Chronopolis

Sorry for not responding to the post directly, but I've seen this complaint come up among VN readers towards JP readers, who visibly tend to be more sensitive to TL quality than others. I want to say something about it because I haven't seen anyone else address this. (Note: I'm not angry at all about it at all, since we are partially to blame.)
Particularly this. Yes there are times where it looks like we are flaunting, and we actually are flaunting (shame on us!).
But although it is possible for one to complain about translation quality because of their ego (to indirectly draw attention to the fact that they can read), in general the complaint they are making comes from a valid point of view, one which doesn't have anything to do with flaunting.
Hmm...I agree that some of the crowd from TLwiki will bash everything but the best translations. The reason is because they have read enough in Japanese to notice all the fine details of narration, and how good an ideal translation can be. The thing is, the ability to put that kind of translation out is really rare, and only relevant for titles which are originally more prosy to begin with. You need a translator with a great deal of Japanese experience, being well-read in English with some writing experience, and have the patience and artistic quality to as Clephas says "craft" something in parallel to the original. Obviously, translators who also know how to *write* is rare.
 
Here's where I disagree. I, and think a fair amount of other Japanese-read people, don't expect the translator need need to know how to *write*. If the translator can understand 99% of the text and 99% of the story and put it together into not-horrendous English, it's a go for me.
 
Well, if you look at it this way, the only difference between me and the people at TLWiki, is that I value the meaning enough to say don't translate this if you aren't getting 99% of the meaning through, while some TLwiki folk also value the prose, enough to say "don't translate prosy works unless you know how to write as well, and btw, people who translate who don't even understand all the meaning, haha, look at those losers".
 
That's my stance. Maybe you don't really need 99% of the meaning to get through in a translation. If it's a plot-light story, I'm more likely to agree "if it's enough for the reader to have fun, then sure."
The reason why I choose this as the general "bar" is that I think it's a reasonable one, after considering the supply and skill distribution of translators and how useful a translation is of varying qualities (meaning ok/bad? naturalness ok/bad? prose-skill ok/non-existent?). In the time it takes to translate one VN or co-translate two, you could read about 7 VN's and study about a hundred more hours of grammar, which would make you qualified. As stated before, TL'ing is a pretty ineffective way of improving your Japanese skills.
 
Two of the key sliding scales here is: how much does the questionable translation negatively affect the reader's experience, and how much does the it affect the reader's understanding/perception of the novel's contents (like when they go to discuss the novel).
 
The experience varies more on the person reading (some people might not be able to stand slightly awkward translation, while others might not mind). I can see the argument that "if there are people who can enjoy the experience, then the translation should be done. People who can't stand the translation won't read it all the way through, and so there's no loss there". The understanding of the contents is more objective. All readers would be consistently affected by this.  
Trying to describe the reason for not wanting sub-par translations (=not wanting people to read sub-par translations)
Just say you have a copy of some book you like, but the book is really old. Words are faded and bloched out everywhere, small parts of pages are torn off. Worse, there are confusing notes about the story written on the side of the pages, some correct and some misleading. You might be able to search for a copy given a year or two, but your friend wants to read the book now. Hesitation comes from:
You want your friend to experience the same book you did. You don't want them to read the "book" the first time haltingly, and then have to reread the good copy a year later. Maybe your friend won't have the patience to read the book again. You don't want you friends and others to think they have read the book, and discuss things from it knowing that the impression they've received is likely flawed.
Anyways. Some of the points (reasons for not wanting people to read a sub-par translation) that I've described in metaphor here, can be found stated plainly in an older post.
 
When it comes to voicing dissent, I still believe in the right to politely state one's disapproval and try and persuade the group to stop, but should allow the group to proceed if they decide to. There should be no harassment. In private circles people can ridicule anything they want I suppose, but since means those people don't respect the fact that other people can do whatever they want for fun, I must disapprove of it.
 
I think the opinion of so called "elitists" on what standards a VN should be translated to is a valid one and I can see what they are valuing, even though I think it's unrealistic and disagree. It's just their actions which I disapprove of.

