English) talk about cutting repetition from works of fiction on a frequent basis, so there's plenty of people to listen to if you're looking for why.

    sanahtlig

    Posted

    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*

    Darbury

    Posted

    You know, there's nothing wrong with literal translations provided they are accompanied by a shitload of translator notes. If no translation notes (or explanations) are forthcoming, then leaving Japanese words in the script is poor translation philosophy. In fact I'll go one step further, leaving unexplained Japanese words in the script is an incomplete translation. It's why literally translated literature come with 400 odd translator notes in the back, and it's part of the reason why official anime is localised (because it's not a medium that can support such TL notes well.) 

    Darbury

    Posted

    TiagFromVenice - (I don't intentionally muck up people's names, honest :P) that reply is hella insightful, and is fairly on the money. VNs replace a lot of written narration with pictures, and most VNs are prose light, which could be a reason a lot of ellipses are used.

     

    The image you linked to features a voiceless protagonist (I'm fairly certain.) But you're right again when you imply that people are more tolerant of ellipses in dialogue, or internal dialogue, than narration. 

     

    There still tends to be an overuse of ellipses in translations though, which comes from punctuation usage differences between the Japanese and English. Take the image you linked to, for example (WHOA that's an incredibly literal piece of translation.) The first 2 sentences. We have "..." followed by an ... in the narration. What is this actually supposed to denote? A pause ... followed by another pause? Wouldn't you normally just call this one long pause? In English you would, but in Japanese this sort of stuff is common, and you could have text box after text box after text box filled with nothing but ellipses. In English I'd suggest you'd just have one ellipsis here, and it would just be 3 dots, not 6. So you'd delete the ellipsis at the beginning of the second line, otherwise you get people wrinkling their nose.

     

    And if you look at the second set of ellipses, down the bottom of your linked image you'll find an ellipsis separating two sentences. Separating two paragraphs. That's really tricky, in English an ellipsis at the end of a sentence usually indicates you're trailing off, and yet I've never seen an ellipsis stuck at the beginning of a sentence in narration. Sometimes you see one at the beginning of a sentence when somebody intrudes on a piece of dialogue (or narration), so you're catapulted half-way into something. So either way you're doing something considered weird in English. I would probably suggest joining those 2 sentences together to form a single sentence, so the ellipsis would no longer separate two sentences, but rather parts of a single sentence.

     

    But that's not half as weird as that humongous dash at the end of the screen, what on Earth is that meant to mean? I dunno. 

     

    Anyway, the point is that going from Japanese to English, punctuation, and even sentence lengths and structures, aren't fixed. This is because the language techniques of Japan are different from the language techniques of English. As a translator (and editor) there's a degree of latitude to fiddle with these language techniques as long as you keep tone and whatnot consistent, which a lot of fan-translators don't take up and unfortunately keeping things overly literal will result in abhorrent abuse of ellipses (along with other problems.)

    Darbury

    Posted

    Sweet job on KoiRizo :)

     

    I should point out, overuse of ellipses is one of those things translated Visual Novels are constantly ridiculed over. You'll note that fan-translations mostly keep them in, whereas professional localisations (JAST, Sekai, and MG all use fan-TLs so they're not included) strongly limit ellipses use, and here localisations are doing the better job. Take NISA's translations, for example. An excess of ellipses makes me want to kill the first person I see... *looks at Tiag* :P

     

    Japanese Language don't really have rules for ellipses use, so feel free to eliminate them where appropriate in the English. English don't use them anywhere near as freely as the Japanese - we have stricter rules, and a culture which frowns on abusing certain forms of punctuation. Take a look at how often ellipses are used in Western novels and compare that to how often Japanese Light Novels and other Japanese media use them. It's not because Western people don't pause, in case anybody was wondering xD

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