Aizen-Sama

Yeah, just like @Meat_Bun1 said, basically whatever method of communication you have port it to either Discord or Slack and your group will be golden in communication matters. Other than that, good luck with your endeavors.

Don't ask for people or the community to translate a title. End.

@abrazilrep that pic was brilliant and made me laugh a lot. I'll store it up for future new members of the community. Thanks. Setting that matter aside, welcome to the forums @Hiaran, always good to see new people. See ya around.

Hey, what up. Good to see people contributing to the community. See you around.

Yeah, this category is pretty subjective anyways, since everyone as an individual has its own quality standard, so in the end nobody ends up completely satisfied with the released patch. It's a sad circlejerk but this is the translation scene in a nutshell.

Sorry about that, you should've said that in the first place, I messed things up, sorry :P. Regarding Kohaku, I'm not very informed about the matter, but if there was proof that they deliberately asked for donations and then went official knowing that they were getting some revenue then that action could be definitely suable. Again, I have no ground to stand on in this case because I haven't researched Kohaku too much myself, but in my honest opinion fan-translation teams (whether they go official in the end or not) should NEVER hold a donations button, because it's unethical and contradicts the principal of "Fan-Translating" anyways.

Well, I certainly like VN's with a lighthearted atmosphere and moeges a lot, those generic highschool scenarios with slice of life scenes are certainly one of my favourite types of VN (I'll highlight "ToHeart2" as an example). But my favourite visual novel is definitely Kara no Shoujo, although the entirety of the cartagra series is a masterpiece as well, you should definitely try those, but they have a darker theme, way darker. Anyways, yeah, my tastes differ a lot in that sense.

Regarding what you said, I'll respond by saying that those are merely supositions. Nobody outside Shinku Translations or Sekai Project knows what really happened, so yeah, commenting about it is pretty pointless since we don't even know what exactly happened in the first place.

Hey, welcome. Always nice to see new people around here. Nice profile pic, definitely a guy with style. WHat is your favourite VN by the way? Anyways, hope to see you around.

I knew someone was going to ask that at some point. Pretty much things related to my group and projects that I'm involved in. There's other stuff as well, but you probably wouldn't like to know if you know what I mean (´◉◞౪◟◉)