One thing that a lot of people who just read translations don't understand is that reproducing a writer like Masada or Romeo's writing style in another language is as much a job for an artist of words as a translator.  One of the big problems with it is that few translators have the necessary vocabulary in either language to manage it smoothly.  How many translators are well-read in the first place?  Pretty few.  People like me, who greedily gobble up reading material like candy, are rare in this day and age, and that makes things worse.  Quite frankly, I stopped playing the English versions as much because I gave up on the dream of a truly great translation as because I had no need for them. 
 
For the average moege, you are basically just reproducing dialogue with minor narration, so only a true incompetent could manage to screw it up.  However, in the case of a VN heavy on narration, the difficulty level of reproducing the writing style explodes.  Even a relatively light narrative in a chuunige - such as Bloody Rondo - would be virtually impossible to reproduce in a way that would satisfy someone who had played the Japanese version, simply because the ways in which a writer can play with narration are so much more varied than with dialogue.
 
Take Dies Irae, as an extreme example.  The dialogue outside of battle isn't terribly hard to handle.  However, the narration is convoluted, highly descriptive, and frequently poetic.  What a translator working on such a game needs to consider is accuracy, flair of expression, and grammatical correctness, in that order.  There are a lot of things everyone but the Grammar Nazis will forgive if you manage to do it with flair in a way that makes sense and still retains the meaning from the original material. 
 
My advice to translators is pay attention to what the writer is emphasizing, rather than just paying attention to the whole meaning of a sentence.  What the writer emphasizes tells you what he thought was important to the story, rather than what you think might be so.  As such, you should always try to reproduce the emphasis of an individual line, even if you can't reproduce the style in a complete fashion. 
 
Edit: The reason why I suggested that it is as much an art as a science is because so much of understanding an author's line of thought relies on an intuitive comprehension of nuance in a language.  Reading nuance takes long experience or an exceptional talent (I'm the former), and most people don't possess either one.

I'll add a couple of examples to that "dissolve everything" that you don't really realize until you start working in a visual novel yourself.
 
First is the position of your dialogue and characters. In the past I thought that a lot of Visual Novels were still 800x600 just because they didn't know better, but that's not the main reason. The wider your resolution is, the more separated each of your elements in your novel will become. You need to get your text a lot higher that what you may think in the first place if you want the reader to be able to read and see the change on the sprites while reading. Check it yourselves, pick any VN with a good resolution, and compared where the dialogue box is compared to those at 800x600. You will suddenly notice how there a huge gap between the bottom of the screen and where the text start. Sometimes a smaller resolution makes everything easier for the eye when it comes to focusing your eyes to the screen.
 
Having the text going from one character to another is not as easy as just "changing the color of the name". When you read your own text is easy to know who's talking because you did it, but give it to someone else and he will probably have issues to know when someone is talking, destroying the entire flow of dialogues by a making him look for the name everytime. Reality is no one reads the name box and it's just there as support so you need to avoid this. The main trick most visual novels use for this are sound for dialogue, let it be voice actors or just beps like in the Ace Attorney series, or get sprites to the side of the box so that way you can know who is talking by the side of your eye. This is specially important when there are a couple character on screen, or if your main character has no sprites so dialogues don't get mixed. There are other techniques like making your sprites go darker when they are not talking, change the color of the boxes, make the boxes appear at different parts of the screen depending who's talking, etc...
 
Dissolving everything makes everything goes smoother, that's for sure, but at the same time it changes the flow of the of the dialogue compared to normal books A LOT. Now you suddenly have small stops of 0.5 seconds everytime a new character talks. This is not of a big problem most of the time, but there are moments you need your text to be fast or at least get quick reactions from your characters for a bigger impact. In this sense writting a visual novel is completly different to a normal book and you must look for ways to make it don't lose quality or impact with your own words. There's also some techniques like adding sound effects, shake effects, or transitions on the screen to develop this impact in different ways.
 
Talking about sound effects. They are not as important as you think. Never. In fact, having too many sound effects will even ridicule your text. If you pay attention to movies or anime you will see that a lot of times the sound effects used for some acctions have nothing to do with what the sound would actually be in real life, but again, it's more important to get an emotional or acction-reaction effect from the sfx that everything else. For Visual Novels this makes the sound effects to be less important since the actions and reactions are usually narrated and you won't have many scenes that require this effect. So don't get too frustated to get good sound effects, your music and your text are a million times more important.
 
