Nandemonai

Thank you! We were all shocked as well!

They hit their goal.

Alright, update time.  All the work on massaging the scripts into the format needed by the scripts is done.  Now we are waiting for our programmer to finish integrating the scripts into the tools.  We should be able to start giving percentages in a few weeks.  (At least, a translated percentage.  Some stuff has been edited, but the new tools distinguish between "translated" and "edited", where the old format we were using before does not.  So some things were edited but the tools won't know that until someone goes and fills all that in.)

Ever 17


I love this image i just love it (narcissu)



Everyone needs a helping hand  yume miru kusuri



Clannad



Muv luv alt



Yume miru kusuri



Katawa shoujo



Sharin no kuni



It is in spanish but if you played the vn you know what this part says anyway  KS



 
brass restoration 

I refuse.

Alright, update time.  All the work on massaging the scripts into the format needed by the scripts is done.  Now we are waiting for our programmer to finish integrating the scripts into the tools.  We should be able to start giving percentages in a few weeks.  (At least, a translated percentage.  Some stuff has been edited, but the new tools distinguish between "translated" and "edited", where the old format we were using before does not.  So some things were edited but the tools won't know that until someone goes and fills all that in.)

Alright, update time.  All the work on massaging the scripts into the format needed by the scripts is done.  Now we are waiting for our programmer to finish integrating the scripts into the tools.  We should be able to start giving percentages in a few weeks.  (At least, a translated percentage.  Some stuff has been edited, but the new tools distinguish between "translated" and "edited", where the old format we were using before does not.  So some things were edited but the tools won't know that until someone goes and fills all that in.)

Alright, update time.  All the work on massaging the scripts into the format needed by the scripts is done.  Now we are waiting for our programmer to finish integrating the scripts into the tools.  We should be able to start giving percentages in a few weeks.  (At least, a translated percentage.  Some stuff has been edited, but the new tools distinguish between "translated" and "edited", where the old format we were using before does not.  So some things were edited but the tools won't know that until someone goes and fills all that in.)

Click here to Spin the Wheel and find out

Swiggity swooty I'm coming for that booty.

I don't even know why but I'm so hyped for this. 

And the Chaos:Head patch was released in 2008.  It had a show-stopping bug where, if you saved at the wrong time, attempting to load that save would crash the game.  Whoever developed that patch never bothered to fix it.  It wasn't fixed until earlier this year (or was it late last year?) by a completely different team, and then only because that new group started working on Chaos;Head Noah.
Also, you mention fan translation scripts that have been "perfected"?  Fan translations vary widely in quality, and many of them are pretty darned crappy.  I haven't played it myself, but I am given to understand that even at revision 4, Amaterasu's work on ReWrite just wasn't very good.
Finally, while it is true that fan translation patches are free, the games themselves are not.  Fan translations ask you to pay the ridiculous Japanese retail price for these games.  That's way more than any of the professional releases you mentioned.  Of course, if you just pirate the Japanese release, and compare that to paying for Western releases, well then that's not a fair comparison at all.

If the missing voices are due to missing voice files in the Japanese release, there is not really anything translators can do about it. However translators can introduce crashes. This would be a crash when displaying a certain line, though this will usually cause a crash even if you try to skip passed it. Not all VN engines are equally friendly towards getting English text and it's can actually be a lot harder to get them working than one might think. Sengoku Rance (the patch, not the MG work in progress) has left some names untranslated because translating them would cause the game to crash. I had to write a program to insert English text into Musumaker because just replacing Japanese text with English will cause crashes and the workaround for that is too tricky to do by hand for each line.
It's also worth mentioning that some official translations have been using different engines than the Japanese versions of the same VNs because of engine limitations. For all we know, Fan TLs can crash because of such engine limitations. Fan tls has less freedom when it comes to choice of engine because they can't repack every single data file to match the new engine. Also some VN engines use compiled scripts and moving those to a new engine requires the source code for those scripts. Just like pre-censored CGs, the source code is only available to official translators.

In short: yes missing voices and crashes are annoying, but I wouldn't blame the translators for those, at least not without checking that the problems aren't present in the Japanese version or if they are caused by engine limitations.
The script errors are due to translators, or rather editors and QC. @Fred the Barber commented pretty well on that part.
 
I was about to write something about how that's not the case and fan tls are progressing etc. (at least those I have internal knowledge of). However your post made me think about this and I have come to realize something.
 
