FabrM

NEW FEATURES WORTH MENTIONING
You can tag other forums users in your posts. Just write “@” and then their username, and wait a bit – a menu will pop up allowing you to choose the user. Our WYSIWYG editor is more stable and MUCH more moddable Profiles are now much more dynamic and have a neat new follower system Blogs now have a lot of new design options and content blocks. Importing feeds SHOULD work better than before, too. We can now create Q & A forums if there’s a reason for one Lots of back-end improvements that lets us easily change a ton of things around the forums People have now discovered the “Mark Site as Read” button (Mods, admins, literally anyone who has editing powers here – feel free to add other good stuff here) The forums sidbar updates every 60 seconds, so freshly new topics may not show up immediately. Just give them a minute, and they'll appear.
BUGS/PROBLEMS
(Green text indicates an issue is resolved or fixed)
THEMES
1. New Forums Theme Called “Temporal”
Any interest in making a different logo/hosting a logo competition for it? Background Images: If you click on the paintbrush (the design menu) you can choose between a few background images. If you want different ones, get the rights to (or written permissions for) a nice image and then contact me : P 2. FuwaFabulous
If there are colors you want me to add back into the color picker, go get the hex colors from the Wayback Machine and send them to me. These sorts of changes are obnoxious, so we need to share the pain. 3. All Themes
Index page sidebars are not properly ordering new posts - FIXED Avatar sizes are weird and strict. Tay or Nay needs to figure out where in the ACP you can relax the rules (both on dimensions and size, probably) For some reason there isn’t a space between “Location” and the user’s designated “location” on the user profiles (and user info boxes next to posts) Find out if it’s possible to hide chat bubble It’s EASY to narrow the functional part of the forums (see how there are sections of background to the right and left of the forums content?). Right now we’re using 90% of the screen space for the content. If you want me to lower that, I will drop it to 85%. Before I do so, however, someone should personally (or convince Eclipsed to : P) agree to make a poll for feedback on this change Can’t hide sidebar: sorry, Lewy : (. Anybody had any luck hiding it? (Note: if you have designer access (like ACP access people or GMs), DO NOT DELETE THE CONTENT BLOCKS) My Content” button is gone. Need to figure out what replaced it. 4. “Gravity Green 2013” 
Theme is no longer supported by its dev and was not upgraded to support IPB 4. That’s why it’s missing. The dev has no plans on upgrading it. 
FORUMS APP
Fix avatars limits Likes are currently anonymous. This is not acceptable. FIXED Notifications are not working like they used to. Need to figure out the best way to establish user settings to make them more useable The old friends system is gone Note to self: Let user groups get the “ghost edit” permission set FIXED Notifications options are restricted to everybody. What’s up with that? Recent visitors on profile pages are limited to one, meaning it will always show you and no one else, making it an effectively useless feature. FIXED Make Profiles default to the “About Me” page Profile pages aren’t prominently displaying user’s last status message No full editor feature when editing a post (?) Profile pages – customization options? Is there no longer an option to preview posts before posting? Does the user receive a notification when they are tagged with @? Is the "go to first unread post" option gone on the thread page? Auto line skip when pressing enter is a little annoying. You can't see all of the emoticons unless you type a single character into the search field New messaging system lists participants triggers Nosebleed’s OCD and is literally Hitler. When you go to "edit my profile" the box to edit your interests is incredibly small. You can only see two(?) lines of text at a time and IIRC it was larger before. Reporting a member (not a post, the actual member) seems to be gone Raw BBCode editing is absent Spoiler tag in chat is absent A link to the front page is absent (< this was on purpose, Maef. I have to fix two menu items before I can turn it back on. The Home button is made and everything, just need to get things ready for it, first) Spoiler BBCode as it exists now doesn’t work as well as the last one. Ex: You need to delete an entire spoiler if you want to delete it because to the BBCode problem. Since you can't edit raw code, you have to copy content, delete all spoiler and then paste. Impossibility to reset font size automatically (size 14 btw, old one was 12 IIRC) Be able to change your star ratings on blogs, etc. Image compression screwed up some images in blogs Can’t add headers to articles Blog header images messed up due to difference in formatting Need report option in chat Need some rich text editing features in the chat Now, when I click on sidebar topics [even the ones I've never read before], it takes me to the latest post of it, instead of the last seen [or first], which is pretty annoying Zaka says: if you edit an off-site blog post that's RSS linked the new one gets pulled and you have a lovely double post to deal with. I'm not sure if this is preventable, intended, or needed in general. Zaka doesn’t make any sense. What Zaka means is that imported feeds are at risk of doubling up. Tay understands Zaka. Tay will look into this. Incorrect posting permissions for some forums - FIXED (Link) The post preview when hovering over topics is neat, but it seems kind of buggy. Specifically, when clicking between "First post" and "Latest post" it sometimes closes itself.  Inconsistent Line Spacing Possible: text under the quote in some posts disappear? Donations Link Not Working (On purpose) Rooke's Theme Broken - Yaaay! Working on it Likes back to anonymous FIXED (hopefully Fuwa Recognition Blog RSS broken on other sites Flash of red before colors reload on FuwaFabulous Users can Post threads in TL Projects Forum FIXED There's no longer a "Back to top" button underneath every post The chat option in the Ignore user settings is removed Chat has no longer a pop-up option  Chat is smaller compared to before, also the avatars no longer shows up in the chat messages. Profile cover photo is now extremely small, compared to before, really annoying. Although, the upload for the cover photo is improved. The message feed in the small box is gone, which is annoying. Please put that back. Ghost Editing showing up for staff Clear Formatting Button FIXED

