Infernoplex

I wanted to visit MangaGamer's ask.fm a moment ago and suddenly I discovered that it's basically gone O____O ... This was the link for MG's account: http://ask.fm/MangaGamerStaff ... What I see when I visit that link is this: So what's going on O____O ... Why did MG got banned from ask.fm? They weren't posting anything bad from what I know and most of the questions and answers were informative. It's a shame all of that is gone now ...

I am kind of secretly hoping that they are just trolling with the background picture and the whole "It's another Grisaia" thing and just create a new IP ... That's just my optimism speaking out from me

I am not sure whether @Hayashi will like it, lately he only talks about Subahibi so I don't think he will be too much impressed with the new Grisaia.

You mean Grisaia?

Oh, so that was the case. I see. Interesting indeed That makes sense, I thought they were trying to somehow get into the western market by that time but from your post I see I was wrong. Getting into the western market wasn't their intention at all. Thank you for the clarification ...

Yeah, that can be an instant turn-off, when you figure out you understand it better than the original translator tried to present it to you.

Oh, yes, I do know of MangaGamer's early translations, I think they got better only after Kouryuu joined them though. As for NI, true, nobody can tell and/or even guess what was going on with the translation of NI, I wouldn't be surprised that it was done on a short notice ... Speaking of translations by Japanese companies, you reminded me of one particular VN I tried to read several months ago ... I think it was called Giniro or something like that (I saw some new VN with similiar name like Gin'iro Haruka mentioned on Fuwanovel but that's not the VN I am speaking of) ... I remember opening up the VN and since it's a dual language release, I picked up English ... And, oh my, what an abomination that is! THAT's waaaay waaay worse than NI or Divi Dead ... That's literally the worst translation I ever saw for a VN and it's done by a Japanese company ... It made me wonder "why the hell did they even choose to include English as an option O_O" ... Now that's what I call abysmal.

Sorry, I think I worded myself badly in my previous post, I didn't want to imply in any way that the VN is bad xD I always take VNDB ratings with a grain of salt and look at them only as a statistics, not as a general rule whether something is really good or not And I do agree that it has a good average vote (7.46 is a very good mark considering there were 60 voters)

Looks nice but I am surprised that such a long title doesn't have a single rating of 10 on its VNDB page.

I am aware of what you said and yes, as you said, it is a servicable translation, it's not abysmal like Nocturnal Illusion and some other titles (I have heard that Divi Dead also had a bad translation even though when I was reading it I thought it was kind of servicable xD) ... When I posted the question yesterday about the Japanese name I didn't mean to start the discussion about quality of translations. I am not in favour of bashing G-Collections for their efforts, first of all most of their localized titles were 2000s-2005s VNs (mostly from Zyx and Trabulance) and most of them were pure nukige stuff like Slave Pageant and similiar (there are some exceptions with several bishoujo titles but most of the VNs were indeed nukige) and you could generally enjoy these titles with servicable translation, this isn't some heavy-plot VN that would require a very good translation so I am certainly okay with how they translated it, even if it has a lot of mistakes, generally it's readable and I am not missing a lot by not having a very good translation ... Unlike the situation with Nocturnal Illusion (I didn't read it but from what I have heard, it's suposed to be a good VN) ... And unlike Divi Dead which got me confused at times and especially after endings, that's how I discovered there were some mistranslations xD ... I know kagi, it's a kanji I passed while I was in my beginner's lessons, I didn't know it could also be interpreted as a lock But truth be told, there's so many different possible interpretations for some of these kanji that I simply have no idea how would one remember them all, a dictionary is a must when translating because without it you can't make sense out of sentences. For example, your translated sentence makes much more sense than the one in the original translation. Totally different meaning, lock and key don't have the same meaning and looking by your example I can definitively see the difference, this initial translation really is abysmal as you said. It looks like the original translator didn't even try to make sense out of sentences. An interesting history, I didn't know that. But I think I do understand why reputable translators from that era didn't want to touch porn.

This is so true. I remember I tried to memorize the readings as best as I could but at the end, after my 50th kanji I gave up because it's meaningless to learn it like that xD ... Especially for Kanji that have like more than 15+ readings like this one ... Nowadays, I remember them only through new vocabulary, that's way easier for me, I can associate better that way. And usually I remember some readings of the kanji that way, I don't have the speed in reading and pronounciation but I do have a general idea on how to read it and what it means. I see I kind of guessed that's how it works ... Oh, so you are learning Chinese too? Cool, though all those asian languages can be really tough to learn. They are totally different cultures.

That's what I have also thought. I remember reading something similiar to what Narcosis said in one of those huge Kanji Dictionaries, it's actually a very famous Kanji book, with lots of pages and the first 200 pages were on explaining the way to read kanji and general "rules" when reading kanji but you mostly need to remember them on a case-by-case basis. Interesting to hear about the forms, I never knew that but it definitively makes sense I can see why it's required.