Hello everyone, Aizen-Sama here. I’ve been only around this community and forums for around 6 months by now, and even though I may not be the most knowledgeable when it comes to VN’s in general, I think that I possess enough knowledge about the translation scene. That’s right, today I’m not writing a post about Luna Translations, but one about my opinion on the translation scene, translation groups, and the community revolving them. Let us establish how this community and market actually exist in the first place. Piracy and fan translating, they are both mutually exclusive to each other and they are the foundations of what we consider as the “western visual novel community”. After some years where piracy slowly started to decrease and official releases started to be a thing I can safely assume that there are three types of people now, one who will support every single game localization and buy the Visual Novels instead of pirating them, one who will pirate everything and anything, or one that will mix between these two because either there is no other access to the game in Japanese to apply the English patch (in other words, you can’t buy the game legally because the Japanese market is already a very difficult place to access with Western VPN’s, mostly because Japanese publishers block them to not let people outside Japan buy these games online, which is usually the only way to get them in the first place) or the individual simply doesn’t support some releases or companies that release VN’s in particular (I’ll set people that want to buy legally a game with a fan-translated patch but can’t do it, so they have to pirate the VN even if they don’t want to as an example). This last example leads to another concerning issue, the relationship between translation groups and the community itself. It’s partly human nature; when a group establishes itself and releases a patch (no matter whether it’s full or partial) we automatically create what is called a “power level” between these two types of people, the users that translate and work on translating games in one way or another (editing, QC’ing, etc…) and the users that simply play the releases made by the first ones. This so called “power level” is what should be avoided at all costs, sometimes the community must remember that the people that belong to translation groups (whether they are official or not) are part of the community as well, and have their own stances and way of doing things. Those “power levels” are automatically made, and they are the primary reason of this community’s fragmentation into several “sub-communities”, which is a problem mainly for the translation groups. What I’m trying to say here is that what is constantly happening right now is that what this “power division” has made is to categorize groups by number of patches released (the more they have released the more praised they are) and that has ultimately lead to two things; groups distancing themselves from the community, which is a very bad thing for both of the parties involved, and groups distancing from each other. What I mean by this last statement is that there is no communication between teams, which leads to what is happening in the actual society that we live in: the individualization of people (Tl-teams in this case). But regarding that aspect, some groups have managed to find a solution to this matter. Let’s put @Arcadeotic's (Euphemic Translation) and @oystein's (Elevator TL) groups for example; both of them have found a way to make the community feel closer to their groups thanks to their “Public Discord Server Policy” (that’s how I call it) and both of them are in the TL Leaders Discord Server (basically a group to try to unite translation teams more, an initiative from Arcadeotic and I). That group has opened my eyes in many aspects regarding team stances towards piracy as well as opinions about the community and it's relation with the Tl teams. This group has also helped me in getting to know people that otherwise I would have never met even if we were active members of this forum and interacted with each other sometimes, like for example Dergonu, Oystein, Kardororororo, and many more. What I’m ultimately trying to say is that banding together is a rare thing for groups now, and this is the first step to create a community feel again, something that, in my opinion, is being lost little by little and needs to be stopped. I’ll mention another issue that many people find itchy, and that is the topic of “the sense of entitlement of a loud minority”. I’d like to make myself very clear about this; I know that there is a silent positive majority, and that compared to the amount of people that complain about things about projects and English patches this majority vastly overcomes the “minority”, but the matter of fact is that this “loud minority” is what gives people that are new to the community a bad impression about it from the start. I’ll set two examples to demonstrate the last point I mentioned: firstly, I’d like to address the Koiken Otome Project, one that took approximately three years to finish. It’s a topic full of controversy, firstly because people firstly speculated that Flying Pantsu was going to “definitely sell out to the localization companies” and they made a ruckus about it. First of all, what if they really “sold out” to one of them? That is, in my opinion, a good thing (primarily because I belong to the “buy everything” type of guy instead of pirating unless it can’t be avoided and tend to support official releases), but mostly because, the fact of the matter is that they spent working on an English patch of a game that contains more than 40K lines three years, and the entire effort is theirs, that means that even if they decided to not release the patch for whatever reason, I would have been totally in favor. Why? Because it’s THEIR work and THEY did it, not the people that feel entitled to have the English patch. Same goes with the problem that revolved around the time of release. Again, I’ll repeat, the matter of fact is that they could’ve released that patch whenever they wanted because since THEY did the patch, they decide when to release it, simple. The second example I’ll highlight in this post talks about Shinku Translations and the controversy that revolved around the SakuSaku patch. If you don’t know what happened regarding this project I’ll quickly sum it up: Shinku Translations made a deal with Sekai Project to release the game officially, what ultimately made people who were waiting for a fan-patch very pissed. The comments on their website were mostly full of “sellouts” and “I already bought the game in Japanese, now I’ll have to buy it again, gg boys” and many more that blew my mind. That was the perfect demonstration of the entitlement that people slowly begin to have when a project is close to being finished. I’ll repeat myself once again, just like Koiken Otome and Flying Pantsu, it was THEIR work, so they had the right to make a deal with Sekai Project and do whatever they wanted to the patch. And, as Akerou explained in one of the comments, it could lead to more titles being localized, which, in my opinion, are good news! People have to start realizing that sooner or later, the entire scope if not most of the translation scope will shift towards official releases instead of fan-patches. As a last argument regarding this matter, I’ll mention a couple of YouTube comments that I found in the official OP video of SakuSaku published by Sekai Project’s YouTube channel, they basically said this: “That's a low punch SP. That's just low. The guy translating it is almost done. If you buy the translation from him and release it in the next 2 months I might forgive you. If you do it less than a month you are forgiven.” “Well just pirate the release when it comes out. This is one of the cases when piracy is completely justified.” These two comments are part of the “entitlement problem” that I’ve addressed before, and I hope they highlight what I’ve been trying to tackle (take into account that these comments are just the surface, just look at the ones in Shinku’s page and you’ll get a grasp of what this community broods sometimes). Last but not least, I’d like to address Fuwanovel as a platform for translation projects and my opinion about it as a Leader of a translation group (in this case, Luna Translations). Don’t get me wrong when I say that. I love Fuwanovel as a site. It’s one of the principal, if not the main responsible for the appearance of a community that revolves around Visual Novels in general. I love this site, and I appreciate the people that back this site paying monthly (I hope I can do it as well when I get the chance) and the mods for doing their jobs correctly and every other person that supports this site. But, I’d like to tackle the issue of trying to host translation projects in a forum-based website. I’d like to point out that the system created in Fuwa worked very VERY well at the beginning stages of the creation of this community. Basically, the “Fan Translator Skills” thread and the “Translation Projects” thread were probably very useful and effective back when the community was niche and not a lot of projects and teams crowded the scene (I’m not directing this towards the “Fan TL Discussion” thread, by the way). But, as a leader of a translation team (and I’m sure that many people will agree with me on this) I just think that Fuwa’s way of hosting projects is not as effective as it was probably two or three years ago. What I’m trying to say here is that, just like VNDB exists, a platform that focuses solely on helping teams and individuals to work on projects will certainly appear at some point, or at least needs to appear at some point. Summing up, Fuwanovel as a forum focused on the discussion of Visual Novels and the fan translation scene is a very good and positive website, and it’s totally needed for the community to keep growing, but! Fuwanovel (the forums) used as a platform to support projects and teams may have been very effective in the past but not anymore, since now the scope is very broad and more complex compared to when all of this started. Finally, to close this rant, I’d like to say that if I had to sum up things probably the most important issue would be that the community is losing the sense of being together, and groups, as well as individuals, are distancing themselves from each other, which is something that has to be avoided at all costs. I’ll personally try to do whatever I can about this matter and little by little this problem will hopefully be solved in the future, because together we can do great things. Let’s try to make the translation world great again, as Trump as it sounds.

