Nandemonai

No, they're not consistent.  If they were, they wouldn't have let Persona 4 onto Steam; it ambiguously implies MC-kun has sex with his girlfriend(s) if you max her (their) S-links.  And they would have updated their "we will allow anything that isn't trolling or illegal" statement to clarify what else they will ban for, since clearly that is not true.
Instead, they have attempted to reap the benefits of appealing to the no-censorship absolutist crowd by claiming anything goes, when it's not actually true.  They have Standards & Practices (just like every other publisher in existence), they're just lying about it.  They'd get flak. First, for merely openly saying they have S&P, the anti-censorship crowd would get all up in arms.  Second, the particular standards they have chosen are pretty hilariously inept to boot.  They would bar a video game adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or the Bible, in a society where American Pie makes a quarter billion dollars.
They want to have their cake and eat it too.  They've refused a handful of Western developed games too, like that Pickup Artist "game".  Their public "statements" attempting to "justify" their actions, in light of them pretty obviously doing something they made a commitment not to do, are nonsense.  They want the benefits of censoring things that might hurt their image, and the benefits of taking an absolutist no-censorship stance.  So they have chosen to be dishonest.

Slowly.  I've been avoiding posting an update mainly because it's mostly not good news, but I doubt it's likely to change at this point.  Darklord Rooke has disappeared.  The last I heard from him was before Covid and he was more or less disengaged from VNs except for this project (which he seems to have disconnected from sometime after that point).
Looking back at the work I did, I did the best I could using the (limited) tools available at the time, but it's not something I'd want to release.  So I've started retranslating the game from scratch (in between retranslating / editing SKM from scratch and, you know, life).  I'm in the middle of chapter three.  So even if DR were to pop up again, what he'd done would be of questionable usefulness anyhow.
So I'm just going to fly solo.  I'll finish the (re-)retranslation myself, then edit my own work.  The good news is the tools programmer for SKM has given me a preliminary editor I can use to proceed with redoing the TL while he builds a toolchain.

No, they're not consistent.  If they were, they wouldn't have let Persona 4 onto Steam; it ambiguously implies MC-kun has sex with his girlfriend(s) if you max her (their) S-links.  And they would have updated their "we will allow anything that isn't trolling or illegal" statement to clarify what else they will ban for, since clearly that is not true.
Instead, they have attempted to reap the benefits of appealing to the no-censorship absolutist crowd by claiming anything goes, when it's not actually true.  They have Standards & Practices (just like every other publisher in existence), they're just lying about it.  They'd get flak. First, for merely openly saying they have S&P, the anti-censorship crowd would get all up in arms.  Second, the particular standards they have chosen are pretty hilariously inept to boot.  They would bar a video game adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or the Bible, in a society where American Pie makes a quarter billion dollars.
They want to have their cake and eat it too.  They've refused a handful of Western developed games too, like that Pickup Artist "game".  Their public "statements" attempting to "justify" their actions, in light of them pretty obviously doing something they made a commitment not to do, are nonsense.  They want the benefits of censoring things that might hurt their image, and the benefits of taking an absolutist no-censorship stance.  So they have chosen to be dishonest.

No, they're not consistent.  If they were, they wouldn't have let Persona 4 onto Steam; it ambiguously implies MC-kun has sex with his girlfriend(s) if you max her (their) S-links.  And they would have updated their "we will allow anything that isn't trolling or illegal" statement to clarify what else they will ban for, since clearly that is not true.
Instead, they have attempted to reap the benefits of appealing to the no-censorship absolutist crowd by claiming anything goes, when it's not actually true.  They have Standards & Practices (just like every other publisher in existence), they're just lying about it.  They'd get flak. First, for merely openly saying they have S&P, the anti-censorship crowd would get all up in arms.  Second, the particular standards they have chosen are pretty hilariously inept to boot.  They would bar a video game adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or the Bible, in a society where American Pie makes a quarter billion dollars.
They want to have their cake and eat it too.  They've refused a handful of Western developed games too, like that Pickup Artist "game".  Their public "statements" attempting to "justify" their actions, in light of them pretty obviously doing something they made a commitment not to do, are nonsense.  They want the benefits of censoring things that might hurt their image, and the benefits of taking an absolutist no-censorship stance.  So they have chosen to be dishonest.

Edit: That's like you're eating fish and being like, "Yeah I haven’t tasted chicken before, but this totally tastes like it!"

And to come to paint my house. And mow my lawn.

Slapstick comedy is slapstick comedy.

