tymmur

There is a science to making surveys. Random questions will usually give you very little while carefully thought out questions can provide a lot. First of all, every single word in each question needs to be considered because it's important that it's precise and that all readers agree to the meaning. I don't think you are doing well in this regard. Also keep in mind that not everyone here are native English speakers and there are translators, who translates to something other than English. This can make using academic English even worse. "1. Which of the following areas best describe where your translation practice falls?" What does this mean? If it how you practice to make you better, how you practiced in the past or the kind of of translation work you do now? The answer activist is not good either. I view activists as people who likes to cause obstructions. I think something like "unpaid hobby translator" is more in line with what you are thinking. You also entirely miss the unpaid translators, who work to produce something they hope can be used to get a paid job later. "2. Which of these pathways best describes how you began your translation practice?" Since you post here, an obvious answer is missing, which is starting out with visual novels, meaning it falls into the category of hobby. Again the word practice might not be read identical by all people. Also what covers academia? You could have foreign languages in school where you have translation assignments. This is in fact mandatory to learn English in most non-English speaking countries. Some schools offer Chinese or Japanese as optional for 1-2 years and I bet you that people going through that will be nowhere near the level needed to translate when they are done. Some people could say academia due to having Japanese at school for one year while others require attending a university or similar studying the language. This will again make the replies less useful than wanted. "3. How often do you engage in personal reading / research on translation?" I assume this is studying and not "how often do you do translation work?". You might want to ask both because weekly means something different if the person works daily or weekly. Also how is reading/research defined? Looking up in a dictionary? Looking up kanji? (I think all translators does that in each translating session). It could also be something other than that, like studying grammar. How about running each sentence through tools like jparser or jisho? Also I have come across both people who translates on all 5 weekdays or only during the 2 days of the weekends, neither of those can be answered clearly with the options you provided. In fact mentioning kanji and the tools related to it, does your survey even take into account that it's Japanese and that the character sets themselves (all 3 of them) are a challenge? This adds an issue you don't get when translating between two languages using the same character set, like the Latin characters. I will skip the control questions to counter the bias from not asking a representative demographic of translators. You have none of that, which is usually quite bad, but at the same time your demographics are so unknown that I wouldn't even know where to start to make such a correction. It's like like political surveys where correction questions can be as simple as "who did you vote for last time". Another obvious question for visual novel translation is if the translator works alone or in a group and if it's in a group, is it done in a way where translators can learn from each other? Single person translations of VNs are actually fairly rare meaning ideas and insights spread from person to person, both regarding work organization and the work itself. How the work is organized and how the text is available matters for the resulting quality. For instance the same text can be worked on by 3 people, first translation, then editing to get a more natural English flow between the lines, then translation verification done by a translator other than the first one (checking both translation and if editing altered the meaning by accident). Interaction between people here can provide useful feedback. I hope you don't mind that I might have been a bit harsh on your survey, but I did it mainly to put focus on the quality of the survey itself, hence how useful the results are. I would actually be interested in the result, particularly if you do something to improve the quality.

Looks like it's a theme problem. Only one can display the pings and yeah, it's the good old crappy one.

I have an update on likes. After having received a like for my previous post, I can tell that the notification appears to work for all themes, but only Rooke's crappy default theme will show the like on the post itself. It would appear that likes have been split into multiple types of likes (thanks, haha, sad etc) and the themes need to be updated accordingly. I have no idea why Rooke's crappy default appears to work without an update, but it's lucky because it can likely be used as a template for the other themes.

A quick theme switching test reveals that the heart button is only in Rooke's crappy default theme. I switched to it and liked a post. That seemed to work, but as I can't stand the theme, I switched back to Infinite Stomach v2 (who came up with those names anyway?) and then the like button went away again. The conclusion is clear: the missing like button is an issue with the themes. If it was the forum itself, then none of the themes would be able to like anything.

I will say it comes down to one really important question: how well is the VN written? If the answer is that it has a bunch of quickly written semi-random text to glue H scenes (hence HCGs) together, then the demand to accurate translation is fairly minimal. If it's say a comedy where the puns are play on words, multiple kanji readings, references to historic events etc, then the VN will be absolutely ruined by MT as what you will end up with will essentially be a bunch of jokes, where the punchlines have been lost in translation. I tried using MT with fairly mixed results (horrible and passable, not not good). I wrote about the problems to a question like this once and was met with a reply "that's because you didn't do this and that". Apparently you should be using Atlas to translate, make a custom dictionary, make it somehow alter the strings on the fly to make them more MT friendly and lots of other stuff. I tried a bit, but realized the amount of time and energy it takes to learn how to do everything right is quite significant. If you spend the same amount of time and energy on studying Japanese, you likely have reached the level where you can hook into VNs to get the text, pass it to stuff like Jparser and read it that way. The difference here is that you essentially get the Japanese sentence and when hovering over each word you get the dictionary lookup for that word, meaning you are actually translating yourself. Getting skills in MT setup will never result in anything perfect while reading Japanese can be perfected over the years. Once I did a test. I used the Jparser approach to translate VN dialogue (20 lines or so). Those lines were then corrected by a real translator. It looks like I caught the essence of the text better than MT would have done. In fact the only problem was grammar. I had a bit of a problem telling the precise relationship between words, like "Jack kissed Jill", "Jack was kissed by Jill", "Jack didn't kiss Jill". This means if you study Japanese grammar rather than MT setup, you will end up with a better quality for the same effort. It should be noted that I didn't study Japanese grammar at all before this test. In fact my combined Japanese studies at that time was likely around a day or so. Jparser is not good enough to become a quality translator in itself, but here we are talking about Jparser vs MT and that comparison has a clear winner. A good tip is to read what you wrote before posting. Check for typos and stuff like that to see if it's clear what you plan to say. Also if you reply, check if you answer the question or if you started to ramble about off topic stuff, which has little or nothing to do with the question you reply to. It's fairly simple and it really improves the quality of your posts. Good quality posts are easier to read, hence have a higher chance of getting the reply you want. Though in this particular case, it might show that you are ready for MT since you use hard to read English yourself Sounds to me like the issue of people who claim they can multitask. Studies have revealed that people are equally bad at multitasking regardless of if they claim they are good at it or not. The difference is that people who claim they are good at multitasking will not increase quality/performance when given just one task while people who claim they are bad at multitasking will improve with just one task. Likewise if non-English speakers are more willing to accept broken English, it might not be because they are better at adapting to it, it could be because they are so poor at English that they will not benefit from the enrich quality of the text, which uses proper English. I have had the luxury of reading a VN (or rather parts of a VN) before and after editing. Both versions were proper English, but the attention to details and attention to overall flow between lines made the edited version way more enjoyable to read. It's also easier to remember what happened earlier in the story because your focus is on the read contents rather than the reading process itself. Maybe if the reader is so poor at English that they fail to benefit from this and have to focus mainly on the reading process, then they might not benefit from a well written/translated VN. Semi-related note to this. One of the ways to tell if a child need glasses is if they can't remember what they read. This is due to the fact that 100% focus is on making out the text, leaving no brainpower to store the word, hence they fail to grasp the entire sentence. Another reason for needing 100% brainpower on reading could be dyslexia, which can also be indicated by failing to remember what the person just read. In other words it's scientifically proven that remembering a text is harder if the reading process is more challenging for the reader (no surprise there). I suspect the same applies to reading a foreign language, though I never thought of it that way before.

Actually MangaGamer is a Japanese company with the main office in Tokyo. However they do specialize in getting Japanese VNs translated into English. Despite being Japanese, they do sell uncensored VNs, provided they can get them, which might be possible simply because they reject any customer located in Japan (not really sure about the legal details). As for Rance, they have released some, which went well enough for them to announce another two titles. If it keeps going well for them, we might end up with the entire series.

10/10 It's rare to find somebody you can punch without getting weird looks (also the story behind it is awesome)

Somehow I don't trust that. If we go back in generations, the number of direct ancestors you have would be: 2 (parents), 4 (grand parents), 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 etc This means people come in x/2, x/4, x/8 etc. It's not mathematical possible to end up being x/3 of some generic origin.

3D VNs have a horrible track record. Nobody managed to deliver 3D visual impressions, which rivals 2D in VNs. Teatime went all out with 3D VNs and they died and all their VNs have poor reviews due to 3D not working for VNs. If you are after the H scenes in 3D, look for Custom Maid 3D 2, @Home mate and whatever all of those are called. 3D H scene games with hints of VN story, but not enough to really classify them as VNs. This is most likely more like what you are asking for. Forget about VNs if you goal is the H scenes.

Replying to this thread.

It's a hard question to answer, or at least to pick one of the choices. The professional work like MG is actually just getting the Japanese image from before they censored it. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they made something, which was really quick because it would be censored anyway. I think my answer would be that I prefer good looking uncensored/decensored from whoever can do it best. However there are horrible artworks out there where it's valid to argue for censoring it to hide the awfulness. In other words all the options in the pool could be the best as the answer depends on the specific VN/artwork. Also if we go into this, we would also have to consider that just like there are multiple uncensored versions, there are multiple ways to censor images. Suddenly this rather simple question becomes quite complex to answer.