Hey what up, welcome to the forums man. And yes, like @oystein said, @Dergonu is a crazy individual, stay away from him or suffer the consequences Anyways, hope to see you around.

Hello guys. This is our first bi-weekly update. I'll cover everything that needs to be mentioned and all of that. Progress speed has been the average, nothing extraordinary, but it's still progress whatsoever. Here we go: Majo Koi Nikki As you guys may or may not know, we have released our first partial patch (check the post out if you haven't) which covers around 4.200 lines approximately, basically the game's prologue. Apart from that, the progress has been steady this last couple of days and we managed to reach 30% of translated lines. The TLC has catched up with the translation progress and the editing keeps progressing with no bumps whatsoever. Translation Progress 30% (12203/40208) Witch's Garden This game has probably the juiciest news out of the two, so brace yourselves. Eclair's route has been completely finished and the only two routes left are Ayari's. So yeah, those are very good news. Apart from that, TLC progress is steady and editing is still on hold, we want to keep making progress in the TLC field, because at this point we're basically retranslating full scripts sometimes and just a couple of lines in others, it's really strange and frustrating for the TLC's sometimes, so that's why we ask for your patience, because the TLC (or retranslation) will take some time to finish. Anyways, here are the numbers for both: Translation 66% TLC 10% We haven't included the accurate line numbers this time because we're experienceing some difficulties with the already linebreaked original lines, messing up the count. Sorry about it. Other things worth mentioning: We've created a Twitter account. There, we'll be pumping live and small updates about progress and what happens in the group in general, so be sure to follow us! One translator who previously worked in Majo Koi (Rauros Falls) has decided to step back from Majo Koi and start translating Musumaker again. Expect Musumaker updates as well as soon as he starts working on it. We are very glad to announce that we are going to be taking care of a new project in this group. The game is called Kanojo to Ore to Koibito to (VNDB). Soon, we'll add it to our current active projects and lay out the usual links and pages for it for people to be more informed about it. Expect progress about this project in our website from now on. About Kanojo to Ore to Koibito to (or tototo or shorts), the people taking care of it were the recent team members that weren't listed in neither of our staff pages for the two current active projects in our website (Majo Koi and WG). The team is: Mitch (Translator) Nohara (TLC/Translator) Takeshira (Editor) Archonoffail (Proofreader) Waterflame (Image Editor) Frc (Hacker) Aizen-Sama (Coordinator) Anyways, that's everything for now. I hope this wasn't a long read. Have a nice day everyone and until next time!

Nobody will ever get near that VN, I'll guarantee that. The group would get a lot of hate and apart from that, as @XReaper said, the translator and editor would have to be gods to change Japanese unique puns to Western puns. Don't expect to have an English patch for that game ever. Apart from that, welcome I guess?

Hello, always good to see new people here. See ya around.

Yeah, the fact that they don't give a shit about anything is one of their strongest points and what makes them real gods. I could ramble for hours about it, but I would derail from the topic, so I'll just leave it at that.

Welp, my family has always been pretty religious (We've never went to the church, though. So that's that). I'm an atheist now and I don't really care that much about religion to be honest, but if the greek mythology gods were revived as a religion again I would gladly follow that.

Welp. It happens, members end up going. I just wanted you to know that you are a great guy and that I was a secret fan of yours. Anyways, good luck with whatever you wanna do in life.

Hey, what up. Always nice to see new people here. See you around.

What Arcade said. That sprite looks fucking nice. Good luck and keep it up. I'll have an eye on this.

Hey, what up. Welcome to the forums! I hope you have a great time here. WHat is your favourite visual novel, by the way?

My favorite VN must be Kara no Shoujo. It's a bit dark, but I can tell you that the story and the translation are both brilliant. Anyways, hope you have a good time here. Cheers and have a nice day.

Hey dude. What up. Welcome to the forums. What is your favourite visual novel by the way? Cheers.