Hey, it's been a while. Now that our hacker and translator are back in action, we should be able to continue the project. And in fact, I bring good news:
Proud to announce that we're releasing another partial, with Yuuki's Hscenes!
https://mega.nz/file/wQYAlT6S#JOnB7tImLTwVGGAf54u4P5y2UFZE65snfwTN-2IgOB8
 
Also a progress update on the others:
Michi: 100% translated, 25% edited.
Shachi: Starting up.
Patricia - 1 Scene translated and edited. On hold.
(linecount pending)
If everything goes well, next patch should come in a month or so, and the one after that before the end of the year.
Extra stuff: so, a few post back I said we'll be releasing a version with honorifics. I decided to put that on pause while we deal with how to restore the missing/censored lines from the non-H script. I hope it's not much trouble.

Hey man. I actually worked on this game's translation for a while before real life fucked me. 
Was actually curious because someone actually completing the game appeared, and I wanted to see what's up.
After looking into stuff for a bit though I'm left with no choice but to make a post.
You claim that you translated the entire base game and the fandisk "in a matter of weeks" working for 16 hours a day each day. Sorry, but this is impossible. No one, and I say no one, can work for 16 hours straight in translation for several days and not deliver a below par result. Also, honestly I can't believe that between the time you asked for the tools in another thread saying that "you were looking forward to translate this" exactly 2 months ago before releasing this https://forums.fuwanovel.net/topic/24092-help-working-with-a-bgi-game/ you were able to translate over 2 Million characters and over 100k lines of text.
So yeah, I'm sorry to whoever was excited for this, but this 100% completion is entirely either machine translated or god knows fucking what. 
As a last word, before anyone claims that idk what I'm talking about, I tried to fan translate this some years ago, one year of approximately daily 1.5-2h of work ended up with me having done only 20k lines out of the 80k lines of the MAIN GAME. I'm slower than your average fan translator, but I just simply can't believe someone is able to translate just the main game in less than a year, let alone in 2 months. No matter the amount of time you sink in each day. Take my words however you want, since I assume you'll want to release your stuff anyway. 
 
PS: The main game has roughly 80k lines, fandisk no clue but definitely more than 20k. No one, I repeat, NO ONE, is able to even remotely come close to do more than 100k lines equivalent to what this game has in 2 months. We're talking about more than 1.5 MILLION CHARACTERS for just the first game ALONE. The fastest guy I know can pull off 1 M charas in a year btw, and he no lifes it 6-8 hours a day because he has infinite time.
 
Take this as you will. Have a nice day.

For me, Sakura no Kisetsu is a classic. However, it's a bit unapproachable now, with old engine and awkward adventure-gameplay system - which is much more annoying than, say, YU-NO. As I wrote recently in recommendations thread:
 
Well, sometimes I do things on a whim, and shortly after writing the above, I decided to give it a try Actually it's quite fun for now - writing things in Ren'py is almost like directing your own puppet-show .
The goal is to rewrite Sakura no Kisetsu into standard VN structure with branching choices system - getting rid of the "look/think/talk with everything to trigger next scene" system. I do this by arranging texts from various "think" "look" and "talk" sections into the order that gives the best flow (and inserting small connecting bits in between where absolutely neccessary). I also plan to re-edit it or partially retranslate the lines that annoy me too much 
As I see, Brazilian Portugese translation uses similar approach, but they used assets (graphics and music) from the remake, which I'm not too fond of - they are very blurry, while the pixels from dithering are still very visible, so it's like the worst of both worlds . I'm working with assets from PC98 and DOS versions. I also plan to have switchable soundtrack, with all three versions available:  PC98 - original FM soundtrack, GS - PC98 MIDI music replayed with SoundCanvas soundfont and AdLib - PC DOS version FM soundtrack.
While browsing graphic files extracted from both versions I was surprised. I expected Japanese PC98 version to have mosaics (and if such were the case, planned to have mosaics on/off switch in the options), however, the version that is floating around the net is uncensored. Probably somebody hacked files with HCGs from English PC version into it? Graphics and scripts formats are identical between two versions, only music files are different because of different sound hardware.
I looked at files more closely and yes, it seems that some CG files were replaced - while all graphic files from PC98 have 1996-04 dates, HCGs have 1999-10.
For now I have ported first two scenes - talk with parents in Shuuji's home and first meeting with Reiko on the way to school - complete with music and sprites with facial animations, just like in the original Some preliminary screenshots coming in ~12 hours.
Of course for now it is all pretty basic - just full-screen background and standard ren'py textbox. I'm still not sure whether to go with that approach, or try something more like in the original, with borders etc, and the actual scenes taking just small portion of the screen? Also, I'm still not sure how much smoothing (if any) should I use while converting backgrounds and sprites. But we can discuss that when there are screenshots.
 
