tymmur
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Blog Comments posted by tymmur
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19 hours ago, phantomJS said:Coz the real Kiri is the exactly the same as the account avartar
Yeah because fuwa has a rule that the avatar is picture ID, hence has to look like the user, right? At least that's what I was told when was setting my avatar.
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Today I went out with friends for the first time in maybe 2 years
That explains it all. You are out of training with alcohol and you clearly can't handle the amount you had before writing this blog entry. Have fun tomorrow when you wake up with a hangover and a lot of comments about your blog making no sense whatsoever.
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5 hours ago, Zakamutt said:Your link to thereviewreview includes an errant period in the URL, which makes it go to altogether the wrong article. Otherwise your post is p. good
http://www.thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/short-course-line-editing
There you go. A clickable link to the right article.
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I think you broke your lamp by turning it 90°. If it is placed horizontally, it will get hot around the lightbulb and the hot air will go up and out the holes. This creates a small vacuum, which will force cold air in from below and the air will constantly be replaced. By placing it horizontally, you trap the hot air inside and then you keep heating the same air, making it much hotter than the designers intended.
I will argue that a lamp, which dies due to being used like in the picture is a horrible one, but it's not the same as it will always kill itself.
As for changing the lightbulb, I don't know the complexity in doing so. In some cars it's made quite tricky and you have to unscrew the entire light to do so and if you touch the wrong location, the lightbulb will due shortly after being replaced. It wouldn't surprise me that some Chinese factory came up with the idea to do the same with this lamp, thinking that if it dies, people are in the market for a new lamp and they can sell even more.
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Original:
Tokeizaka-san irritatedly flips through the book, but her hand stops suddenly.Mine:
Irritated, Tokeizaka-san flips through the book, until her handsuddenlystops.I don't read the same into both sentences. In your version she flips through the book until she casually stops. In the original, she flips though the book and stops suddenly because she spotted something in the book. Sure I might be biased because I know the context of the entire scene, but I view that as a bonus.
QuoteMy version:
Irritated, Tokeizaka-san flips through the book, until her hand suddenly freezes.
Alternative version: (a bit more liberal, which might make more sense given the context)
Irritated, Tokeizaka-san flips through the book, until she suddenly freezes.
I think this will bring it closer to the meaning in the original line. The key difference here is that the stop comes very suddenly and completely unexpected to everybody, including herself. I agree that suddenly should be considered in each case. In this case it fits well because it's a very sudden event like "suddenly a loud bang could be heard and the lights died". The word suddenly tells that something happened without warning and likely quite unexpected.
Other than that I really like the post. I will also add that I had the luxury of reading the VN when it was translated (the start that is. It's not done yet) and then again after Fred edited it. It was an amazing experience. The contents is more or less the same, but the reading experience and enjoyment have been significantly improved. I expected it to be an improvement, but not to the scale that it turned out to be. In fact when I read it yesterday, I realized that despite being aware that editing is a really good thing, I had still underestimated the importance of it. Reading the edited version compared to the unedited version was like... wow. Just wow. I think that's the most accurate description of my immediate impression.
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How would it sound natural if a native English-speaker rephrased this line?
That question contains the very essence of what editing is about. Not just about 〜, but in general. It goes for everything. Perhaps a bit more precise: "how would this line be written if it was originally written from scratch by a native English speaker and not based on a translation?".
Reading the bullet lines I conclude it's one of those signs/words I don't like. The issue is that the meaning depends on context and sometimes the context doesn't provide the answer. This mean two people can read the same text and they end up not having read the same contents. Text should be clear and strait forward to deliver the meaning. Sure a VN could be intentionally vague to postpone revealing what really goes on until later, but that's not what I'm talking about here. It's about wanting to be clear and then write it in a way where people can read it in multiple ways. Considering that 〜 comes with such an issue, it can only be too slow to get rid of it and replaced with something, which can't be read in multiple ways.
- Darklord Rooke and Darbury
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33 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:
@Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, after all.
And while it is perhaps true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, most people won't stop and smell the roses if you don't present them properly.
Somehow that sounds like an encouragement to all forum users to smell @Rose. Well what could go wrong
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The problem with UCS-2 is that it was pulled from the unicode standard in 2011 and as such Microsoft no longer officially supports it. While it might work, they no longer even mentions it in their documentation. If you want to tell windows to write code using UCS-2, then you need to get info elsewhere on how tell windows it is UCS-2 and it would be a really poor business situation to use it because it might be broken in the next windows update and Microsoft will likely be like "not supported => won't fix". UCS-2 is most likely good enough for all VNs in more or less all languages. However it should be pointed out that for the most part, UCS-2 and UTF-16 should be more or less interchangeable for two byte characters (can't verify this, documentation is gone).
CP932 has the benefit of using either one or two bytes, which mean smaller scripts. It use a single byte for Latin letters and two bytes for... well everything not in standard ascii (some katakana use one byte). It's the encoding, which provides the smallest files for mixed English/Japanese writing. While it may not look like it at first glance, English writing does matter in an all Japanese release. It's used for pathnames, including names of voice files. There can be so many of those that it adds up that they are half size of what they would be in UCS-2/UTF-16. This mean from a pure size issue, CP932 is a winner.