For some reason, I can't like your comments, it says "you are not allowed to give reputation to this user" ... Anyway, thank you for the link, some of the things mentioned there I already knew and some of the things I didn't ... I bookmarked the site, it looks like it has some interesting Japanese materials, I do collect this type of sites for my study of Japanese. Reading through the article you linked and my analysis of the Kanji name, now I think I semi-understand why (菅原 空美) is read as Kanbara Sorami: 菅 - (On-yomi: カン、 ケン) (Kun-yomi: すげ) 原 - (On-yomi: ゲン) (Kun-yomi: はら) 空 - (On-yomi: クウ) (Kun-yomi: そら、 あ.く、 あ.き、 あ.ける、 から、 す.く、 す.かす、 むな.しい) 美 - (On-yomi: ビ、ミ) (Kun-yomi: うつく.しい) Kanji readings obtained from http://jisho.org/ ... I hope it's not a problem I increased the size of the text, this way kanji can be examined better. Looking at it like this, it seems that last name "Kanbara" came from the combination of one on-yomi and one kun-yomi reading (somehow はbecame the "ha" with dakuten marker). And "Sorami" came from the combination of one kun-yomi and one on-yomi reading ... Though I have no clue how one decides which one to pick, it could also be "Sorabi" xD ... I am maybe misunderstanding some things, I am sorry if that's the case, I am still in the learning phase so I really try to learn this stuff in the best way that I can. My current knowledge of Japanese is some low N5-N4 stuff and I did learn all of the Hiragana and Katakana as well as their writing and reading ... As for kanji, I learned like 150-200, of the 2000+ standard ones that must be learned. The only kanji that I knew of earlier in this name was 空 ...

I was reading the English version of this VN, not the japanese one, so there's no furigana anywhere to be found ... Actually, Sorami's last name is only mentioned once at an introductionary phase and by a 3rd person ... And then never again, she is always referred to as Sorami and it's voiced as Sorami but I couldn't confirm her last name. I noticed the problem with the romanization only when I went to VNDB and saw that they named her Kanbara Sorami which got me off guard because in my notes she was called Surugawa Sorami. In all honesty, I think the original translator of these old VNs (G-Collections) got some translations wrong. Some other VNs translated by them that I have read also had obvious translation errors that even I who am not good in Japanese can notice them (because the translated text itself sometimes seem very strange and off the scale at times). This is the first time I noticed they badly romanized a Japanese name. It's not just a missing vowel ("Ryouko"=/="Ryoko") ...

Thank you! I should have looked at getchu page first but I forgot that they always list hiragana for names ... That confirms it I don't know why they did that either. The protagonist isn't voiced and there's only like one line in the entire VN when her full name is mentioned so there's no way to hear her last name pronounced in-game ... But I do think I have heard Sorami mentioned so there's no dilemma with that one Anyway, that's the info I was looking for, thank you @Nosebleed

I am editing the characters page of this visual novel and I stumbled upon a dilemma with one of the character's names. I am looking at this character and I am wondering if the given romanization of her last name is correct. Namely, when I look at the JAST's page and while in-game she's referred to as Surugawa Sorami but the initial creator of her page on VNDB named her Kanbara Sorami so I decided to check who's right and who's wrong but since my Japanese is very weak at the moment, I can't decide what's right ... So far, I've tried with online dictionaries looking for her name with kanji input (菅原 空美), but as expected I came up with multiple variants of reading her last name, and it seems that Kanbara is probably the right answer, JAST's naming Surugawa isn't even listed as an option here, and ENAMDICT returns somewhat similiar results. Did JAST mistake with her romanization? What's the correct answer? Asking those who are good in Japanese and can help me out with this dilemma Thanks in advance

Same is true for PC platform xD You also have millions of games on PC to choose ... But I agree on the notion that games like Pokemon Go and Angry Birds have wider audiences than VNs would probably ever have on a mobile device. O_O I will need to check that out, this is the first time I am hearing of it. I don't know about mobiles but I do know that a good amount of otome VNs have their console releases (PSP mostly if I remember correctly) ... That's interesting to hear, about IMHHW, you are right, it turns out it did have an iOS and Android release. I got interested so I did a filtered search on VNDB for all iOS and Android VNs ... And it turns out I was wrong O_O This list is telling me there are actually a lot of iOS and Android VNs out there and a lot of them also have English language available! Turns out there is a market after all ... Color me surprised O_O ... Yeah, I have just realised that. I have heard of Otomate, they are quite famous. Okay, that's about it, I will not derail this thread anymore, sorry I was just curious about something, my intention wasn't this, I kind of went off topic here ... Anyway, as for Shuffle!, I don't really care and I am definitively not buying it, as everybody else stated that without Essence+, it's basically what we already had from MG ...

Thanks, that explains it! I was right, it's a person Thank you for the link of the interview ... I even managed to find something interesting here: That's something I was wondering about for some time. Visual novels shouldn't be very demanding in terms of processing power so why aren't we having a market for Android and iOS VNs just yet? xD I have a tablet and I always thought how great would be if I could read all VNs on it, it's definitively something that I would look very forward to.

May I know to whom are you referring to? I am trying to follow you here I thought at first that you meant Japan as a country but the more I am looking at it, it looks like you are referring to a person? O_O Whose alias is Bamboo?

@Rooke May your wish be granted!

You wish, ahahaha

Thanks for the clarification, I didn't know that ... I rarely follow the fan-TL scene so I couldn't have known that either way so thank you for clarification I didn't mean anything offensive earlier, I was just surprised that he always defends them every single time on this forum Though I don't think that's because of his potential bussiness with SP, he genuinely believes in them from what I have seen of his comments on this forum Anyway, I don't really care, I was just curious a little bit about him, that's all

You seem to be the regular pettifogger for localization companies (mostly SP or in this case Denpasoft) on this forum, may I know why do you try to justify literally everything that they do? I am starting to think that you are their employee

That's considered to be really fast in my country xD

I face palmed very hard right now ... What has suddenly gotten into the minds of these Japanese developers? I am seriously starting to dislike whole eroge on Steam phenomenon. it's so wrong on so many levels ...