And I'll leave it like that for now.

Hello everyone. I've been a lurker around here for quite some time but never really registered since I'm the shy type. But right now I'm looking for collaborators so I guess it can't be helped.
Let's go to business. I'm looking for artists for my upcoming (and first) visual novel: One Thousand Lies (OTL for short).
The entire script 100% completed, and the Visual Novel works perfectly, so you can be sure that the project will be finished because IT'S ALREADY DONE! The theme of the Visual Novel is romantic comedy, with some psychology and philosophy themes inbetween. Think of anime like Oreigaru to get an idea of what I'm aiming for. I'm looking for artists of all kind, the first priority are for sprites and CG. I would love to have a background or GUI artist too but I can always use pictures with filters or make something myself for the menus. I'm using open music and I'm programming everything myself, but it wouldn't hurt if some musicians or programmers want to join and help here and there. The novel is in spanish, so it would be a plus if you speak it so that way you can read the script by yourself. I would love to have it translated to english but I don't think my english would be good enough for something like this. I've been using placeholders till now so I can give you guys a demo if you are not sure about participating first, but please keep in mind that only the script is final. The Visual Novel is a free project and I don't pretend to get any money from this, so I can't pay for it (I'm really sorry). Maybe we can get to some kind of deal if your work is really good but I can't promise anything. Thank you for your time, and let me know if anyone of you is interested. See ya!

Oh man. Krill, hope you get better soon!

Just tell them that the Japanese's perversion is the source of many great stories.

Finally done with Baldr sky dive1 - lost memory, after 90+ hours of hard work, Not 100% done with the game, still got survival mode to clear, but I'v done all the routes and got all possible endings,.Time to move on to Baldr sky dive2 - recordare...Great Vn though, but replaying the same battles for different ends are a honest pain in the ass, this is like half way between a VN and a game-play VN...It has mostly Text, but it has enough gameplay and repetition to make it feel like a gameplay VN, but with less grind. Still got some missing CGs....maybe they are in Dive 2... since there is no english patch, there is no english walk-through,so that kinda sucks 

Hum. For me, enjoying reading was being able to imagine things I wouldn't normally do on my own. Being able to delve into worlds aside from reality. To put myself in other people's shoes, and walk that mile you could say. Things you can't necessarily do in real life. In short, it's fascinating. 

I'll read just about anything without concern for writing prowess or what gives, as long as it's interesting. 

</3
 
 
On topic though, I love the blog feature. I can spam my random thoughts as I spend every waking moment reading UnTL'd VNs... not that I have gone into blog spam mode yet... my 4 months off school are only just starting.

Should we promote and highlight quality content creation or purposeless chatter?  To me the answer is fairly obvious, especially considering the real estate consumed by the two features is about the same.  The birthday feature serves no purpose other than fueling a massive spam farm.  Congratulating someone on a birthday doesn't show sincere consideration if you have to be reminded to do it by an automated tracker that has been thrust in your face.  Any result from that is simply the illusion of thoughtful consideration.

Quick annoucement letting everyone know we just implemented prefixed tags on the Visual Novel Talk board.
 
For those who don't know what that is, they're icons that appear on a thread when you're browsing the forums. You can see how they look like in the Ongoing Projects section.
 
These help indexing threads in encompassing categories, thus optimizing searches for similar content.
Additionaly, by using this system, more threads that use similar tags can be suggested to a user at the bottom of each thread. (it looks like this)
Overall, it's a more effective way of tagging things and something we've wanted to implement for a while but everyone just kept forgetting about
 
For now this feature is being launched to the public first in the Visual Novel Talk board, but the plan is to expand it to other boards as we see fit.
More tags can be added to this list as well, but these should be fairly encompassing for most threads.
 
 
List of Tags currently available:
 
VN Release
Threads annoucing a particular visual novel release.
 
Patch Release
Threads annoucing translation patches or other types of visual novel patches released.
 
News
News related to a particular title or the visual novel industry/world in general.
 
Discussion
General visual novel discussion. Threads for discussing a particular visual novel, a scene in a visual novel and general visual novel aspects you can think of.
 
