tymmur

I think that's more or less what I said as well. More translators will always be needed and I would not flame people for wanting to start. If I could, then I would love to open some "translator school/training ground". However now that a quality translation of Musumaker is within reach, I will not sacrifice it to train some wouldbe translators. It might be an idea to make a translation project with an easy to read VN for new translators to train themselves, but Musumaker will not be used that way.
 
I'm not sure branching out is the right choice of words for this. The plan is to translate Majo Koi Nikki before starting/continuing on Musumaker, not to translate in parallel. I'm currently the only one working on it and I'm restructuring/reorganizing how the translators need to input the translation. This will make it easier for the translators, less risk of screwing up (like touching a line of code, which then makes the game crash) as well as making administration easier. I can't really do this while translators are working, which makes right now is the perfect time to do something like that.

As much as I would like assistance from more people, I have to agree with this statement. Looking at the log and old forum posts, I would say RaurosFalls started out like that. The will to translate, but not really the Japanese skills to do so. He translated the best he could, studied whenever he had a problem and studied in general and within 3-4 years he actually became a decent translator. Being quality minded, he then went back and retranslated everything he had touched so far a 2-3 times (not editing, actual translation work relative to the original lines). The quality improved significantly and this is the quality you see in the patch. This mean it is possible to train to become a translator, but it takes so long that Musumaker will hopefully be fully translated once the training pays off and delivers quality good enough. I would still encourage people to start studying Japanese if they want to translate. Just do not expect to start translating Musumaker within a few months.
 
Speaking of quality, I plan on adapting the approach used for Majo Koi Nikki. This mean translation, tlc, edit, qc and so on. Joining Luna Translations allows shifting the focus from just getting the VN translated to getting a quality translation. More on this later. For now I will just say there is a much stronger focus on quality than there used to be.

As much as I would like assistance from more people, I have to agree with this statement. Looking at the log and old forum posts, I would say RaurosFalls started out like that. The will to translate, but not really the Japanese skills to do so. He translated the best he could, studied whenever he had a problem and studied in general and within 3-4 years he actually became a decent translator. Being quality minded, he then went back and retranslated everything he had touched so far a 2-3 times (not editing, actual translation work relative to the original lines). The quality improved significantly and this is the quality you see in the patch. This mean it is possible to train to become a translator, but it takes so long that Musumaker will hopefully be fully translated once the training pays off and delivers quality good enough. I would still encourage people to start studying Japanese if they want to translate. Just do not expect to start translating Musumaker within a few months.
 
Speaking of quality, I plan on adapting the approach used for Majo Koi Nikki. This mean translation, tlc, edit, qc and so on. Joining Luna Translations allows shifting the focus from just getting the VN translated to getting a quality translation. More on this later. For now I will just say there is a much stronger focus on quality than there used to be.

To be honest, that's kind of the wrong mentality to have. For starters, you need to know more than just some kanji, you need a solid mastery of the language to be a decent translator, and that means a couple years of studying. We don't really need more people in this scene who spend a couple months learning basic grammar and a few dozen kanji, trying to make sense out of the VNs they're "translating." 

Ixrec is amking his translations ultra-literal. Sometimes is readible (MuvLuv) sometimes is so badly written it's just incomprehensible (Comyu).
https://vndb.org/p771

We all probably read new version of A Profile.
Old art (from vndb):

New art:

I hate Miou's face, she looks like that Moomin from Sharin, Natsumi.