Way back in the dawn of time for English VNs, lets say year 2000, translations were made by a group of people gathering in the same building to work on a translation. Once completed, it was put on CDs, placed in boxes and then the boxes were sold. In other words it was the pre-internet approach.
 
The problem with that approach is that if you happen to live in an area without such a company and you can't or won't move to a location of such a company, the only way to translate is to make a fan tl patch. Sure enough fan tl patches started to appear.
 
Now the one building resulting in CDs approach has died and most (all?) of the companies with it. Today we have some other companies and they have embraced the internet. Suddenly translators can sit in their parent's basement or in some foreign country or whereever they are and work on commercial titles. This means skilled people are no longer forced to only work on fan tl patches.
 
What does this mean for the fan tl patches? Mostly it means brain drain. Skilled people figure why not get paid to do what they currently do for free? Is it the end for fan tls? Not as I see it. The fan tl community will likely shift towards having a bunch of people who does the work to gain experience, which will help them getting a paid job. This means it will not die, but since the official releases will end up with all the skilled and experienced people, we can expect the fan tl quality to drop relative to the official releases. I wouldn't call that dying, but we will likely see fewer masterpieces. Having said that, some people want to translate one specific title and if they can't get paid to do so, they could do it for free, which is likely the main reason why I will say that we might still get masterpieces as fan tls.

Of the fan patches you're praising for updates, I've only played Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate, and fairly recently (well over a year after their last release, I believe), and I can attest it's still got a fair number of errors. It's no 11eyes, by a long shot, but it's not as good as a typical release-date MG release, or S;G0. I actually don't understand the fixation on that one; it's seriously fine.

Don't know who phar is, but as far as I understand, Makoto's, koestl's, and moogy's work are all official releases at this point (at least the ones that are good; ask moogy about the sharin fan TL and see what he thinks...). I've also seen some pretty convincing evidence (i.e., a bunch of screenshots) that the fan releases are not as high quality as the subsequent official release, in the case of Saya no Uta, and I'd be surprised if that's not the case for those same peoples' other works.
Regardless, maybe those are good: I guess what I want to argue isn't that there aren't occasionally acceptable quality fan TL releases, so much as that acceptable fan TL releases are the exception, not the rule, whereas I'd say the opposite for recent MG, SP, and JAST releases (that I've seen, at least; I hardly play every VN out there).

Recent professional English VN releases from known good localization outfits (anything recent from MG, SP, and possibly JAST?) are universally higher quality than fan translation patches. The team that did Dies irae was not associated with any of those, and this was their first project; they likely incorrectly believed they didn't need (or perhaps could not afford at the rate they promised? who knows.) as much QC as is merited. Turns out that when you have hundreds of thousands of words to deal with (Dies irae might even be into the millions?), even if you're pretty damn good, you still make a lot of mistakes.
I'd be curious to see a citation of a really excellent fan translation, which some people in this thread seem to be asserting not only exists, but even go so far as to imply it's the norm. Honestly, even the best ones I've read have universally been filled with errors (at least as high an error rate as what you're seeing in Dies irae, given the number of lines you've quoted and the size of the script), and that's to say nothing of abominations like 11eyes. KoiRizo is a great example of a fairly well-written script, for a fan TL, which is again still chock-full of errors, because QC is both hard and hard to prioritize for fan TLs. Or we could go look at, I dunno, the Little Busters! fan TL, which doesn't even have word wrapping in the entire script. I've certainly never read a fan TL with as high a quality as the S;G0 release being called out in this thread, for instance, even though S;G0 does indeed have at least a couple dozen errors that I found when reading it. I think that's nonetheless still pretty solid for a script of its size.
I also don't even usually see fan TLs releasing patches; the aforementioned KoiRizo, for instance, certainly had someone who was willing and able to make all those fixes, but the people making the patches couldn't be bothered to take them.
Fan TL is a fine thing for getting exposure for stuff that otherwise wouldn't get it, but you're kidding yourselves if you genuinely believe it's higher quality than what you're getting from known good English VN publishers.

There's so much wrong with this post that I mentally broke and lifelessly stared at the scared passersby for at least ten minutes.

The translation is what is shit... the game itself, while not top-tier, was good before Mikandi's hired translators got to it.

Damn you, @Huang Ling Yin, for making me switch to this hideous theme just so I could like your post.  And @Darklord Rooke hurry up and fix your busted-ass looking theme!

