Nandemonai

The most important thing to know maybe is this: Do not try to translate anything into a language you don't speak fluently.

Localization companies have a lot of constraints. The business requires co-operation with the Japanese side of things. No game can be released without the consent and involvement of the rights holders. The Japanese IP holder can't just sign on the dotted line and take easy royalty money. They have to do work. Legal work, chasing down VA contract clearance. Graphics work, uncensoring the artwork and finding original assets. Programming work, updating the game engine to handle incompatibilities with Western OS default settings and the fact that Western languages use characters that, in Japanese, nobody ever uses so you're free to use things like apostrophes and commas as game scripting commands. Witness Kara no Shoujo and Koihime initially releasing with no VA because they couldn't afford to pay the VA fees. Witness a certain game I know of not ever getting an editing pass to fix issues, even though company staff privately admitted to me they wanted to - because the Japanese side didn't want to give the localizer their script compiler, and didn't want to be bothered because they'd already provided one fix and seemed to feel 'why jerk us around fixing one thing at a time'? Witness Pulltop, releasing Princess Waltz under Jast USA (great game by the way) then deciding to start MoeNovel. Or Jast USA getting Steins;Gate but not being the ones to release it on Steam, or anything else by them. Navel pulled out of a partnership with MangaGamer to release Shuffle! on Steam all by themselves. The licensors have a lot of pull, and they absolutely will use it. And the truth is, VNs sell a truly pitiful number of copies in English. Koihime had no VA because they didn't think the game could sell two thousand copies. It eventually did, after close to two years. After they decided to cheat a bit and include the size of their hard copy print run in the 2K (assuming it would eventually sell through) because they didn't want to do a hard copy release of it with no voice. Things are somewhat better if your game can get on Steam, but after Steam opened the floodgates suddenly there's lots of games on Steam and so few nowadays get the eye-popping sales figures IMHHW or Nekopara did once upon a time. So even though sales are declining slowly but steadily in Japan, as mobile inexorably cannibalizes everything else people used to spend money on, they're still - even far removed from what they used to be at the peak, like they are nowadays - still far higher than they are in English. This makes it a tough sell for most companies.

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...)

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.