Analysis
Extensive analyisis threads of certain visual novels or things pertaining to visual novels.
 
Review
Threads reviewing visual novels.
 
Let's Play
Threads with visual novel Let's play videos
 
Podcast
Visual Novel podcast threads
 
Help
Looking for a walkthrough or have an important question about a visual novel you need answers to immediately? This is the tag for those threads.
Note: For threads asking questions but have the intent of turning into proper discussions, use the discussion tag as prefix instead.
 
 
 
How to use prefixed tags:
 
1) Check the "Use first tag as prefix" box and click on the "Add a tag" button to open a drop down menu with all the available tags and select the one you want as your main tag, this should be the one that best describes the type of content in your thread.



 
2) After you select the tag you want as your prefix, you're free to add aditional tags after it as well, but these will just remain regular tags. The prefixed tag will be highlited as opposed to the normal tags and it should look something like this:



 
3) Post your thread like you normally would and the prefixed tag should now appear behind your thread's title when browsing the VN board.

My dad smoked his whole life. One day my mom told him "If you want to see your children graduate, you have to stop smoking." Three years later, he died of lung cancer. My Mom told me, "Don't smoke, don't put your children through the same thing". At 24, I have never touched a cigarette. I must say, I feel a sense of regret, because playing Clover Days for 5 minutes gave me cancer anyway. 

I'm (finally) done with SubaHibi. My first actual eroge in japanese! *self-claps*
 
It was... great. I think. I actually have no idea what I think of this game as a whole, as I could only comment on its parts right now. I need everything to simmer down before I can say something about it, to be honest.
 
Meanwhile this screen can probably fairly sum up the game:
 

When in doubt, I rely on the following general strategy where a glut of reviews exists.  I call it "Evaluation by Critical Thinking".  It assumes that any given person is biased, and thus comments that contradict the overall evaluation are more trustworthy or notable.
 
1) Identify positive aspects of the game highlighted in negative reviews.
2) Identify negative aspects of the game highlighted in positive reviews.
3) Synthesize negative + positive aspects highlighted above to arrive at a fairly objective assessment of the game in question.
 
While it requires a decent sample size of reviews, this strategy doesn't require any one of them to be particularly high quality, and as such it's well suited when all you have is a bunch of user reviews on a site like GameFAQs.

Kara no Shoujo
http://www.gangqinpu.com/fullread.asp?id=16460
 
Edit: Oh yeah this guy has lot of good stuff:
http://www.thaynebohman.com/sheets
 
Particularly "Answer" from G-senjou...I can't play it properly but its a very fun song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiMgfEUJaE4

Kara no Shoujo
http://www.gangqinpu.com/fullread.asp?id=16460
 
Edit: Oh yeah this guy has lot of good stuff:
http://www.thaynebohman.com/sheets
 
Particularly "Answer" from G-senjou...I can't play it properly but its a very fun song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiMgfEUJaE4

I kinda thought how Fuwanovel felt like a high school setting sometimes... there are certain classes (threads) I participate more in than others, so the people I respond to and see often, it sort of feels like classmates.  Then there are other people I see around but never speak to really or at all since we don't really attend the same classes.  So I may know of them, but am not part of their clique or w/e.  There are people I can call acquaintances/friends that I talk only when in school, and then there are closer friends I spend time with outside of school (chatting outside of the forum).  I guess how integrated I feel in the forum depends on how often I attend and get involved with everyone & what's going on.  If I skip and don't attend enough, I'll probably start to feel less integrated overtime and my connections with people on the forum may start to fizzle out too.
 
I think to feel very personally integrated.. maybe have a lot of recognition by members, feel like your contributions affect the forum, and feel like your presence matters if you disappear.  People like that probably have like more "school spirit" kind of feeling, wanting the forum to do well and prosper because they care about it so much.
 
Yeah~ just some weird comparisons I was thinking about before. 

You start ordering people around and being unreasonable. If people enough pretend to obey you, you did it.

Lurking is best 

In my experience, I actually got addicted to reading -after- playing visual novels.
 
