Darbury

Yeah, I got a bad batch of gas station sushi and ended up in a medically induced coma for the past four years. Just woke up this morning. Anything interesting happen while I was out? Can’t wait to finally see how Game of Thrones ends...
@NSAID: I totally get the low/no budget dilemma. Been there, done that, got the off-brand t-shirt. Maybe just tack it on your v2.0 to-do list? 😀 

Welcome to Fuwa! Always glad to see creators putting new material out there.
One friendly suggestion: have a native English reader go through your script. While I haven't played the full VN yet, your Steam screenshots have enough anguished English in them ("I look at the both of my hands", "despite the sky is still shrouded") that it might easily dissuade someone from downloading/playing the game. You've clearly put a lot of work into this, so it's worth the extra effort to make sure that readers can fully immerse themselves in the world you've created.

My work here is done. Shut 'er down, boys!  🥳

*twitches*
Wait, this wasn't a very useful reply. My apologies.
Feel free to tell me to bugger off and I'll even hide this.

I personally think that VNs right now are in a sense stuck in a cursed loop. VNs as a medium just really lack variety and as a result appeal to a small number of people. Even most all-ages titles follow the same story structure: even in non-adult titles a male protagonist always has to be surrounded by a lot of female love interests; it almost always has to take place in high-school; even in plot-focused stories there are a lot of slice-of-life scenes, which aren't even well written, and mostly just serve as a way to stall the story for some time rather than developing the characters; finally, the personalities of the protagonist, the heroines and even the side characters typically just follow certain well-known archetypes. So, if you just happen not to enjoy some of these titles and just want to find something more unique, you're much better off watching some anime or reading a manga. Otome games are a bit different, but, from my limited experience with them, they seem to have a bag of different, though slightly similar, problems. There are indeed some unique and experimental VNs that do things differently, but most of these are doujin titles and don't get that much exposure. Most of them aren't even that good, since good authors are likely to join some company at some point and start making a lot more standard VNs, or leave the medium altogether. Also, we, the current VN fans, enjoy these tropes to at lest to some extend, and a lot of us actually prefer them. As a result, in a short run it's not a very good strategy for companies to experiment with story structures, since they don't know if the fans would like these changes, and they just stick to the strategy that worked thus far. And VNs are also expensive to make, so they don't allow for much flexibility. Nowadays, manga and light novel authors don't even have to make any initial investment at all, since they just can start posting their stories online and see how people react to them, or even completely stick to episodic online distribution. In case of VNs, even a single financially unsuccessful product can make a whole company go bankrupt.
I personally think that if VNs somehow let this loop, there's a good chance that they would start appeal to a bigger number of people. They probably wouldn't be the same people as the current VN fans. Will they ever do that? I doubt it, but I don't know. EVNs might actually lead to something interesting at some point, who knows?

The good news is, we have a backup of the forums from a month ago.

I prefer to think of this as a helpful PSA.
If, at the end of July, you see a previously unannounced TL release of a long VN with H-scenes and at least seven story branches... RUN! And bring your wallet with you! It'll be a tire fire of unbelievable proportions! 

I want to support this for the title pun alone.

It was an eventful week for us in a lot of ways. One translator has decided to bow out from the Majo Koi Nikki project, and we thank him for all his hard work and wish him the best of luck on his future projects. Meanwhile, two of our other translators returned early in the week after long absences, both of them apparently bringing a burning desire to put some numbers on the board. With our staunch froggy ally, the three of them had a prolific week on the TL side. Our TLC showed up to advance that cause, and I put in some editing as well. The upshot is we hit a couple landmarks this week, crossing 40% translated and 30% edited. Anyway, enough chatter, here's the numbers:
Translated: 16259 / 40208 (40.4%), +1246 (3.1%) week-over-week
Edited: 12406 / 40208 (30.9%), +884 (2.2%) week-over-week
TLCed: 5079 / 40208 (12.6%), +259 (0.6%) week-over-week
Others: no change

How about "a squid munching on a dried old man"? Now there's a description everyone can relate to. 