Reusing old code is certainly an aspect of it, but there is more to it as well. The encoding is dead simple to handle if you write custom code for it. Musumaker is hardcoded to CP932 encoding. When reading a line, it checks the hex value of the first character, or to be more precise, it checks the most significant bit of the first byte. If it's set, it's a line to print in the text box. If it isn't set, it will be a command to execute (like stop bgm, add sprite or whatever). Very easy to code and works well with Japanese text. Works horribly with English text and could very easily be a nightmare to write for a new encoding. Even if they were to rewrite the engine from scratch, they would likely stick to using this approach because "it's fast to write and execute and it works".
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9 hours ago, tymmur said:
⁇ ⁈ ⁉ ‼
I looked more into those and the more I look at it, the stranger they get.
?? <-- two characters
⁇ <-- one character
They look sort of the same, so I figured if display isn't the main trigger, is text size something? Assuming we use utf-8 (the most common unicode encoding), then ? will use one byte (it's standard ascii). However ⁇ is not a standard ascii and is a multi byte character. To be more precise it uses 3 bytes. This mean even though the number of characters is cut in half, the amount of bytes in the text is increased by 50%. That goes for all 4 of them.
If we switch to utf-16, which is used once in a while, no character can use less than two bytes, meaning the two ? characters will use 4 bytes combined. However due to lower overhead in utf-16, ⁇ has a two byte encoding, meaning in this case the number of bytes is reduced by 50%. In this case it could make sense for size, but the size is increased for every standard character, which will likely eat up way more than is saved this way.
This leaves the question: when is it beneficial to use those combo characters? Looks like they can be used for chess, but that isn't the same as it would be beneficial to do so from a technical point of view. I find parts of unicode to be silly and this certainly seems to be characters we could do without.
On this topic of character byte size. Japan tend to stick to shift-jis/cp932 because they use two bytes for write kanji/kana. Utf-8 use 3 bytes, meaning a 50% increase in text size. That is most likely the major reason why VNs tend to require Japanese locale. Utf-16 however can write Japanese characters using just two bytes and I suspect as windows becomes more and more aimed at unicode that VNs will start using utf-16. That would really be a gift to translation efforts because it will remove the issue of "character not present in cp932".
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ᵯ ⋛ ␛ ☃ ☠ ☭ ♋ ꈚ ꊪ
Unicode is fun. There is more or less everything there, even Fuwa users. Hello @Rooke ♜♖
ௌ <-- that's one single character
I didn't find the dollarpound sign, but I did find this ₠. It's the original Euro sign. They then changed it to € before they actually printed the money, but nobody came up with the idea not to include to old one in unicode.
Or more on topic, here are 4 characters:
⁇ ⁈ ⁉ ‼
If you claim there are 8 characters on that line, then you better stop drinking now. They are only 4 according to unicode.
- Darbury and Darklord Rooke
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I love your blogging about issues I haven't really considered, but are actually quite important. On top of informative, it forces me to stop and think, which is a good thing.
Like with your last entry (about quote marks), I have to point out that most VNs use the character encoding cp932. ‽ isn't included in that one, meaning while we might see it in the wild, it will not be inside VNs, at least not those using Japanese engines. It might appear in engines using utf-8 (those claiming international support). Doesn't look like solving !? or ?! with just a merge to ‽.
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Just to add fuel to the fire, I will add that "" can be problematic. It's a quote in English and in the dawn of time (computer time, that is), programmers figured it would be a good sign to quote strings. This mean "This is a line" will leave out the "" in the string itself. Writing ""This is a line"" will end the string at the second " and cause an error. The way to write the line in a way the computer would understand would be "\"This is a line\"". However it could also be written "「This is a line」". However this only goes for " and this would also be accepted by the computer "“This is a line”".
For easier comparison:
- "\"This is a line\""
- "「This is a line」"
- "“This is a line”"
Next problem is that most VNs use Japanese locale and as such use the shift-jis encoding (or rather Microsoft's codepage 932, which is virtually identical). This mean that not all characters are available. More specifically whatever is used should be available here Microsoft's cp932 page for 0x81 leading byte. Being aimed at Japanese text, they didn't include “”, but row 60, column 05 to 08 looks useful, or at least as close as one can get to what you asked for.
Leaving technical reasons aside, I do actually like the 「」signs. I think they look decent. I just wish they were available with a character width, which didn't provide so much whitespace around them. However they seem to be made to match a default kanji width to make kanji line up vertical. There is nothing we can do about the width, other than making a custom font.
- Rose, Darklord Rooke and Darbury
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Learning How To Learn Japanese, Part 1: Obligatory Introduction
in Learning How To Learn Series
A blog by Kenshin_sama in General
Posted
I once saw a polyglot study guide (polyglot is usually defined as knowing at least 5 languages). Apparently they use many different study techniques, but they all have a few things in common:
The part about studying every single day is important because the human brain has a place for foreign languages. You need to trigger it with the language of your choice daily. If you only trigger it occasionally, you won't get it into the mindset of the language in question. It's not the amount of time you spend, it's how you spend it. 30 minutes a day is way more beneficial for remembering what you study than a 5 hour study session every Sunday even if the daily study only sums up to 3.5 hours weekly.