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Darbury

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Everything posted by Darbury

  1. You can bring the eroge with you to the tropics, you know. Why stop at 80%? Live the dream.
  2. Welcome to Fuwa! I've gotta say, your tastes overlap mine to an extent that's eerie. (A) Have you been stalking me? (B) If so, do you know where I put my car keys after lunch? I'm having trouble finding them.
  3. How about "a squid munching on a dried old man"? Now there's a description everyone can relate to.
  4. Literal translation: You go to the orchestra for some Mozart. The musicians come on stage and give you some Mozart, note-for-note, measure for measure, just as it's written in the sheet music. Expressive translation: You go to the orchestra for some Mozart. The musicians come on stage and begin playing some Mozart. But the conductor's fine-tuned the piece to account for the acoustics of the hall, the strengths and weaknesses of her players — who are her first chairs, her soloists? — and her understanding of how the music needs to flow. When should it swell? When should it whisper? What's it trying to say? In both cases, you've heard a work by Mozart. But in only one, I'd suggest, have you been given the chance to experience it. (Replace all the above with a Led Zep cover band if you'd like. I won't judge.)
  5. It's not too much to ask. After so many years spent living on scraps, we've just become accustomed to asking too little.
  6. Another quick project plug: Luna Translations just released their v1.0 English patch for the Majo Koi Nikki (a.k.a. Witch's Love Diary) demo. And guess what? You should totally go get it. I've been helping out with their proofreading, and I can tell you they've done a bang-up job so far. Best part? It's super easy to obtain. Qoobrand offers the trial, which covers the game's prologue, as a free download on their site. (You'll want to grab the first one, not Trial 2.) Just download it, patch it up, and Robert's your mother's brother. Just so you know, he gets a little grabby after two or three scotches. It should also be said that Qoobrand jammed a bunch of H-scenes into the early hours of MajoKoi. Consider that fair warning... or the clang of a dinner bell, if you're hungry for that sort of thing. Unlike a lot of VNs, however, those sections are there for a reason.* MajoKoi is set up as an intricate puzzle, and the oddly early placement of the H is all part of the larger mystery. So go on — pull up a chair, order yourself a Dragon Burger (medium rare), and settle in for a small taste of what Majo Koi Nikki has to offer. Trial download: http://qoo.amuse-c.jp/01_mazyokoi/download.html English patch download: https://lunatranslationstestsite.wordpress.com/downloads/ * Not a good reason. But a better reason than most, at least.
  7. Perhaps the sanest post I've read on Fuwa in a long, long time. Thank you.
  8. This begs the obvious question: “So what’s Frediting, huh?” Frediting is doing all the above very, very well. For example, a good Freditor would smack you upside the head for misusing “begs the question” like that. As Fred’s proofreader du jour, I can attest both to the quality of his prose and the dank awfulness of his puns.
  9. Ouch! Sorry to hear it, Tay. As a New Yorker who's had plenty of stuff stolen over the years, I've managed to get a surprising* number of items back by keeping an eye on Craigslist sales for my area and the surrounding area. Not saying it's likely in this case, but it's worth a shot. *Two. Which is unsurprisingly better than zero.
  10. It's not a total loss. Today, thanks to you, I added the term "fair-dinkum" to my vocabulary. As the man once said, "So shines a good deed in a weary world."
  11. We'll always have Paris bedazzlers.
  12. Here's a quick question for anyone who has the Steam version: Do they still translate Battler's oft-repeated line as "turn the chessboard over" rather than "turn the chessboard around"? It's a tiny thing, but that mistake bugged me to no end on my last (and only) playthrough.
