Nandemonai

Heh. Back in the day it was the Peach Princess forum (since after Jast folded, they reorganized under that name for a few years).

I started translating VNs having read 0 in Japanese. (My first project is Nocturnal Illusion, whose official loc was so bad I still did a better job.) My editor found dozens of questionable-looking lines that, upon going back and rechecking, were pretty amateurish and awful errors. (I mean, I am an amateur.) On my next VN - SKM - I've noticed a big improvement from when I started versus now. Like anything you'll get better with practice. I often spend significant lengths of time struggling to figure out a mere several lines of fairly complicated Japanese. Sometimes it's 'what does this mean?' and Googling idioms I don't recognize and whatnot, and sometimes it's 'I know what it means, how do I express this thought in English in a coherent way that reads well?'. Expect it to take a lot longer than you thought it would (even if you were already thinking it would take a long time).

Fan projects, by their very nature, do not ask permission. They simply do what they want. If you want to join a specific fan translation project, you should talk to the people running it. Getting their attention might be hard; a place like this is a good place to try to get in touch. If you have a specific game you want translated badly enough to do it yourself, and it doesn't have a project already, this is also a good place to come looking for a group to start one. But you don't need anyone's permission to post here. There is no licensing board of amateur translators you need to worry about either. Just do it. There is one catch. (There's always a catch.) If you want to start a new project to translate game X, but no one else wants to work on it, you'll have a problem - in that you need a programmer who can create tools to extract and re-insert the scripts. If you aren't that programmer, you'll have a hard time getting started. It is, in fact, possible to have a would-be project fail because you can't find anyone. The project forum is full of abandoned and incomplete projects, most of which floundered for exactly that reason. Fan TL projects have three key skills: Tech, to get the scripts out of, and back into, the game. Translation, to produce intelligible scripts. Editing, to make those scripts fun to read. You have one of those key skills. You should be good.

Project is definitely not dead. I have no other news at this time.

Paying a language tutor to tell you what you did/didn't get right might be a worthwhile endeavor. Using MTL is not. If you already know enough Japanese to tell 'oh I should clean this up to be more standard so the MTL can figure it out' or 'this looks like an idiom, lemme google.jp this and see' then you will be more accurate than the MTL, making it mostly useless for that purpose.

Yes, I'm necro'ing a 4 year old thread. Fear my dark magic! So I thought I'd fool around with the script tools. I did get them half working - the readme is wrong (it says "Copy scenepatch.sdb to the "patch" folder and run make_patch.bat" - you actually also need to copy scene.sbd). But the resulting patch leaves most of the names in Japanese. That's no good. Is anyone from this project still around to take a look? (I mean, probably not, but...)

That was the number I got when I googled the going rate in general. I know the rate for VNs was much lower, but wasn't sure how much I could share. I mean, just because I'm not under NDA doesn't mean people on the grapevine I've been talking to aren't. Then I remember this: This confirms the 1-1.5 cents per character figure.