No, though I suspect X-change use the same engine as Tokimeki Check-in!. They look surprisingly similar from an engine point of view and are both made by Crowd. I'm not sure if the engine from Private Nurse is used for anything else, though Heart de Roommate and Figures of Happiness could be worth a look considering they are all made within 2 years by Angel Smile.

If you are going the path of supporting old engines, then do consider adding support for old translated titles like Private Nurse and X-change. There is a number of VNs, which didn't age well due to the engine and poor support on modern computers and/or missing features. For instance I did decide to replay Private Nurse a few months ago, but stopped quickly because it turns out the keyboard can't make it move forward to next line and clicking the mouse quickly becomes annoying.

There is a storyline though all of them, meaning each contains something, which you understand better if you play them in the order they are released. Be aware that the early ones have had remakes, but AFAIK the newest remakes haven't been translated. This mean the first one is a bit buggy (a few insignificant graphical glitches) while the 3rd is seriously buggy. Sadly advising to just skip the 3rd is bad because the storyline makes that one quite important. Hopefully we will get translated remakes some day. I started with that one too. Sure you can start with that one and it works ok and you get a full storyline. However you can do stuff like "call for help" where you then have to pick which of two countries. Those two countries are locations of earlier Rance games and the people showing up from each speak in a way where you miss at least half of it if you don't know that Rance used to work together with all of them. In fact I think they are all heroines from previous Rance games, complete with H scenes and stuff. It's almost like every single sentence is a reference to events in the past.

Read the "behind the scenes" part of the first Rance game. They decided they needed to stand out from everything else and one way to do that is to make the main character a total jerk. He is intentionally unlikeable in a way, which makes him comedy likeable (if that makes any sense). I recommend starting from the start to get the storyline. Be aware that each Rance game is different and they go from dungeon crawlers to Risk elements (Sengoku Rance has lands to conquer and armies and stuff).

In that case you have come to the right place. There are plenty of test subjects unique individuals here, which could have your interest. Maybe you could become some sort of Desmond Morris of the otaku tribe. Now that's certainly a good start here and I hope a lot of people think like that. Sadly I can't think of anything you can help me with with, but I do hope you find somebody else you can enjoy helping

Isn't that the same as asking: are movies porn? It' pretty much depends on the contents. There are nukige with no real story, which pretty much lives up to the criteria as porn while there are all age VNs, which clearly doesn't. Then there is the thing in between. Hollywood has the thing in between as well and that isn't porn. They do go quite far and have actually transmitted STDs during recordings of non-porn movies produced in Hollywood.

Looks like sanahtlig is spot on. There is no reason to spend anymore time on this thread.

http://www.thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/short-course-line-editing There you go. A clickable link to the right article.

I can't answer that without entering the debate: what is a video game? When I was first introduced to the term video games, it was my impression that it applied to consoles only and computer games was a whole different thing. Since then the difference has been a whole lot blurred (like the console stole the computer game feature of making savegames) and now I have no idea how to tell the difference between a video game and a computer game. I would say yes and no. It has game elements in it, like the goal to fill the history to unlock all screens and CGs in memory (or whatever the VN decides to call the review button). It has graphical properties of a game with sprite movements and stuff like that, though it would likely be more relevant to compare that to a movie. It has a bunch of voices (most of them anyway), which would also hint more at a movie. Last, but not least it has all the text, which would be considered a novel most of all. I would say VNs are just that: VNs. They can't really be classified in any of the existing categories because it has features from multiple categories, but not enough to classify it in any of those. We could start to talk about calling them games if we add a dungeon crawler game or something similar to it, but then we have to debate how much you can add and still call it a VN. Not really to me. VNs are VNs. That's how it is to me and I don't really care how other people view it. Because VNs are partly multiple different things people will forever debate which one they are and they will likely never agree.

Summary: tracing is fine for personal use, but not for publishing.

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.

I fully agree, though not having one would likely mean the end of your life. I mean whoever claims not to have one is full of sh*t one way or another. Also why is Ratboi's comments getting a lot more likes than the post with the memes themselves? While the comment is good, the best part of this thread is the nsfw image.

eroge: story with many H scenes nukige: H scenes without a story worth reading That's how I view the definitions and I know other people here have mentioned those definitions as well. However it's not universally agreed upon because VNDB has a tendency to add the nukige tag to eroge.

Dfbreezy - starter of weird threads If this thread should have any credibility, at least research fuwa first. If it should be about well known users, at least start by going through the blogs. The people mentioned in OP seems somewhat random and the text for each seems somewhat random as well, not to mention shallow. Looks like some descriptions are just based on the user's avatar rather than what they have written. The only thing really positive about this is that Nohman has the right idea and started building a proper list for what the title says.