tymmur

Hello everyone, this account is almost 2 years old so I'd say an introduction is long overdue.
I watch anime and read VNs whenever I can. Right now I'm learning Japanese so I can one day help more VN goodness come west.
I hope we get along and you can use this post to ask me anything cause I don't really know what else to say.
 

We have one translator, who knows kanji and is working on gaining experience with Japanese and being in the UK, it seems experience with English as well. It might not be perfect at first, but it sounds like growth potential to me. Remember if we harass new people to quit, we will reduce the number of good translators in years to come and it's not like we have enough as it is today.

I'll leave it to my boi koestl:
Granted, the VN picked is not full-length, but it's hardly super-short either (and even a 500-liner takes significant effort to translate imo, then again I am pretty damn lazy).
Actually, let me give that quote some pushback: translating forces you to look hard at just what a line actually means; sometimes you can cruise by and miss things when reading more casually, so for some people translation will help you learn the language. But you need to actually be able to comprehend what you're reading at a decent level for that to work. I don't think N5 is even close to that bar, to be honest.
...So basically exactly what Decay said already, but I got to quote koestl so it's all good ok

I have done do in the past where intentional language errors turned the all age text into adult contents with hilarious results. The problem is that such hints are essentially useless. Those who need to get a hint are the people who accept poor translations due to not picking up on such details. It's kind of like writing a self studying guide for people to learn how to read.
This time I subconsciously illustrated the horrors of multitasking. Studies show that people claiming to be good at multitasking will indeed have roughly the same productivity while those who claim to perform poorly at multitasking will decrease productivity while multitasking. No surprise there, but the interesting part is that on average, both types of people do equally well during multitasking, meaning rather than being good at multitasking, the issue is lack of being able to perform better when not multitasking. I knew this already, yet decided to post anyway and the result speaks for itself.
 
Now I'm left with a real puzzle. How can a non-native speaker imitate a non-native speaker

It's been a while since I've made an introduction post; I'm a bit rusty at it.
I've been reading VNs for who-knows-how-long. I don't remember what exactly was my first, but some of the earliest ones I played were Narcissu, Hotel Dusk, the first two Ace Attorney games, and Katawa Shoujo. I'm mostly interested in yuri, otome, and BL (usually in that order), but I won't turn down a well-written galge.
I don't watch much anime or read manga very often, and I don't read light novels at all, but I do listen to a lot of Japanese music, especially j-metal and visual kei. Both my avatar and signature images are from j-power album covers. I play a shitton of video games besides VNs (my backlog is embarrassingly large) and have a major soft spot for narrative-focused games, which is one of the reasons I'm so interested in VNs. I'll read just about anything put in front of me, which is both a blessing and a curse.
I'm a professional editor/proofreader and do writing commissions, including for VNs. Among others, I was a proofreader for Pairs and This, My Soul. I'm the writer of a yuri KN named A Tale of Two Extras; it's unfortunately stalled at the moment, but I'm determined to get it released someday!
I've been studying Japanese for a while now, though I still consider myself beginner-level (as in "not even N5" beginner-level) and don't plan on translating anything anytime soon.
It's nice to meet you all!

We have one translator, who knows kanji and is working on gaining experience with Japanese and being in the UK, it seems experience with English as well. It might not be perfect at first, but it sounds like growth potential to me. Remember if we harass new people to quit, we will reduce the number of good translators in years to come and it's not like we have enough as it is today.

If zakamutt wanted that information to be public, he would've posted it here instead of PMing you. Sharing his PMs is a real shitty thing to do. Now why would he ever show you any proof if you'd just leak it right away?
I don't know what's going on behind the scenes really but Zaka is a very trustworthy individual and you're clearly stepping on some toes here. The nice thing to do would be to pick another project and move on.

Wow a mix of my three favorite topics, pirate themed adventures, comedy and women. Time to go into pirate mode and download this ASAP... ehh I mean whistles Look behind you. There is a three legged monkey. That's the second biggest monkey I have ever seen. Runs off

"My name is Guywood Thrilegs, and I want to be a pirate"

 
Join us to discover the secrets of the Caribbean islands, the stories of brave pirates, wise advices of the voodoo maiden, great deeds ... Well, and above all, of drunks drinking grog and, yes, beautiful women!
Video Trailer: 
 
More than 400 3D FullHD images.
Dozens of animations.
Game available in English and Spanish.
Four full H events.
https://discord.gg/MAcgjJY

https://www.patreon.com/GrogsDevs

 

Monkey Island but instead of being hard, it'll make me hard? I think that's a welcome change.