(This post contains spoilers if you haven't played the game, so please don't read it if you're planning to try the game.)
A Profile is probably the most boring VN I've ever get to play.
First of all the protagonist and the set up of the game is pretty weird. Basically, it's a school full of weirdos and unwanted people, I could get the explanation of "because the school is in a conflictove area", but that's  not the case, at least that was my impression when I played, because one of the heroines is an Ojou-sama, and the scene where the story develops seemed to me like a very standard neighborhood.
The common route is boring and repetitive. Constantly reminding us that the protagonist was a troublemaker in the past but now wants to "reform" or something like that, and the slice of life scenes were bad as hell, while I do try to get the approach the game wants the player to have regarding getting closer to the game's characters I don't think it it accomplishes it very well.
I'll rank the three heroines from less boring to a "want to kill myself while playing the game" level of boringness:
Rizu (less boring)<Miou<Miku (dear god)
Rizu: sister of the protagonist. Her wake up scenes made me want to just skip her entire route, because I swear that I spent almost 45 minutes just passing text talking about how the protagonist is trying to wake her up and she doesn't want to. She feared her brother's attitude when he hanged out with his old friends and was a delinquent, that's what forced Masayuki to change, but in the totality of her route I found her annoying and acting like the description of her says: "Like a spoiled brat" (If the game intended the player to find her character annoying then it was a very well done deed.) Last but not least, the trigger to her H-scene was pretty bad imo, suddenly she likes her brother so much that she wants him to sleep with her without any build up.
Miou: Masayuki’s childhood friend. She’s a "bright character" that just likes to be together with Masayuki and Kaine. She considers hemself as a normal girl. But what does the game or the one who wrote the game consider normal? The main problem regarding her route is the focus that is given. The constant question of : is she prostituting herself or is it just a rumor about her? (Although the story makes it pretty obvious.) Then, the constant back and forth about how does she like the protagonist but at the same time she wants to stay away from him as much as possible and wants to hurt Rizu as much as she can because she was the reason Masayuki changed from a delinquent to a decent student. What a retarded reason, although knowing Rizu's personality I wouldn't mind helping Miou in her deed, lmao.
Miku: I swear to god this was by far the most boring route I've ever read in my entire VN experience. No other route can make me want to jump from a window other than this one. First of all, the fact the she is portrayed as an Ojou-sama but she's in a school known because of their badly behaved students makes no sense whatsoever, I could get the reason of proximity regarding her house in the story, but still, weird. She has a cold personality throughout the entire game, except when she shows her true intentions to Masayuki. The reason she's concerned about him is because he stopped running competitively because he had physical restraints that didn't let him keep up. Again, another retarded reason to be concerned, and after reading that I realized that I had read several hours her route waiting for something more interesting, a deeper backstory. In the end, all that I got in the end was a stupid backstory and a tasteless heroine.
Summing up, boring story, tedious and boring routes and stupid reasons to do things. I know, it's a game and it's fictional, but man...
Apart from that, I thank Amaterasu translations for translating the game, because although I don't like it I know there are lots of people who do, and after all a fan translated game will always be something good for the community so everyone can enjoy more VN's in general.
 

Majo Koi Nikki Translation Project (Last Update: 05/03/2016)

https://vndb.org/v14062
 
Description (Quoted from VNDB)
 
Opening Video (YouTube)
 
English Translation Demo
 
Team
Team Name: Luna Translations
Translator: Hasa
Editor: Aizen-Sama
Hacker: Aizen-Sama, Porygon2
Image Editor: Aleister
 
Progress
05/03/2016
Scenario texts have been extracted.  04/23/2016
An English translation demo (linked above) has been posted on YouTube. The scripts will be extracted once our hacker's finished with his school stuff. Preparing our team blog to share project progress and all that.  
ETC
Before we've decided to translate this game, we threw a poll here to find out which game people preferred to see translated: this one vs Sakura no Uta -Sakura no Mori no Ue o Mau-. Some time later, we learned that some people might dislike to see the latter title translated for reasons, which was why we cancelled the poll shortly after. We didn't mean to make anyone upset by picking up the latter game, and if any of you had any bad feelings about it, we apologize. 

I'm thinking the same thing, but then it occurred to me that it is more or less the same situation as back when I tried to resurrect the Musumaker translation. Through programming/hacking I managed to get the game accept translated text. This placed me in the same category as you with a working game and no translators. I managed to get one translator with the approach you just took with a forum announcement. I then spent the next 5 years recruiting 0 translators through forums. It might have been dumb luck to get a translator by just waiting on a forum, but I did, meaning it is possible. I can't blame you for at least trying.

It's much better now. The less bright blue really does wonders and now I can actually stand it and stay long enough to read posts. However sadly I'm not completely free of any reaction in my eyes, even mow a few minutes after reading there. I wonder if that is possible to get rid of without losing the company colors. I'm not sure.