Nay and I put up a copy of the old forums. It wont let you post new content, but you can go back to old posts, click "Edit", and copy all the contents (and put them in the new boards). I'm still working on the IPB 4 problems, mind you, but this is a critical tool which I hope will help.
Links in this thread: Old Forums Backup Online: Use It to Grab Lost/Corrupted Content

Yes. As promised.
It'll be a full copy of the forums made the morning of the day of the upgrade. You won't be able to post in it, but you can go grab all your old content if it disappeared or got messed up and transfer it here.

Except that painting is making something original, and this is taking someone elses work and giving another fanbase a mangled copy of it. Apples and oranges.

You would be amazed at the amount of translations people do (mostly attempt to do) while openly admitting that they haven't even read the game before, or people that pick up something while not even breaking the year mark in studying just because they are bored and 'want practice'. It's far from the minority of fan TL's.

I agree that blindly bashing TL's isn't constructive nor productive, that's true. But people will defend any TL to the absolute maximum even if the writing style is stilted and isn't the same (this applying to people who play the game in japanese and talk bad about a translation) or the english is horrendous. That's silly. People should absolutely be allowed to criticize it regardless if it's a Fan TL. It promotes better quality. This fanbase doesn't allow for that because every translation is some sort of holy relic that we should all just deal with because people put time into it.

People who criticize TL's aren't always just people who ride the hate train, they are also people who've read the original and are sad to see a subpar translation come out of it. And only in EXTREMELY rare cases are people going to ever retranslate something, way more often than not that bad translation will always be the one people go with, and the name is forever tarnished.

If people TL'd scripts, showed them around, got some criticism/experience and grew from that, that's fine. I don't think thats faultable. This is a 20+ hour commitment of reading that you are giving to THOUSANDS of people. That needs quality control. That's not in the same scale of drawing sketches and showing it to friends.
 

I don't think I should be writing anything in this topic, because I don't like translations in general. Even their inherent, unavoidable flaws bother me to some extent (untranslatable details, jokes, cultural differences, all that stuff). It's not limited to VNs, I always prefer the original work, as long as can read it of course. Well, that's why I learned Japanese to begin with.