I happened on this thread while browsing to see how far off the internet our site has fallen.  The site is fine, but we had to move servers... The problem is that the domain is owned by an inactive member.  We're still trying to contact him to take control of the domain again... Once we get ahold of him, we'll be back up and running *crosses fingers*.

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read?
New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time.
Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ?
Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect.
I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book.
Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child.
 
As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory.
VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it.
Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.

The Cynical Brit, TotalBiscuit, John Bain. 4 years he fought hard against cancer and unfortunately lost that fight. 
 
His video game reviews are portrayed as very objective, giving the viewers the facts and quick rundown of various games. So objective that he refused to release a review of a game after a short twitter fight with one of the devs as people may view his negative critiques on the game as just personal bashing.
 
 He retired from totalbiscuit on April 30th after treatment for his cancer had made it too difficult for him to think clearly.
 
July 8, 1984-May 24th, 2018. 33 years old.
 
https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/999787845127634944

Ehhh.... when people say they want to eat out a heroine, they don't actually mean they want to consume her like she is food, even if she might be sugar sweet.

I don't personally think it's about the market getting big in itself, since the appeal of the medium is small enough that it's clearly never going to hold a candle to the major sellers on either Steam or GOG. However, GOG have already had some success as an outlet for Japanese games (Tokyo Xanadu was a chart-topper there despite being a fairy mediocre title), and visual novels have an overlapping market with such Japanese titles.

If I had to guess, then, part of the point is to be visibly welcoming to a certain demographic, while also indirectly snubbing Steam. It's poor "optics" with respect to some of the population, but if GOG are betting on the idea that those people (approving of censorship, and so forth) are more likely to be Steam-loyal than to share their no-DRM ideology, then it would be quite a strong way of boosting their presence as a freer and more consumer-friendly alternative, in the business of giving all customers their desired product without putting unnecessary obstacles in their way.
So, they get to increase their appeal to the Japanese-content-loving demographic, and also increase their appeal to the libertarian demographic (more or less their core), at the same time. Win-win for them, really.

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read?
New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time.
Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ?
Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect.
I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book.
Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child.
 
As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory.
VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it.
Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.

I didn't say it as a bad thing. It's more like an objective observation. I have nothing against people or companies profiting as long as it's without exploitation of people and I see no signs of exploitation here.
I'm quite sure GOG didn't plan this. Just think about what we know. Some VN companies have tried to get GOG to sell VNs. This will most likely have provided GOG with contact info like direct phone numbers to CEOs. GOG will also most likely have playtested the VNs themselves during past negotiations, hence having a pretty good idea what it's all about. Now Valve messed up and the English VN market is free for the taking. Odds are that whoever comes first will get the majority of the market, possibly even close to monopoly.
In other words other companies had provided GOG with the means to add VNs to the store in a matter of days and they might have been in that situation for quite a while. Valve then basically said "act now" and they did. Seems like it's the company version of getting the winning Lotto numbers.
 
If GOG planned this, it would mean they somehow managed to make Valve act like idiots, hence some sort of corruption. I really don't think that's the case because I can't really see GOG acting like that and even if they did, I don't see how they could do it. Besides Valve have on multiple occasions revealed that they are able to make stupid decisions without external help. GOG was just at the right place at the right time and they knew how to make the best of it, but they did not have control of the reason why it was the right time or even if the right time would ever turn up.

That's why I said GOG. Entering an established market is tricky. You need to spend time and money on marketing and hoping to get some awareness and attention in order to get a even a tiny fraction of the market. Right now the VN community is flaming Steam and people talk about a doomed VN future (or risk of it). GOG shows up and get hero status by ensuring VNs can still be purchased in the future. This spreads as fast as the Steam bashing and threads like this one ensures everybody knows that GOG has started selling and what has GOG done in regard of marketing for this? One twitter post and one post on their forum. Simply put the timing appears to have allowed them to conquer a market overnight without marketing expenses.
This is why I said GOG would start to sell VN now despite never having made that claim before. Timing is everything.

That's why I said GOG. Entering an established market is tricky. You need to spend time and money on marketing and hoping to get some awareness and attention in order to get a even a tiny fraction of the market. Right now the VN community is flaming Steam and people talk about a doomed VN future (or risk of it). GOG shows up and get hero status by ensuring VNs can still be purchased in the future. This spreads as fast as the Steam bashing and threads like this one ensures everybody knows that GOG has started selling and what has GOG done in regard of marketing for this? One twitter post and one post on their forum. Simply put the timing appears to have allowed them to conquer a market overnight without marketing expenses.
This is why I said GOG would start to sell VN now despite never having made that claim before. Timing is everything.