Some more quick opinions on how these samples might get edited down. (Guessing at the missing portions, of course.)
ORIGINAL
And... ... since the clock tower looks very misterious and beautiful looking at it from a distance, I wouldn't like to get disappointed by ruining m(y impression of it?)

EDIT
And seen from a distance, the clock tower is mysterious, beautiful. I'd hate to ruin that impression.
Much of the meaning is already implicit in the bones of the sentence. Paring down is fairly painless. 

ORIGINAL
She's very self-assured and significantly popular with boys and girls (mostly boys, of course) because she kindly gives you advice if you ask for her (help?)

EDIT
She's confident and always has a kind word of advice when asked. As a result, she's quite popular — mostly with the boys, of course.
This just needs a little shortening to fit. Plus, reordering cleans up the ambiguous cause/effect relationship — i.e., she's not self-assured because she gives advice.
 
ORIGINAL
Their first family head was obsessed with education, he even hired architectural professionals in order to reproduce an ancient greek building on this (plot of land?)
EDIT
Their first family head was obsessed with education. He even hired architects to recreate an ancient Greek building on the grounds.
This one just needed superfluous words cut, as others have pointed out.

ORIGINAL
I haven't been thrilled about the visit, but her comments let me down a little bit. It's just like hearing negative reviews about a tourist spot that (is supposed to be great?)

EDIT
I was already down about the visit, and her comments aren't helping. It's like hearing bad reviews of a supposedly great tourist spot.
I think Rooke's got the right of this one re: context, but I took a stab at keeping "comments" anyway. "But" is also an odd conjunction here, since her words amplify matters rather than contradict them.

I got news of the progress. After some negotiation with Luna Translation, we merged, or you could say we joined their team. Naturally this mean major changes and I will try to sum them up here.
 
Majo Koi Nikki is being translated right now Musumaker have no active translation right now Musumaker will be translated by Luna Translations once Majo Koi Nikki is done Efforts to make a HD patch ASAP is unchanged  
While it may sound like a delay, it really isn't. Luna Translations started out with just one translator two weeks ago and now there are 4 (and still recruiting. Do tell if you are interested). The team also has an editor, meaning translators should only translate, not edit. In fact translators would not have to do anything but translate as all other tasks are dealt with by other people. RaurosFalls worked as sole translator and editor for Musumaker and the result has been that he got through less lines in a month than Luna Translation have gone through each week so far.
 
This mean even though Musumaker has become second in the queue, the ETA for a full translation has become much lower. Assuming the translation progress for the last week will stay stable, the remaining lines in Musumaker would be possible to translate in just 10 months. RaurosFalls would need years to finish on his own.

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tymmur AaronIsCrunchy AaronTooNerdy I feel like having double vision

I have a friend with impaired vision who is very sensitive to light.  I seem to recall he was particularly sensitive to bright blue light.  He absolutely hates blue LEDs.
Some further insight on the matter:
http://www.livescience.com/31949-led-lights-eye-damage.html

It's not about being ugly (only @OutoftheBox said that). It's about actually feeling physically unwell when watching it. I admit I'm more sensitive to light than the average person (particularly flashing lights), but still that page affects me negatively physically, which is fairly rare for a static homepage. I can't even remember experiencing that happening before.
 
I did some thinking about this. The key here might not be that it's different shades of the same color, but the fact that it is all blue. Blue is the shortest wavelength we can see, which mean it's highest frequency light, which affects our eyes. The high frequency in turn mean it's the kind of light with the most energy. Maybe starring into high energy light like that overloads something in the eye or the connected nerves, at least in some people. It does transfer significantly more energy into the eyes than if it were red light, which is the lowest energy light we can see. Natural occurring light is primary low energy, meaning lots of red and very little blue. Starring into blue lights isn't something we would be able to do naturally, meaning genes, which would not be able to cope with it would not be a disadvantage until modern times.
 
While the physics are facts, it's just my theory on how the eye/nerves/brain responds. It may or may not be correct, but it got me thinking: what would happen if I see the very same page, except it is in shades of red? I'm not sure I would like how it would look, but it would be interesting to know if it triggers some bad feeling or not.
 