  13. It's sad but true: we've finally come to the end of our tour of Japanese punctuation for VN editors. But before we bid adieu, there are a few more types we have yet to cover. None merit full blog posts, however, so I offer them up here in a bit of a punctuation grab bag. Reach in if you dare. The placeholder: 〇 The 〇 is typically used to censor offensive language by replacing one of the characters in a word. It's the equivalent of writing "f*ck" or "sh-t" or in English. Everyone knows what's being said, but we can all pretend we didn't say it. Kumbaya, amirite? Cursing really isn't a thing in Japanese, of course, so these marks get used either for our naughtiest bits — think "cock" and "dick," or "pussy" and "cunt" — or certain other socially offensive terms. You might be surprised to see censoring in the middle of an H-scene that, in all other respects, has spared no detail or volume of liquid, but there you go. Just think of them as pixel mosaics for written text. As for editing these bad boys, you should almost always just go with uncensored English. Fuck yeah. The one situation where you might want to consider doing otherwise is when a VN also bleeps these words in the VO. In that case, you'd also be justified in using the censored English equivalent with either *, -, or _ replacing vowels as needed. Pick only one wildcard and be consistent in its use. Another use for these characters in Japanese is to mask portions of real-life names or places — e.g., Bu〇er King. This is done both out of a sense of propriety and to avoid the wrath of real-life lawyers. You'll conceivably see the names of celebrities, bands, games, movies, etc. all masked in this fashion. Thankfully, there's a long tradition of this in Western literature as well, most notably in the Victorian era — "I sent my butler out to the renowned psychic, Madame G—, to seek her advice on the matter." Our best course of action during editing is to mimic the Japanese, but do so in the English tradition, replacing the omitted portion with an em-dash — two if the excised text is particularly long. Sometimes, rather than use 〇 for masking, a VN writer will choose to come up with soundalike parody names for the person, place, or thing being referenced. And so you'll end up with people talking about anime like Wagonball Z and Tailor Moon. If the VN chooses this option, then so should you. Do your best to come up with witty replacements in English. More rarely, you'll see a double 〇〇 all by its lonesome. This just stands for "word goes here." It's a literal placeholder. If you encounter it in narration, you can usually replace it with a few underscores, like _________. If it appears in voiced dialogue, possible options include "blahblah," "yada yada," "blankity-blank," or whatever else you can think up. Parentheses: ( ) In VNs, these typically indicate a line should be read as internal monologue, or in some cases, a stage whisper. The meaning is clear in both languages, so best to keep these as they are. Unless, of course, your text engine is one of those rare snowflakes that can output English italics. In that case, use those. Bedazzlers: ★☆♪♫❤❆❀✿❁ Okay, they're not actually called "bedazzlers," but it's a good a name as any. You know what I'm talking about, right? That big ol' box of typographical Lucky Charms that gets dumped right onto VN text to provide some wacky flavor to the proceedings. Hearts, stars, flowers, snowflakes, music notes, Zodiac signs, etc. Some common uses include: - A music note at the end of a line to show it's being sung. ("Fly me to the moon♪") - A heart somewhere in a line to indicate puppy love at its most disgusting. ("He's so dreeeamy❤") - A name or term being bracketed by stars to show that it's extrasupervery OMGmagical. ("Aha! I've transformed into ☆Magical Girl Bertha☆") - A tiny gun so we can commit suicide after enduring all the above. These little pretties are self-explanatory enough that I tend to leave them as is. Japan's gotta Japan, right? But use your best judgement; if you feel like they're getting in the way of the of the English narrative, go ahead and prune them back — or omit them entirely. Full stop. Not the punctuation; the whole series of punctuation articles. We're done. If I think of any more oddball Japanese punctuation marks worth discussing, I'll add them to the end of this post. But otherwise: happy f〇cking editing!
  14. Yup! Moogy has said much the same thing, and I consider it to be his best piece of advice by far. In fact, I'll quote it below in its entirety:
  15. Dammit! Where's my "You're already dead" GIF when I need it. Let's gather what we know. The Japanese wave dash: - is most often used to apply audible brightness to a word or phrase. It appears both in electronic communications (IM, texts, emails, message board postings, etc.) and light writing, but not in formal circumstances. - is much less frequently used to impart irony/sarcasm to a word or phrase. As far as I know, this usage is largely limited to e-communications. I'd welcome the input of a native speaker, though - typically appears at the end of a word/phrase/sentence. - has long since hit critical mass in Japanese pop culture. If you use a wave dash in Japan, your reader will likely know what it means. The English tilde: - is most often used to impart irony/sarcasm to a word or phrase. (I also quite like this BuzzFeed article's take, which suggests the tilde indicates ambiguity, working to destabilize language.) This is almost entirely limited to casual e-communications. To the best of my knowledge, I have never seen this usage in a book, magazine article, handwritten note, etc. - is much less frequently used to brighten a word or phrase. Again, this is almost entirely limited to casual e-communications, and appears to be copying Japanese wave dash usage. (Similarly, I'd suggest the ironic use of the wave dash is on loan from the Western tilde.) Arguably limited to the halo of those with an affinity for Japanese media. - typically appears at the beginning and end of the inflected phrase. - is far from hitting critical mass in Western pop media. A quick google will show lots of threads like the one you linked, with people wondering what the hell that squiggly thing does. Worse yet, the answers are inconsistent. Some people mention only the kawaii inflection. Some people mention only the ironic inflection. Some people mention both, but aren't sure when one applies instead of the other. And some get it right. It's a crap shoot. So we have two different characters that look a lot alike but, in their most common casual usage, have two very different functions. The wave dash is joyful, the tilde is ironic. Not helping matters any is that, when you least expect it, one mark may decide to appropriate the other's meaning just for fun. This is a goddamned minefield for any VN translation. It's introducing additional ambiguity into a process (JP->EN translation) that is already fraught with unintentional ambiguity. This is not a good thing for writers or readers. Just because you, or even your friends, can navigate this minefield, that doesn't mean the larger community of English readers can do so reliably. Nor does it justify why those mines even need to be there in the first place.