Hi everyone,

I've created over 2000 tracks of music and sound effects that you are welcome to freely use in visual novels, games or anything else you like. It's all original...all my own work. All I ask is to be attributed as detailed on my homepage:

http://soundimage.org/

I sincerely hope my tracks are helpful. Any and all feedback is welcome and always appreciated!

All the best,

Eric

^if you can take literally everything else
True Remembrance is fairly short, has no porn, is free, and p. good; the themes also don't seem overly Fapanese to me. However its somewhat episodic nature in the start might make people quit before they get to interesting stuff, so idk how well it works.
In the same vein, you could try Blue*, though that one makes me even less sure. Has the free/noporn thing, not that short though but not super long either. The writing for the translation is... interesting, at least. It tries hard and sometimes falls flat on its face, basically

Jumbo lasted 5 minutes as opposed to an hour. Served little purpose correct, but because it didn't happen often, it didnt bug me. If the VN was another 2-3 hours long, I likely would have begun to criticize its length in terms of its actual story content. I mean, I did mention that when the relationship started, everything did start dragging along.  
 
Edit: Read your take on it, and I don't necessarily disagree with you. I just have a different way of looking at the VNs, and try to look at the picture as a whole. I'm sure I could find things to criticize in this one for days, but first and foremost, I want to describe why I found something enjoyable, or why I found something boring. Looking at the actual writing on a line for line basis is something that does not help me describe my enjoyment of a VN, unless things are so bad it detracts from said enjoyment. I enjoyed Highway Blossoms, so I am far more willing to forgive some flaws, and just flat out miss others.  

Going forward, I'll be posting the Majo Koi Nikki TL status updates to this thread. Totals for this week, as of ~24 hours ago:
Translated: 32% (12956/40208) Edited: 17% (6696/40208)
 
I'm going to add weekly deltas (I would do that now, but I don't have edited numbers for last week) and TLC progress, but we can't generate the TLC progress count... yet. Working on it. I can also provide detailed per-route breakdown of progress, if people are interested, though I don't see why you would be since I don't think we have plans to release a partial patch. If you are interested in that for whatever reason, chime in here or PM me.
At any rate, normal, good progress this week on both TL and editing side. Editing is a fair bit behind TL at this point, but we'll be trying to close that gap some in the coming weeks.

Thanks guys, you're all very welcoming.  Darbury, it's nice to know we have similar tastes and regarding your car keys, try looking in the bathroom. (If you washed your hands that is)  Haha kidding.

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.

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.

Hello guys my name is Henry and I am just another fellow Visual Novel lover like you guys.  This is my first time registering in this kind of site where you can post threads and topics, despite my age (early 20s). 
I never really like to read books, but when i found out the world of Visual Novels, I was astonished by the beautiful images, interactive capability, numerous paths to take that invoke freedom, perfect music that manipulates the viewer's atmosphere and hearts, and the vast variety of genres of Visual Novels!
The very first Visual Novel I read, if I remember correctly, was True Remembrance.  It was a short and beautiful Visual Novel and sucked me into the new world.  Although It ended in less than 10 hours, but to someone who never really read much books, it was kind of long for me.
Then I dove into the world of the bittersweet Narcissu.  It had a sad story with amazing music that goes with it.  Before i knew it, I finished the novel and downloaded the OST into my phone. 
After that I started Ever 17 Out of the Infinity, my first long Visual Novel intriguing story. The scientific and theological aspect got me hooked because I am into science especially about time. (That I don't need to say I love Steins;Gate)
And now I am starting Sharin no Kuni and have lots of VNs already downloaded waiting for me such as G-Senjou no Maou, Juniper's Knot, Katawa Shoujo, The Fruit of Grisaia, Remember 11, Root Double, Saya no Uta, Sepia Tears, Swan Song, and Symphonic Rain.  Before I download anymore I should probably finish at least half of these. 
That's where my life's at right now.  Besides Visual Novels, I like to play video games like Kingdom Hearts, Dark Souls, Disgaea, and Final Fantasy games.  Nice to meet you guys.