Another thing about blue. Research has shown that blue light triggers a hormone release from the brain. This hormone is a "wake up" trigger, which makes sense since the sun is the only natural source of blue light. Reading on a screen with blue light is now a cause of insomnia and it is actually recommended to read paper books rather than ebooks before sleeping due to this issue. This mean checking for new posts on an all blue forum just before going to bed would be a bad idea.

It's not about being ugly (only @OutoftheBox said that). It's about actually feeling physically unwell when watching it. I admit I'm more sensitive to light than the average person (particularly flashing lights), but still that page affects me negatively physically, which is fairly rare for a static homepage. I can't even remember experiencing that happening before.
 
I did some thinking about this. The key here might not be that it's different shades of the same color, but the fact that it is all blue. Blue is the shortest wavelength we can see, which mean it's highest frequency light, which affects our eyes. The high frequency in turn mean it's the kind of light with the most energy. Maybe starring into high energy light like that overloads something in the eye or the connected nerves, at least in some people. It does transfer significantly more energy into the eyes than if it were red light, which is the lowest energy light we can see. Natural occurring light is primary low energy, meaning lots of red and very little blue. Starring into blue lights isn't something we would be able to do naturally, meaning genes, which would not be able to cope with it would not be a disadvantage until modern times.
 
While the physics are facts, it's just my theory on how the eye/nerves/brain responds. It may or may not be correct, but it got me thinking: what would happen if I see the very same page, except it is in shades of red? I'm not sure I would like how it would look, but it would be interesting to know if it triggers some bad feeling or not.
 
Another thing about blue. Research has shown that blue light triggers a hormone release from the brain. This hormone is a "wake up" trigger, which makes sense since the sun is the only natural source of blue light. Reading on a screen with blue light is now a cause of insomnia and it is actually recommended to read paper books rather than ebooks before sleeping due to this issue. This mean checking for new posts on an all blue forum just before going to bed would be a bad idea.

I will try to be a bit more constructive. The colors clash big time and look downright hostile. I don't want to look at them for extended periods of time. In fact I don't want to look at them for even a minute. After the Pokemon incident with kids in Tokyo being rushed to the hospitals, one of the universities started studying nice and hostile colors. They ended up with some software, which can analyze a picture and tell how nice/calm it is on a scale from 1 to 10. Even without that software I can tell you get max 3, likely lower than that.
 
To make matters worse, the font is kind of small, making me strain my eyes even more. I totally do not feel welcome there. The font size issue should be correctable by telling the browser to increase the font size.
 
I tried inverting the colors (as in each color channel becomes 255 - value). It actually becomes better that way, but it's still far from good. That isn't a solution either.
 
That's all I have to say for now. The colors made me leave before I studied it enough to comment on the actual contents.

I will try to be a bit more constructive. The colors clash big time and look downright hostile. I don't want to look at them for extended periods of time. In fact I don't want to look at them for even a minute. After the Pokemon incident with kids in Tokyo being rushed to the hospitals, one of the universities started studying nice and hostile colors. They ended up with some software, which can analyze a picture and tell how nice/calm it is on a scale from 1 to 10. Even without that software I can tell you get max 3, likely lower than that.
 
To make matters worse, the font is kind of small, making me strain my eyes even more. I totally do not feel welcome there. The font size issue should be correctable by telling the browser to increase the font size.
 
I tried inverting the colors (as in each color channel becomes 255 - value). It actually becomes better that way, but it's still far from good. That isn't a solution either.
 
That's all I have to say for now. The colors made me leave before I studied it enough to comment on the actual contents.

I did an interesting experiment. I took the HD screenshots and searched the net for similar screenshots from the old version. I decided to go all age only, meaning I can post all of it in this post. I could make my own screenshots to make them more identical, but I don't think it's worth the time. I might write a bit of code to make the very same screenshot in both versions once I have both versions.
 
 

I finished my programming project, meaning I can now pull text from the game script and insert it again. A brief look tells me that it is working, but due to the importance of no failure at this point, I plan to walk through all files and get the computer to show changes to make sure it didn't change anything I didn't plan to change. With a bit of luck, the system I have made will be plug-n-play for the HD version as well. A nice bonus is that it will be much easier to translate now and much harder to mess up the code while doing so. I will write more about how easy it is to translate once the system is ready to be used for actual translation work (not just for testing).
 
News on the official HD release
Looks like there are new info for the HD version. It was originally scheduled for a release on the 27th, but now it says 24th, though it doesn't seem to be updated everywhere. HD requirements have been increased from 5 to 9 GB. The minimum OS requirement is listed as vista on the official site, but getchu and similar tends to write that it works on XP.
 
I wouldn't consider any of those changes major, but they are still big enough to be mentioned.

I finished my programming project, meaning I can now pull text from the game script and insert it again. A brief look tells me that it is working, but due to the importance of no failure at this point, I plan to walk through all files and get the computer to show changes to make sure it didn't change anything I didn't plan to change. With a bit of luck, the system I have made will be plug-n-play for the HD version as well. A nice bonus is that it will be much easier to translate now and much harder to mess up the code while doing so. I will write more about how easy it is to translate once the system is ready to be used for actual translation work (not just for testing).
 
News on the official HD release
Looks like there are new info for the HD version. It was originally scheduled for a release on the 27th, but now it says 24th, though it doesn't seem to be updated everywhere. HD requirements have been increased from 5 to 9 GB. The minimum OS requirement is listed as vista on the official site, but getchu and similar tends to write that it works on XP.
 
I wouldn't consider any of those changes major, but they are still big enough to be mentioned.

There has been a bit of progress again. I started writing a script to extract the translated text and make it possible to put back into the game script. Next up is putting it back. If everything goes according to plan, it will be done in time for the release of the HD version. Once I have that one, all I have to do is to make it possible to insert text into both versions and we can reuse the translation in the HD version. It requires some automated checks if the lines changed and stuff like that. It is a whole lot of work, yet the workload seems to be minor compared to do all this manually. Also the time I spend is extra time spend, not taken from translation time.
 
Meanwhile the translation progresses. Suika's route is nearly complete. It's missing 11 of her spoken lines, meaning it's missing 20-25ish lines.
 
I plan to do a patch release ASAP for the HD version. At this point I don't really care about translation milestones, just release something for the HD version as it would be better than nothing. The release date is "when it's working", which sadly might take a while. There are so many details to look into. Most noteworthy is redrawing all the buttons to contain English text, though unless some graphics artist magically appears and does them, odds are that the outcome with be something quick and ugly to at least get started. My goal isn't to make everything perfect, but to make it playable and then perfect in the next patch. Any graphics artists around, who likes to draw buttons? (no, I didn't write bottoms, though decensor artists are welcome too).

VNR would somewhat fail for musumaker. All the text in the schedule is handled completely differently than text usually is in a VN and it is unlikely that VNR would hook into it. This mean the messages like willpower down, money up and whatever it says wouldn't be translated. The same goes for the buttons. They are png files, not text. There are other examples of places where VNR would fail too, like the intro. All the text in the middle of the screen is also png based. Last, but not least setting up MT for this one would be lengthy. Every single name would have to be entered to tell what it is a name because MT would treat them as items, like orange, strawberry, tree and so on. I'm sure there is a double meaning/pun to using names with double meaning like that, but I haven't quite figured out what it is.
 
The text for the schedule is actually written in the exe file. Finding those and inserting translated text was actually quite difficult. Time will tell if this will be a problem in the HD version.
 
I'm in a weird position right now. I sort of dropped the idea of improving the scripts for now as my goal now is the HD version. However without the HD version or confirmed knowledge of the script syntax, I can't do anything, meaning I'm stuck and not doing anything at all even though I made a long list of stuff I know I have to do. Never before have I been looking forward to the release of a VN like I'm doing right now.
 
At least the translation progress itself is progressing unaffected by the remake announcement.

I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Just ask Apple. Over the years they have made products, which didn't match any existing markets. Sometimes it went poorly (like the Newton) and sometimes it went well and sort of created the market for the product (iTunes Store, iPhone, computers small enough to put on a table, home computers with floppy drives, CDs etc). I would say VNs are sort of the same thing. They can't really get into an existing market, but it has a chance of making a market of its own.
 
With VNs trying to create a new market, it certainly have to rely on good reputation and type. Sadly I feel like VNs suffer from what happened to the gaming industry in the 80s. Some people managed to make great games and then Wall Street went in to get easy money and released garbage. It was a disaster because great quality and garbage got mixed together. The poor quality companies died, but so did some good ones because selling a $30 game is hard when the shop has a barrel of $5 games. Even if they were of worse quality, people went for 6 games for the price of 1. There is a number of great VNs out there, but there is certainly also quite a lot of garbage, which isn't worth the money or time. Money isn't the greatest in VNs, but that haven't stopped some companies from mass releasing cheap VNs with little or no contents. While there is a market for both, it does mean that somebody plays a good VN, tells somebody else about it and the other person goes "I'm not sure about this thing. I will pick a cheaper one first to see what it is" and then the result is a dropped VN and no more VNs for that person.
 
I think the quality/price issue might be the biggest issue for VNs becoming popular. There is also the Rapelay issue, which told people what products from Japan is all about. It doesn't matter what the truth is. Whenever a VN tries to make it into the general market, people "knowing it all" warns about it because it's one of those evil things. Clearly it's much better to play a game where you shoot everybody.

I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Just ask Apple. Over the years they have made products, which didn't match any existing markets. Sometimes it went poorly (like the Newton) and sometimes it went well and sort of created the market for the product (iTunes Store, iPhone, computers small enough to put on a table, home computers with floppy drives, CDs etc). I would say VNs are sort of the same thing. They can't really get into an existing market, but it has a chance of making a market of its own.
 
With VNs trying to create a new market, it certainly have to rely on good reputation and type. Sadly I feel like VNs suffer from what happened to the gaming industry in the 80s. Some people managed to make great games and then Wall Street went in to get easy money and released garbage. It was a disaster because great quality and garbage got mixed together. The poor quality companies died, but so did some good ones because selling a $30 game is hard when the shop has a barrel of $5 games. Even if they were of worse quality, people went for 6 games for the price of 1. There is a number of great VNs out there, but there is certainly also quite a lot of garbage, which isn't worth the money or time. Money isn't the greatest in VNs, but that haven't stopped some companies from mass releasing cheap VNs with little or no contents. While there is a market for both, it does mean that somebody plays a good VN, tells somebody else about it and the other person goes "I'm not sure about this thing. I will pick a cheaper one first to see what it is" and then the result is a dropped VN and no more VNs for that person.
 
I think the quality/price issue might be the biggest issue for VNs becoming popular. There is also the Rapelay issue, which told people what products from Japan is all about. It doesn't matter what the truth is. Whenever a VN tries to make it into the general market, people "knowing it all" warns about it because it's one of those evil things. Clearly it's much better to play a game where you shoot everybody.

I think that is the wrong way to look at it. Just ask Apple. Over the years they have made products, which didn't match any existing markets. Sometimes it went poorly (like the Newton) and sometimes it went well and sort of created the market for the product (iTunes Store, iPhone, computers small enough to put on a table, home computers with floppy drives, CDs etc). I would say VNs are sort of the same thing. They can't really get into an existing market, but it has a chance of making a market of its own.
 
With VNs trying to create a new market, it certainly have to rely on good reputation and type. Sadly I feel like VNs suffer from what happened to the gaming industry in the 80s. Some people managed to make great games and then Wall Street went in to get easy money and released garbage. It was a disaster because great quality and garbage got mixed together. The poor quality companies died, but so did some good ones because selling a $30 game is hard when the shop has a barrel of $5 games. Even if they were of worse quality, people went for 6 games for the price of 1. There is a number of great VNs out there, but there is certainly also quite a lot of garbage, which isn't worth the money or time. Money isn't the greatest in VNs, but that haven't stopped some companies from mass releasing cheap VNs with little or no contents. While there is a market for both, it does mean that somebody plays a good VN, tells somebody else about it and the other person goes "I'm not sure about this thing. I will pick a cheaper one first to see what it is" and then the result is a dropped VN and no more VNs for that person.
 
I think the quality/price issue might be the biggest issue for VNs becoming popular. There is also the Rapelay issue, which told people what products from Japan is all about. It doesn't matter what the truth is. Whenever a VN tries to make it into the general market, people "knowing it all" warns about it because it's one of those evil things. Clearly it's much better to play a game where you shoot everybody.