But well, I prefer the translations to be as faithful as possible. Note that "faithful" does not mean "literal". Often quite the contrary - overly literal translation can actually twist the original meaning - ENG and JP differ a lot after all. As long as the translation conveys the same information and emotions, it can use completely different words and expressions if necessary. Well, basically what Decay said.

That aside, this thread seems like a good place to talk about the usage of honorifics, brought up by OriginalRen in MoeNovel topic (https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/7346-moenovel-announcing-something-monday-1711/?p=191342), so I'll continue the discussion here.

Including honorifics in the TL can seem like an "otaku translator/editor mindset", but it's not that simple. Sometimes they can be omitted or replaced easily, without affecting anything too much. However, that isn't always the case. Using KonoSora as an example, there are quite a few occasions where honorifics are vital for characters' interactions and jokes. Omitting them would require writing multiple conversations from scratch (what MoeNovel did, which resulted in killed jokes and/or nonsensical dialogue most of the time). When it comes to Kotori alone, there are 2 or 3 conversations centered on Aoi triying to convince her to start addressing him without the "-kun" honorific and there were a few dialogues where Aoi complains about it, Kotori drops it accidentally (and Aoi comments on that), etc.. Good luck with rewriting all that into English without destroying jokes and characters' interactions.

Is it doable? Probably. But it would require a more liberal translation - and doing that right requires quite a lot of skill and extra work. Is it worth the effort? In my opinion - no. Not in this case anyway.
And that was the main reason why I decided to keep honorifics in KonoSora. It's just easier to do it that way. The majority of potential readers know them anyway, so it's not a huge issue. My preference to stay faithful to the original text comes after those.
EDIT: by the way, I forgot to mention that MoeNovel's "TL" also uses some honorifics (there's An-chan, Ma-bou doesn't sound very English either), so I only make it consistent.

I also try to keep references to Japanese pop culture, but again, keeping it understandable for the reader is the priority. One Piece is popular, so there's no harm in leaving a reference to a character from this franchise. 2chan slang however, isn't known at all, so it can't be included. Fortunately, it's possible to convert it into fitting internet slang equivalents to keep the references understandable, but still reasonably faithful. And a minor reference to a running gag from Ikkyu-san can be skipped without affecting anything at all (this anime was apparently very popular in Asia, but on the West? Did anyone hear about it?).

The story is set in Japan and it's a translation, not a localization. Characters will be eating Japanese food, watching Japanese TV shows etc.. There's no need to change everything, just the important and/or the most confusing stuff.

There are also some really great translations that are at least on par with Grisaia but the games themselves aren't popular here so no one mentions them. Like Hanachirasu. Its translator, Makoto, is extremely skilled and Hanachirasu had a great translation. 
 
I think one of the things a lot of people mistake about translation is that conveying the original author's intent does not always mean providing a literal translation. I see the philosophy a lot where translators will just translate the words and then try to make them fit into a mostly proper english sentence. These usually read awkwardly and comes across as stiff. When this happens, the personalities of the characters don't come across as well, the humor isn't as funny, the emotional beats aren't as strong. Basically, there's no heart in it when it's translated that way. I think trying to understand and convey what the author was trying to say is almost more important than simply telling us what the words mean. This is where translations like Grisaia shine, because Koestl seemed to understand the work very well and was able to express that in English brilliantly. 

For one, people may not know Japanese, but they do know english, and most people who read regularly outside of VN's can easily see when something reads terribly and doesn't flow. If a piece of writing doesn't read well, then it's just as much a cause for a complaint as straight TL-errors, imo.

It's one of the things that bother me the most about this fanbase, they accept every single translation like it's the holy grail, even if the translator will outright say they don't know much japanese. They don't care about it's readability or it's accuracy, despite people claiming they do. They only care about its existence. Nobody is willing to call any translator out on their bullshit because they feel unqualified to criticize something because everyone else will ruthlessly defend it's simple existence over it's content.

People who don't learn Japanese shouldn't be scrutinized or looked down upon and be given garbage just because they don't learn Japanese and be told to 'deal with it.' That's absurd.