  16. If we take our idea of what's acceptable in professional English writing from Internet usage, we'll be falling down a deep, deep hole for a very long time. To Rooke's point, that tilde is a linguistic cheat, shorthand for emotion in situations where brevity and typing speed matter more than precision. Think of it as a one-character emoticon. And if we say this particular emoticon cheat is fair game, why not all the other emoticons? Rather than make thoughtful use of language to convey whether a person's dialogue is happy or sad or teasing, we could just stick :-) or :-( or :-P at the end of every other line. So much easier, right? I'll be blunt: it makes for lazy writing. And worse yet, it makes for uninteresting writing. Besides, you're kind of making my case for me. Your example shows the tilde (which looks a lot like the wave dash, but isn't) being used to indicate casual sarcasm. Then we have the wave dash (which looks a lot like the tilde, but isn't) being used to indicate bubbly joy. Oh, and also sometimes sarcasm. Oh, and also sometimes singing. So when a reader sees something squiggly at the end of a line, how are they supposed to interpret it? Is it uplift or put-down? Or pop hit? You might say the reader should figure it out from context, but in a translated VN, cultural context is an ocean away and linguistic context sits at the end of a long game of TL telephone. It's an iffy proposition at best. I'll be blunt again: to leave squiggles at the end of a line is to leave a work partially untranslated. And in this case, the burden gets shifted onto the shoulders of an unprepared reader.
  17. Another day, another deep dive into the esoterica of visual novel punctuation. Next on our chopping block: the wave dash ( 〜 ), which looks an awful lot like the Western tilde (~) but functions nothing like it. Our refrain here is a familiar one: the wave dash has no place in well-localized English VNs and should be removed or replaced wherever possible. No ifs, no ands, but one very small but. How 〜 functions in Japanese The wave dash has several fairly pedestrian functions in written Japanese, including separating ranges of values, which is handled by the en-dash (–) in English; denoting geographic origins; and separating title from subtitle, which is handled by the colon in English (e.g., Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo). These are all fairly boring, however, and if you’re an editor, your translator should already have converted such wave dashes to their Western equivalents. Where things get interesting, and by “interesting” I mean “annoying,” is when we start looking at some more colloquial uses that pop up in translated VNs with alarming frequency. The wave dash can be used to elongate and modulate a vowel sound, much like the long vowel mark (ー) in katakana. You’ll sometimes find 〜 applied to the end of a word, and it’s implied that this longer sound is audibly “brighter.” Terms like “uptalk,” “vibrato/tremolo,” “kawaii” and “girlish” get thrown around a lot. (Think of the stereotypically perky “Ohayooooo” morning greeting you often hear in VNs or anime.) It’s usually a deliberate choice by the character, done to sound cute, funny, etc.. The wave dash can also be added to the end of a sentence to suggest the entire line should be read with that same brighter inflection – a happy sing-song of sorts. Or sometimes, it can signify literal musicality, as in the line should actually be sung. “Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day〜 ” Less frequently, and usually in the context of digital communications, the wave dash can be used to suggest that a word or sentence should be read as being ironic/sarcastic. “Oh great. What a beautiful morning 〜 ” As you can see, there are a bunch of possible readings of any given wave dash, and the correct interpretation depends largely on textual and cultural context. Add in the fact that 〜 is non-standard English punctuation that your average non-otaku isn't familiar with (never mind its various nuances), and it seems like a no-brainer to dump it and convey the intended meaning in clean, clear English instead. But no. For some fecking reason, VNs are littered with these fecking squigglers. They’re fecking everywhere, like that scene in The Lost Boys where one of the Coreys, I don’t know which goddamn one, starts eating a takeout container of lo mein but Kiefer Sutherland or some other vampire guy gets all vampirey and is like, “Nuh-uh, Corey” and that selfsame Corey suddenly looks down and his delicious noodles have turned into thousands of these wriggling, white maggots and he can’t vom fast enough. It’s literally like that. Literally. The answer? Get rid of them. Do your readers a kindness and remove wave dashes wherever you encounter them. If your translator has done their job right, you’ll have all the context you need to turn those dashes into well-formed English that anyone can understand. That doesn’t always mean stretching out the last letters preceding