Gameplay elements are a lot harder to design and test and get working. That means they cost a lot more money. These games are made on shoestring budgets. There are companies that specialize in 'gameplay titles' out there. And most of the time, those titles are not known for having a strong story. In other words, it's pouring a lot more dev resources into something that's not the core selling point of your game (which is, pretty much like you said, a novel with added production value). These guys make money by being happy to be the niche players. Or to put it another way - your point is essentially the same reasoning publishers use when they say 'Graft a multiplayer mode onto game X! Just freaking do it, we don't even care if it makes sense, gamers like it!' Sometimes that works out (Mass Effect 3) and other times, not so much (Resident Evil 3). These companies are like Atlus (well, before Sega bought them). They know how to survive in a low-volume market. If they wanted to make mass-market-appeal games, they'd be making a different kind of game entirely. Not every game has to be mass market. If you want to know 'why aren't there more releases in English', here's your problem. There are a decent number of games. Heck, there's some you haven't even listed (like Koihime Musou, or Aselia the Eternal, or - and I'm being serious here - Persona 4 Arena). I've been around since the early 2000's, and I converted into a paying customer when I found out a VN was lucky to sell a few hundred copies. The numbers I hear nowadays are they're lucky to sell two thousand. These games are absolutely popular enough already in English. Just not with people who actually pay. I'll put it this way: The raw untranslated script for SKM is about 6 megabytes. Rounded down to 5 to account for repeated text and punctuation, etc - at 5 cents per character (very low end of the going rate) and 2 bytes per character that's $250K. How many copies do you need to sell to make that back at $40? 6250. Then there's licensing fees, and we know that MangaGamer said 'if the original KM doesn't sell 2000 copies, we can't pay for the voice so we'll have to remove it'. There's more voice, so bump that up a little. You're probably looking at 8500-9000 copies just to break even. And now you know why MangaGamer hasn't done it. They can't pay the translator a decent rate. They'd have to find someone willing to be significantly underpaid. But suppose for a minute Koihime had sold - instead of the probably 2500-3500 copies it likely sold (it sold > 2K, they added the voices back) - 6 or 7 times that number. Then licensing the sequel would be a no-brainer. It would have been out years ago, probably. Furthermore, every game that was remotely worth releasing would be getting licensed and released. It's the same story with other text-heavy Japanese products. RPGs were a niche product. Every time an RPG was released in English, the company releasing it was taking a risk. And then FF7 came out, and it was one of the first videogames to do cinematic awesome cutscenes well, and it was absolutely in the right place at the right time to do gangbusters. Prior to FF7, RPGs had been building in popularity slowly, but post-FF7, an audience was there and realized 'maybe I should pay more attention, this looks nifty'. Post-FF7, most major JRPGs got translated (but not all). The same thing happened again a few years later, when the quirky-and-cutesy-Japanesey style games caught on. First was Disgaea, which was an amazing game and sold out instantly and Atlus reprinted it and then NIS (the makers) founded NIS America, which has gone on to do very well. Then Recettear sold hundreds of thousands of copies on Steam, proving to everyone 'no really, people will buy the weeb shit'. VNs don't need to be made into something they're not in order to start selling. In fact I'd wager they're already starting to sell. Look at the huge uptick in otome releases, and console releases.

Whoops. I saw 'review', it looked like a review of a VN, I didn't look too closely. I'm still not gonna post percent updates here, those are available at the status tracker and the change-in-percent-edited statistic is mostly useless.

I have been remiss in one thing. Now that this thread has been necro'ed, I see it. I never formally announced I wasn't going to be updating here anymore. The updates just stopped. I didn't even provide the link to the real status tracker pasted half a page or so above. So here goes... This project is not cancelled. I am editing it. This thread will not receive periodic updates with percentages anymore. That was mostly useful because VNTS pulled numbers from here, and VNTS was high profile so feeding it accurate numbers was useful. But there is no more VNTS and never will be again (the 2 updates last July only hammer that point home). So there's no point in manually compiling percentage data to dump into posts here. All that data is automatically tracked at the project official tracker: https://cookie4.com/projects/skm1/progress/ Progress is slow. I wasn't happy with the original work I'd done, so I started over. The percentage didn't reset to 0, so all the lines I edited before still show as edited. Consequently a bunch of work doesn't show up there, and that will stay a problem more or less until I finish Shoku.

It's pretty much just me at this point, and I have a real job so that takes up a lot of my time. Don't expect a release anytime soon, but it is still being worked on.

It is true that - legally speaking - a fan translation patch is technically against the letter of the law, but it's not against the rules to talk about such things here. Witness the ginormous 'fan translation project' section What the rules (and the mods) care about is not paying for the game. You bought a legitimate copy from DMM. You're fine.

As I recall, there were several other girls you could have sex with, and the school nurse would give you a condom when you went to see her. If you had sex with any of them (except the one who told you she was on the pill) without using the condom, they'd get pregnant. You'd also get in trouble for having sex with the main heroine's sisters (they aren't main heroines) but I don't think they got pregnant.

That explains the long radio silence on the issue. And also why, 18 months or so ago, Sekai said more info would be forthcoming at some con ... and said announcement never happened. Those kind of negotiations are highly sensitive and have to be kept secret. They still should know it isn't hard to say 'Negotiations are more sensitive and complex than we had hoped. We have no further updates at this time.' and move on. Would have saved themselves a lot of flak.

I will be very surprised if anything like that happens. Really old games like that just aren't worth the money.