PARIS, TX —  Last week, 28-year-old anime fan Learmont Irons reevaluated his life upon finding out that his current “anime of the season” was originally porn. Reports indicate that Irons was browsing the franchise’s Wikipedia page when he discovered the horrifying truth.  While struggling to cope with this revelation, Irons barricaded himself in his room. Eyewitness accounts state that he refused to come out until “Nasu took back what he did”.
Kinoko Nasu has been unavailable for comment since the incident.
When questioned about his reaction, Irons had this to say, “When I first started watching [Fate/Stay Night] Unlimited Blade Works I expected the girls to be pure maidens. Imagine my shock when I found lewd images of my favorite character. It’s one thing if it’s fan art, but the fact that it was official ruined my image of Tohsaka Rin. I felt betrayed.”
When asked about other characters such as Saber and Sakura, Irons said he had no problem with that. He explained that since neither Saber nor Sakura were his waifu then he could “care less about those sluts and their H scenes in the visual novel.”
Anime expert and Type-Moon enthusiast, Howard Ludo shared his thoughts on the matter, “It’s these dirty secondaries. They think that they can waltz right in here without reading fifty hours of scrolling text. [Irons] wouldn’t have been surprised if he had read the fucking visual novel.”
There are similar reports involving such beloved series as Little Busters, Utawarerumono and Yosuga no Sora. Fans seem to be uncomfortable with the fact that their favorite anime was originally fap fodder for lonely Japanese men. This has baffled researchers.
“During this difficult time of betrayal I am confiding in the anime whose authentic, pure, and heartfelt love story made me fall in love with the medium: Kanon,” reads a note left by Irons.
As of press time, Irons is still barricaded in his room. According to his MyAnimeList account, Irons is still keeping up with the series despite the setbacks.


Sauce

As someone who's never played your games before, but is vaguely interested in The Last Birdling:  i know that talking up your own stuff can be bad, but you should also beware the other way around.  You might want to be a little less hard on yourself when describing your own body of work.  If the whole thing is "Jesus Christ, I'm so sorry that I suck" then you run the risk of causing people to say "Well, gee, this game looked good, but maybe I should reconsider..."

And too bad there's no route for Sister Mishima #blasphemy
 

So in my inbox was an email about the whole W Happiness price discrepancy thing (apparently the game was more expensive on Mangagamer.com itself, which is contrary to their new policy, so they gave free Steam keys to those affected).  Lo and behold, the email contains the following line:
Copyright © 2017 Japan Animation Contents, Inc., All rights reserved.
Can't find the reference now, but MangaGamer has said they don't use that name in Japan.  This sounds like the name they do use.  Lo and behold, when I google that name, I find this: https://jobs.gaijinpot.com/job/details/107365/en/translation-interpretation/anime-game-translator/  There are some interesting tidbits in this employment solicitation.  They offer (or at least, they did in 2015) between 1 and 1.5 cents per (I presume Japanese?) character, and they want to see 40K characters per week.  These seem to be the requirements at least for that one opening:

So in my inbox was an email about the whole W Happiness price discrepancy thing (apparently the game was more expensive on Mangagamer.com itself, which is contrary to their new policy, so they gave free Steam keys to those affected).  Lo and behold, the email contains the following line:
Copyright © 2017 Japan Animation Contents, Inc., All rights reserved.
Can't find the reference now, but MangaGamer has said they don't use that name in Japan.  This sounds like the name they do use.  Lo and behold, when I google that name, I find this: https://jobs.gaijinpot.com/job/details/107365/en/translation-interpretation/anime-game-translator/  There are some interesting tidbits in this employment solicitation.  They offer (or at least, they did in 2015) between 1 and 1.5 cents per (I presume Japanese?) character, and they want to see 40K characters per week.  These seem to be the requirements at least for that one opening:

I played almost all of his fan TLs, and I know some people who understand Japanese and have analyzed them. This isn't an imaginary problem. I can't tell you exactly how much he has or hasn't improved, just that several people have pointed out tons of egregious TL errors present in his Comyu translation.
The English TL is written very poorly, mixes references up, makes confusing mistranslations, and is just much harder to understand than it should be. Cross Channel is supposed to be difficult to understand, so people use that to excuse the translation, but the translation amplifies that effect by being misleading or confusing in ways never intended.
Anyway, if you want to go on about this, maybe take this to PMs instead of clogging up this thread with an unrelated debate. The point is: Ixrec isn't the translator you want for this and he's probably not available anyway.