the wave dash, mind you. That ways lies disasteeeeeer. All you need to do is ask yourself one simple question: How would it sound natural if a native English-speaker rephrased this line? That’s it! Let’s look at some examples. The easiest is where the English usage matches the Japanese, such as stretching out a vowel. So imagine a character walks into a dark and spooky house, then calls out to see if anyone’s home. What about cute inflections? Well, English is a rich language; there are plenty of ways to make a sentence sound perkier: There’s no magic formula, and it's not rocket science. It's just sitting down and rewriting. And if you’re doing your job as an editor, you should pretty much be rewriting every single line anyway, so it’s no added hardship. The one, small exception If you remember, I mentioned digital communications a little earlier. This is the one place where I’d recommend you let a sleeping wave dash lie. Typographical oddities (such as emoticons) are part and parcel of the electronic vernacular, so it feels much more natural to let them stay in a text or an IM that’s being quoted verbatim. You want your reader to feel like they’re seeing exactly what the character has on their screen. Just make sure you’ve edited these lines so the English meaning will still be clear if the wave dashes were removed. After all, there’s a world of difference between “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ” and “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ”
  18. I’m on vacation, which as a dad, is usually more exhausting for me than not being on vacation. That means no rants about the evils of third-person direct address in VN translations this week — sorry! I just don’t have it in me. Instead, I thought I’d give a long overdue plug to a project I helped out on last year: ff80c38’s 2x Ren’Py port of True Remembrance. And by “helped out on,” I mean ff80c38 did everything; I simply pitched in with a little Photoshopping and typesetting at the very end. This was a total passion project on his part, and it shows. If you’re not familiar with it, True Remembrance is a short kinetic novel released by Shiba Satomi in 2003, then gussied up and re-released in 2006. (insani subsequently published a wonderful English-language translation of it two years later in 2008.) I’ve always had a soft spot for this VN, in part because it’s not afraid to be quiet and contemplative. It underplays its emotions rather than underlining them and, as a result, feels more like a found storybook than a modern trope fest. There’s a plot, of course — there are guns and spies and dystopian futures and unexpected twists — but to TR’s credit, it’s never about those. The visual novel’s gaze stays fixed on its characters, exploring their empty spaces and pondering how they might be filled, if ever. True Remembrance is not a perfect VN, not by any means. The art is on the simpler side, which some might consider a plus, and the game’s writing often stumbles when it comes to comic relief — pretty much any scene in the café, for instance. Still, its measured tone is a rare find, and for that, I treasure it. The original freeware release of True Remembrance only ran on Windows; this Ren’Py port adds Mac and Linux to the roster. It also supports higher resolutions, hence the 2X identifier. And let me just say that, across the board, ff80c38 approached this port with utmost respect for the source material. Not a letter of the script was changed, and great care was taken in resizing (or in some cases, recreating) graphics for the new resolutions. Finally, I can’t stress to you enough that this version is entirely unofficial, released late last year in hopes it might help a few more people find True Remembrance. So listen: if you’re not running Mac or Linux and/or don’t really care about higher-res assets, I urge you to pick up the original English release at insani’s site instead. It’ll do ya good. But if that's not feasible, for whatever reason, please think of ff80c38’s project as another snowy back alley into Shiba Satomi’s world. Download: Windows / macOS / Linux Postscript: Why-oh-why isn’t Mimei of the Transmission Tower, the author’s other VN, translated yet? Seriously. I know insani was considering working on it at one point, but that was years ago. This has long been one of my white whales, and I’d love to be able to read it in English before the world ends sometime in late November.
  19. That would be the result of trying to use the awful text window that pops up in the mobile version of the site. Yay for responsive design?
  20. I'm totally behind that. My own approach is overkill, of course, but it makes my editing OCD happy. So, um, we're still talking about punctuation here, right?
  21. And do you know what those are used for? Chess commentary. I kid you not.
  22. You're welcome. (Still working on the dollarpound.)
  23. But what about the ampercent? Or the dollarpound? Or hyphentheses?
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