To be clear, I didn't intend to blame any particular person in the chain of producing the translation. I am criticizing the product, not the process. The product, the Corona Blossom translation, is a bad translation, for the reasons I posted above. So now, let's talk process:
There are many ways to get to a good translation. The current VN translation scene, especially fan translation, almost exclusively follows a strategy of having translators who know JP well and focus completely on correctly literally translating the Japanese into Engrish and then leans heavily on editors to turn Engrish into English. That is probably a phenomenon completely unique to niche video game translation, mostly but not exclusively VN fan translation. It's not even true of top-tier mainstream JP games; people don't talk about Alexander O. Smith's editor, and they don't call him an editor. He's a video game translator, and a damn good one. He didn't get that reputation by literally translating JP to EN and then letting an editor turn the result into something people really enjoyed reading.
There's a reason for the difference: it takes a lot more talent, knowledge, and dedication than most of us in this community have to do both sides of the translation well, especially at the pay rates you can achieve for doing good work in VN translation. People who can do this are rare, respected, and are widely talked about in the community as a result. You know their their names because they can do both. But on the flip side, the demand for translations is high enough that we can't really afford to wait for those scarce resources to take care of everything.
So a lot of work gets done the hard way. Exchanging all the necessary context and fixing all the inevitable misunderstandings between translators and editors takes a lot of time. This separation of responsibilities is probably a huge contributor to the various issues with fan translations (alongside other reasons, many of them undoubtedly more important, of course). But I don't really see any way around doing things the hard way like this, other than for editors to spend years studying Japanese or for translators to learn an editor's skills. Probably neither of those is happening any time soon.

It's not too much to ask.
After so many years spent living on scraps, we've just become accustomed to asking too little.

It's not too much to ask.
After so many years spent living on scraps, we've just become accustomed to asking too little.

It's not too much to ask.
After so many years spent living on scraps, we've just become accustomed to asking too little.

It's not too much to ask.
After so many years spent living on scraps, we've just become accustomed to asking too little.

Noooo, nonono. I'm sorry, but this is just entirely wrong. You've been poorly influenced by working on a very bad translation. What we're doing with Dracu Riot is NOT the norm, and is not how the process should ideally go. A good translator, and all of the best translators currently in the scene, will write sensible english the first time around. An editor isn't supposed to seek out "lost meaning" or extract hidden nuance, that's actually the translator's job.
1) No one is better equipped to do so than the translator. They know what the line means in Japanese, how it's conveyed to the Japanese readers, and all of that. An editor doing so can misinterpret the line due to inadequate translation and lead things even further off-track. They need to keep in constant contact with the translator, further wasting the translator's time, and they could get the smaller things wrong that they aren't contacting the translator for.
2) Your method leads to an inefficient use of manpower. If the translator gets things right the first time around, an editor doesn't have to waste as much time deeply analyzing every single line for hidden nuance, and basically "retranslating" the script from engrish to english, further necessitating additional editing and proofreading passes due to the heavy amount of rewriting involved.
3) It's just freaking hard. There's just so much you have to think about with every single line about what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. When you read a sentence in english and wish to rewrite it in english again, you end up with preconceived notions about the message it's trying to convey that are sometimes difficult to eliminate. Basically what I'm saying is that it's really too much, and you're going to miss some things here and there. The translator doesn't experience this phenomenon as strongly due to going across languages, which leads back to point #1.
It's a pretty safe guess that almost all of the best translations you're most fond of don't go through this process. Their translators get things right the first time around because they're a fairly eloquent writer in English and are capable of putting out natural-sounding english language on their own. They still need editors because they don't have a perfect hit rate, and two heads are better than one, but the process goes so much more smoothly and turns out so much better when major rewrites aren't required on a regular basis.

Forgot about the bath CG, my bad. I honestly don't remember if there's anything else like that (I don't think so, but I could be wrong).
 
No, don't misunderstand. It's not that I want them to write solid prose. I just want a translation, not a copy-edited Google Translate transcript. Here's four screenshots I saved of bad translation. I have several more, taken before I gave up on collecting them. If I wanted to read it and screenshot style nits, I could undoubtedly find dozens; prose isn't the problem here. Bad translation is.