There is a study that says people who read many visual novels tend to develop speed-reading (read faster) and have better text analyzing skills.
This is so true. When I first played a visual novel, i didnt like it much. I would rather watch anime because it would give me more content in less time, and because I would just listen (and thus get less tired and bored than when I was reading).
 
However, when I actually got used to reading visual novels and had fun with then, I began having a taste for reading.
At first it was tiring to read, but now I was listening and reading (so when I got tired of so much text, characters would appear and start speaking, so listening to them would be the -break- between the novel side of it, as voice-acting with tachi-e resembles anime).
 
After finishing some VNs, I realized my reading speed improved. 
Part of it was because I was bored of fillers (which made me develop a technique of text skimming to avoid the boredom but still retain content),
and had a lot of curiosity (I wanted to know "whats next" so soon I found myself reading in auto-mode in full speed).
After some time, I realized I was too used to some character styles and voices, and i found myself cutting some voices and having enough pleasure just reading the text (which was waay faster). 
 
After that evolution, I got more and more into light novels (something I could not stand to read more than 1 hour a day), reading them voraciously.
Getting used to raw text and not having to wait for character voices, nowadays I even click a lot in VNs because even in auto-mode it gets slow (mainly when you can sense what the next lines are going to be).
 
So what I can say from my experience is that, VNs are a great middle-point between anime (audio-visual) and novels (text-only), and transformed me from a formerly 100% visual person to a bookworm.
After reading some studies, I believe many high-school students here in Japan have been experiencing the same (starting with gyaru-ge for fun, and end up reading light novels spontaneously).
 
So Visual Novels are great to connect both mediums and you can feel how much you can improve as a reader.

I always claim bullshit on these claims, as throughout most of human history we were hunter gatherers and didn't even have writing. And even if you exclude that and only take into account the generations that existed after writing was invented. The majority of the world was illiterate for the longest time. Even if people are generally reading less than 2 generations ago, we still beat most other generations since at least most of us are literate.
 
I remember this once came up in an episode of Lucky Star, and I would have to agree with Konata's counterpoint. She argued that these claims rarely acknowledge the fact that most people do spend a tremendous amount of time reading online. Be it through social media, blog/forum posts, articles, etc. So even if most people aren't reading books, we are still reading quite a bit.  
 
Regarding VNs, I think they are fantastic tool to get people back into reading fiction. Most people who do read fiction, read it because it is entertaining and interesting to them. But to be perfectly honest, TV dramas, movies, anime, video games, etc are far more entertaining for most people because they involve more senses. Visual Novels are a medium that rely on prose writing, but also incorporate music and visuals much like anime and video games. So the people who get bored with regular books, could probably find entertainment in a VN.     

I guess, but writing good male protagonists takes effort
I mostly stopped paying attention to male MCs just because there's absolutely no point in it most  of the time and unless they're mind blowingly annoying I no longer care, so I mostly just care about the heroines and how they feel and stuff, so situations like this are kind of painful. This is also why Yuri is superior to het romance, because instead of just dealing with shitty male characters, you just pair the two heroines together and solve all the problems in the world.

May I join this? I will give some of my favorite ost on visual novel and some of my opinion. So, here goes
1. Final Boss BGM of Soukoku no Arterial Mutual Justice. Epic for Final Boss at each route (Although it may repetitive if you heard it for 100% completion).
2. Sengoku Rance Drivin' to the Dead. Sound epic mostly because it's your time to kick Xavier ass in middle game and this song is heard when you battling vs. Byakko (Most of the first player of Sengoku Rance will probably hearing it first at battle vs. Byakko anyway).
3. Midori no Umi OP. Calming, but make me rage like "WHY THE HELL THIS VN IS NOT IN ENGLISH YET???????" Sorry, just like express my anger lol (But the calming statement is right, so much I like to heard it many times).
4. Kara no Shoujo 2 OP. Same style as Midori no Umi imo (And obviously same singer, Shimotsuki Haruka). Waiting for the English release at this year by Mangagamer.
5. euphoria op. The violin is definitely will be not out of place if someone add it in Yoko Shimamura collection imo. As the game, well I better not touch it since it's not my taste mostly. But once again the OP is awesome enough to hear it again.
That's all for now. I will probably add more in future

Comyu has some of my favorite VN tracks like Find a Way Out: