Akshay

It is, in fact, active. not as active as I'd like, but it exists. 
 

Aiyoku No Eustia (https://vndb.org/r24024)
A fan transation project by Eustia Translations
Partial Patch is out! https://mega.nz/#!no0DyQza!DZShSFgME_-iW6vaEdYy3oek-794a1yiuiW48U05dBQ Covers up to Eris' chapter (Chapter 2).

 
Opening Movie:
Description (modified VNDB description):
Personal words:
Translation Video Sample:
Team:
Project Lead/Translator/TLC: eplipswich @eplipswich
Head Editor: Desertopa
Head QC: Angeldeath
Reserve/Former Members:
Translator (Reserve): TakoRin @TakoRin
Editor (Reserve): kumada
Translator (Former): goodluckmyway/Be Water @goodluckmyway
Editor/QC (Former): Vermillio @Vermillio
QC (Former): Esham @Esham
Progress:
You can check out detailed real-time progress update at the following link: https://1drv.ms/x/s!AhHDq_NSwaAqgSnImaDDLTME-lmi?e=ai9dey
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You can follow me on Twitter: @eplipswich
Job Opening(s):
None at the moment, but feel free to PM me if you feel you can contribute to the project.

Schrodinger's Cat Reinterpretation
 
 

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This thread just made me reconsider being a member of this forum.

Not even by a long shot.

Jinpou’s route is pretty meh, and I’d avoid getting near the abomination that is Mio’s route if I were you.
 

Next time when you reset, keep the .SAV's in a different folder, you can reuse them and keep your data. 

jinpou just wants some chinpo : (

Activist makes it sound like I'm doing it for some political reason, so Other>Fan. Really though it's just kind of fun sometimes, I wouldn't do it otherwise. I'm not exactly diligent though.
The "path to translation" question is kinda weird for self-taught fan translators. The only released vn translation I did, one of the sex scenes for Maki Fes, I did mostly because one of my friends asked and it seemed fun. I got the scripts for other vns the same way, and you can find ways to extract vn scripts on your own if you look for tools around the net.
With regards to theories of translation, I think a lot of academic writing has sort of filtered down into more digestible articles. I recently read the first two links listed on this page, and it's kind of the more highbrow version of the eternal liberal/literal debate in most cases. The concept of functional equivalence, or whatever they call it now, is very much a meme that has spread throughout the community, just not by that name. The current fanbase for Japanese media is to an uncomfortably large extent plagued with demands for stiff, literal translations, which is why you'll see very few professionals arguing for more literal translation styles as they have a better grasp of the concepts. The story goes that early anime / game localizations had a tendency to go perhaps too far with changes and censorship, and so the stilted language produced by most fan subtitles at the time began to be seen as a sign of authenticity. Now we have a generation of people who grew up on weebsprach. It's horrible. There are people legitimately writing things worse to cater to them.

There is a science to making surveys. Random questions will usually give you very little while carefully thought out questions can provide a lot. First of all, every single word in each question needs to be considered because it's important that it's precise and that all readers agree to the meaning. I don't think you are doing well in this regard. Also keep in mind that not everyone here are native English speakers and there are translators, who translates to something other than English. This can make using academic English even worse.
 
"1. Which of the following areas best describe where your translation practice falls?"
What does this mean? If it how you practice to make you better, how you practiced in the past or the kind of of translation work you do now?
The answer activist is not good either. I view activists as people who likes to cause obstructions. I think something like "unpaid hobby translator" is more in line with what you are thinking.
You also entirely miss the unpaid translators, who work to produce something they hope can be used to get a paid job later.
 
"2. Which of these pathways best describes how you began your translation practice?"
Since you post here, an obvious answer is missing, which is starting out with visual novels, meaning it falls into the category of hobby. Again the word practice might not be read identical by all people. Also what covers academia? You could have foreign languages in school where you have translation assignments. This is in fact mandatory to learn English in most non-English speaking countries. Some schools offer Chinese or Japanese as optional for 1-2 years and I bet you that people going through that will be nowhere near the level needed to translate when they are done. Some people could say academia due to having Japanese at school for one year while others require attending a university or similar studying the language. This will again make the replies less useful than wanted.
 
"3. How often do you engage in personal reading / research on translation?"
I assume this is studying and not "how often do you do translation work?". You might want to ask both because weekly means something different if the person works daily or weekly. Also how is reading/research defined? Looking up in a dictionary? Looking up kanji? (I think all translators does that in each translating session). It could also be something other than that, like studying grammar. How about running each sentence through tools like jparser or jisho?
Also I have come across both people who translates on all 5 weekdays or only during the 2 days of the weekends, neither of those can be answered clearly with the options you provided.
 
In fact mentioning kanji and the tools related to it, does your survey even take into account that it's Japanese and that the character sets themselves (all 3 of them) are a challenge? This adds an issue you don't get when translating between two languages using the same character set, like the Latin characters.
 
I will skip the control questions to counter the bias from not asking a representative demographic of translators. You have none of that, which is usually quite bad, but at the same time your demographics are so unknown that I wouldn't even know where to start to make such a correction. It's like like political surveys where correction questions can be as simple as "who did you vote for last time".
 
Another obvious question for visual novel translation is if the translator works alone or in a group and if it's in a group, is it done in a way where translators can learn from each other? Single person translations of VNs are actually fairly rare meaning ideas and insights spread from person to person, both regarding work organization and the work itself. How the work is organized and how the text is available matters for the resulting quality. For instance the same text can be worked on by 3 people, first translation, then editing to get a more natural English flow between the lines, then translation verification done by a translator other than the first one (checking both translation and if editing altered the meaning by accident). Interaction between people here can provide useful feedback.
 
I hope you don't mind that I might have been a bit harsh on your survey, but I did it mainly to put focus on the quality of the survey itself, hence how useful the results are. I would actually be interested in the result, particularly if you do something to improve the quality.

Did you have to bring him down like a falling tree? 
 
 
 
 
 
Jk love you

This is why you don't take advice from people on Facebook.

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