It's still not a clear answer, but I will assume it to be a machine translation for two reasons. One is how you mention adapting, which hints MT. The other is you don't seem to get what I'm talking about, something which should be clear if you would be translating yourself.
I don't think faithful translation is really possible with a machine translation. However you watched the anime, meaning you know the plot. It's nukige, meaning it's not plot heavy and last, but not least there exist something for hmanga, where it's "translated" without the knowledge of Japanese, meaning somebody looks at the pictures and makes up a new story. It's generally viewed as a bad thing because it's disrespectful to the original and hence the original author.
If you really want to go through with making a "translation" based on a machine translation, you should consider your writing skills and not be 20% liberal, but more like 60%. If the MT fails to provide something, which makes sense, then make up something. Read your story multiple times, edit it to make a good flow. It will be flamed for being a really bad translation (you can't avoid that), but if your intended reader is somebody who will use a machine translation anyway, then you can improve the reading experience. You have decided to slaughter the story already. You might as well go all the way if that is what it takes to make it at least worth something.
I have to point out that if you start with a machine translation, I will look down on it purely on principle. It's generally a horrible thing to do to a VN. However it's a nukige and you know the story from the anime, you might have a chance of at least making something, which could be enjoyable to read (providing you like the genre). Just call it a rewrite or something rather than a translation. I can't call anything based on a machine translation for a translation and doing so will trick the reader.

TA is a frontend to either machine translations or jparser. The latter is help for word splitting, kanji reading and dictionary lookup, making it an ok tool for human translation. It has the sideeffect of making translation work seem too easy, which can make inexperienced translators seem to think they do better than they do. If you take this approach, do make sure you have the grammar nailed down well, or jparser can lure you into thinking the sentence mean one thing while it's actually something else. Not long ago I wrote some examples of what can happen if you read a sentence without proper grammar skills. You can end up with a sentence where you can't tell which of the following is correct: "Bob's key does work", "Bob's key doesn't work". "Key's Bob does work". Obviously if you can't tell those apart, the translation will be garbage.
Since TA can provide both a machine translation and aid translators, you really haven't told us your approach and as such haven't answered the question.

I'm, like, into visual novels and stuff.
Enough so that I decided to learn the language!
I will hang out like an awkward nerd and maybe help translate stuff if anyone needs a hand. Nice t' meet ya, or something.
(I really have no idea what to put here. ;_;)

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read?
New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time.
Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ?
Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect.
I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book.
Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child.
 
As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory.
VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it.
Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.

So you are saying they made a new flagging system, which triggered incorrectly on a bunch of games and just by chance it hits the games Morale in Media started targeting a week earlier? The timing seems a bit suspicious to be completely by chance. I find it likely they were aware of MIM and having ended up on the dirty list and then they started to check titles with confirmation bias and quickly assumed it's likely correct and acted accordingly. They received a backlash. Jim Sterling and so far 10k signatures is what we know, but we don't know how the affected companies reacted. For all we know one or more started using lawyers due to the possible claim of risk of financial loss due to being kicked based on false info.
Another thing I started thinking about today is the fact that Steam is the big one on the gaming market. In fact one could argue that it's a monopoly. If they start to use their size to cause financial loss for other companies, they start to enter the domain of antitrust laws. The affected companies are quite small, but the signatures is an indication that it has upset quite a number of people and if it is allowed to grow, it might get political attention. Right now there is a guy in the White House, who is unpredictable, very much pro first amendment and sides with the people. On top of that he has talked about using antitrust laws to split up Amazon. If you look at this from Valve's point of view, what they see is that it's unlikely to reach such a level, but not completely impossible and if it happens, it would be bad. Really bad. Since VNs aren't really important to Valve, it would likely be better to just blame a technical issue and kill off the whole thing before it has a chance to escalate. If you think the case is too small for high ups to be interested, remember that the AG once reacted personally to a funded kickstarter campaign, which didn't ship anything to backers.
It's also possible that the backlash and/or feedback from affected companies have reached a higher level at Valve and they want to put everything on pause while they investigate what is going on here.
 
Regardless of what is going on, it looks like things are getting back to normal. They say they will review the titles in question, but I have a feeling they will not find issues severe enough to remove them. Most likely all of them will just stay unmodified.

I looked at the major contributor to what contributes to my results and it turns out that nationality provides a really strong bias. I decided to skip that question entirely. Next I decided to dress differently because I'm not always wearing the same (surprise surprise). This changed the results completely. Not sexually involved came in second place (but at least it's not first). All other tags changed completely. Now I will apparently have wake-up sex, boob job, triple blowjob and tribalism on penis. Tomorrow morning sounds awesome
 
Now I started wondering what it takes to get certain tags. It could be interesting to pick a tag and then it will look up the answer to each question, which will make that tag most and least likely. Consider this a feature request.