*I'm not sure in which subforum should I place it. It's clearly not "Original Visual Novel", it's also not exactly "Translation Project" (although probably some translating will be involved). Well, I hope our mods will help me by moving it into most suited section.

These are the most disgusting-looking cookies(?) I've ever laid eyes upon.

Chocolate chip potatoes.

HOLY SHIT BRO. THAT'S SUCH GROUNDBREAKING ADVICE MY G!

Steins;Gate.  Demonbane.  Tokyo Babel.  Shadows of Pygmalion.

Here is a list of translated Nitroplus titles:
Phantom of Inferno (Translation is very old and from what I heard not very good.)
Kikokugai (Fantranslation)
Zanmataisei Demonbane (Official Release by JAST)
Saya no Uta (Official Release by JAST)
Hanachirasu (Official Release by JAST)
Dra†KoI (Fantranslation)
Kaigen Seito (Fantranslation)
Chaos;Head (Fantranslation and the extended Chaos;Head Noah version is being workd on)
Steins;Gate (Official Release by JAST)
SoniComi (Official Release by JAST)
Guilty Crown Lost Christmas (Fantranslation)
Phenomeno (Fantranslation)
Robotics;Notes (Official Release)
STEINS;GATE ELITE (Official Release)
Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi. (Official Release by JAST)
 
And then there is Nitro+Chiral the BL branch of Nitroplus:
Togainu no Chi (Official Release by JAST BLUE)
Lamento -Beyond the Void- (Fantranslation but an official release is planned by JAST BLUE)
Lamento Treasure Disc (Fantranslation)
Sweet Pool (Official Release by JAST BLUE)
DRAMAtical Murder (Fantranslation but an official release is planned by JAST BLUE)
 
That makes 20 translated titles by Nitroplus. As you can see Nitroplus is partnered with JAST who publish their games in english, so If you are looking for a specific title they should be first ones to ask. Unless it is a title of the Science Adventure series (Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate and so on) then it is likely out of their hands.
And besides the listed titles the following Nitroplus titles are getting a translation as we speak.
Zoku Satsuriku no Django -Jigoku no Shoukinkubi- (Official Release by JAST, but it is said that the title will take quite a while until it is released)
Sumaga (Official Release by JAST, but it is said that the title will take quite a while until it is released)
Chaos;Head Noah (Fantranslation in the works)
Lamento -Beyond the Void- and DRAMAtical Murder are confirmed to get offical releases by JAST BLUE.
Slow Damage (Official Release by JAST BLUE)
 
There is another title that is regularly rumored to get an release but since there is nothing official it is not going to get added to the lists above.

Not one, not two... but four projects? WTF? Is this intended to be a translation by human, or machine? Or edited machine TL? Because I've never seen a fanproject TLer ambitiously trying to pick up 4 VNs at once.

guys, that whole 'MG hates the fans" is like from last year? Maybe before? They've moved on, the community has moved on, so do it too. Every company talks about their custumers, they only had the bad luck of having it leaked. MG does a lot of good for the localization scene, providing a good quality job and a good selection of games.

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.

As I was one of the members that burned out a while back (too many VNs played for the sake of my blog on the site), I know something of where you are coming from.  I was spending something like 50 hours a week playing VNs, many of them I didn't like or whose concept I found boring and pedestrian, to be able to be fair when doing my VN of the Month column.  I was using a tiny scoop to try to get through the piles of hot steaming brown stuff to get to the stuff that shone regardless of genre, and my satisfaction levels kept falling until I just fell apart.  I was even working on one screen while playing on another at times, while using meal times as a time to get caught up on a VN.  
To this day, I have to be careful not to play too much in the way of VNs, or my trauma comes back, despite the fact that I am loving what I'm reading.  Heck, I'm currently recovering from another bout of that while doing something else to put myself back together.
More recently, I was becoming increasingly depressed that the only community I still enjoyed being a part of was doomed.  With the increased rl stress that hits every time I leave the house over the last four  months, I was on the verge of collapse when I decided to get online and do my latest scan of the forums... and saw this.
To be honest, just the fact that you are getting involved in the site again at all eased a lot of the pent-up stress that has been weighing on me every time I come online of late, so thanks for coming back.

Hi everybody. My name is Tay. I’m the site admin, and I’m writing this post to share a few thoughts and to apologize for what has been a very difficult period for the site (and many of us in the real world, myself included). Please note that I am actively working on the site today (01:26 update: currently waiting on Nayleen’s help on a mysql issue that I don’t know how to solve) and will be available in this thread and on Discord throughout the day.
 
Why did you disappear?
I was overwhelmed by real-world responsibilities and the real-world issues affecting the site. I feel deeply that it’s my responsibility to keep an appropriate baseline amount of support (server, forums fees, forums UI theme subscriptions, front site plugin subscriptions), and have mostly done so, but not being here in a full, active manner means that I was unaware of even large issues, such as Invision losing my auto-pay details. I feel really bad, guys. I'm sorry.
 
Why didn’t you more proactively pass along the keys to other community members instead of just ghosting us?
Dropping torrents caused hundreds of real-world issues that made a site hand-off – even partially – unconscionable until resolved. It makes me happy that they feel like an ancient memory to most of you, but they have been my lived reality for a long time. Only this summer did that chapter fully come to a close. Fuwa is in the clear, for what it’s worth, and for the first time I feel like I have options.
 
What the &$% is going on with site/forums updates?
I’m working to fix some issues in how I access the various databases on the server. Once that’s fixed everything will be updated and troubleshooted. It’s going to be another Fuwapocalypse. But it’s gotta be done. I give you my word that, so long as I can get @Nayleen’s help, this will be done by week’s end.
As regards the forms, specifically, Invision, the software company who made our forums software, deleted the auto-pay credentials I’d given them and the software license lapsed for several months. It’s been renewed and everything will be updated as soon as I get Nay’s assistance and make a bunch of meticulous backups.
 
What is your plan for Fuwanovel going forward?
It may not be appropriate for that to be my call. I need to touch base with all the core users still active and sort out what’s best. I love Fuwanovel. It’s been a work of love spanning more than ten thousand hours (and much more than that in dollars). But my focus and passion -- help bring visual novels into the wider gaming community – has been realized.  I’ve been fortunate enough to facilitate or be part of some major, tectonic shifts in the industry. It’s a different world and I am likely not the best equipped to pick a direction. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.
What I’m confident about, however, is that the way I went about building Fuwa, while successful, is unsustainable. Palas put it incredibly well last month:
 
“It’s like running a business, but without, well, the business.” Perfectly said. For better or worse, I’m wholly or largely responsible for the projects he highlights: enormous and technical VNTS posts which took two people 5 or so hours to do every Friday night, an ambitious reviews hub scouring VN reviews from across the net, a VN reviews team, forums projects, etc.
A lot of what I did on Fuwa amounted to spending ungodly amounts of time watching trends in both the industry and site traffic and building ideas around what I thought would bring interest to the community and the VN player base. It worked well: we had huge traffic and played an important role in bringing VNs out of obscurity. But the lived reality was often me researching, designing and proposing these projects, and asking others to step up and either run or contribute to them without compensation. We’d have people putting in 20 hours a week, some weeks, on top of core admin staff working 30-40 hours weekly, and it STILL wasn’t enough. Most pitched in because we liked the cause, and liked hanging out with each other, and liked the dopamine rush of user engagement. Some did it because I asked them. And some did it because they felt like they had to. I’m still working on pulling apart my feelings on this issue.
I don’t know how to fix this part of being a fan site. I do know that it is wrong to ask so much of members without paying them. Fuwa has never made money and I was never able to pay for help. This isn’t going to change anytime soon, so any new site reality is going to have to take into account the need for a lessened human cost.
 
Anything else you want to say?
Tons. But that’s good for now. I’m spamming Nayleen on all the usual channels and mostly just want to get the site fully updated. We can chew on the site’s existential questions in the meantime.

On the bottom left, you may find the available themes. Infinite Stomach is a dark theme.

Welcome aboard. Fan translation is not for the faint  hearted as it requires many many many hours of dedication to what is entirely a volunteer project for sometimes harsh ungrateful audiences. If you want to try it out, you can see about joining our project which needs another dedicated translator, but you'd have to take the translation test first. That should also tell you if you're up for the task. Here's a link to our project:
 

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.

DeepL is by far the best. I might now have told anyone this, but all my doujins are translated this way. I even fooled (((professional))) translators and they think I know Japanese. LMAO what a bunch of morons. 

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.