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Satsuki

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    onomatope*'s lastest title - Kyuuketsuki no Libra - is coming to Steam

    in Visual Novel Talk

    Posted

     And as I said, you can read them in the thread.There's probably been 2 specific suggestions, and maybe 2 or 3 other more vague ones which deal with techniques. I have to run out the door in probably 15 mins, so you'll have to hunt them down yourself, it shouldn't take too much trouble.

    The way you reword it is to figure out how the tone is changed in the character, figure out what it does, and find a way to imitate this as best you can. The specific suggestions which were mentioned imitate the real way people actually speak (I know this because I hear it all the time and it annoys the bejeezus out of me.) And yes, shoving words at the end of sentences is bad... most of the time. Depends on how it's done.

    And yes it applies to me as well. If you read my first post on the issue, I went out of my way to advocate a literal philosophy as well as a localisation philosophy, with the provision that literal philosophies always come with footnotes.

    Couldn't find anything other than "put something at the end", "throw it away" or "do it like we did with others". There was the one idea of using exclamation point which sounds good, but won't work at all when she speaks in lower/sad voice.

    I have no problem with footnotes btw.

    onomatope*'s lastest title - Kyuuketsuki no Libra - is coming to Steam

    in Visual Novel Talk

    Posted

     There have been plenty of suggestions in this thread, from the use of intensifiers to completely rewording things like Grisaia. 

    You certainly made the leap from that to untranslatable at some point. The options are always between various degrees of literal translations and localisations, people who advocate for 'literal translations or nothing' are offering suspect advice (and the literal translations always come with footnotes.) You may have a preference for one, like I lean toward localisation, but the other option is never discounted because different people prefer different things. You may hate what the localised versions sound like, but others prefer it done this way, because just like you think the localisations sound stupid, I think tacking 'desu' on the end of English words in an English translation sounds laughably bad. But you notice I didn't mention that...

    Nope, I wanted to know the way of handling the exact "desu" word, not just "we can just do it like we did with the others". In Japanese, using "desu" is completely normal (well, although she overdid it a bit), so if you reword it into some kind of "is there anyone even speak that way?" language, then we have a problem. I haven't read Grisaia so I'm not entirely sure how exactly Makina speaks, but if she only used weird words at the end of a sentence, and they translated it into corrupted broken English, then I don't really think I like it either (again, I haven't read it, so don't jump on me for this).

    And now that you mentioned "different people prefer different things", isn't that applied to your opinion as well? 

    onomatope*'s lastest title - Kyuuketsuki no Libra - is coming to Steam

    in Visual Novel Talk

    Posted

     So 'putting random english words at the end of a sentence is bad' suddenly means 'the word is untranslatable, don't bother?' I'd love to hear how you made that leap of logic. Considering I'm not a fan of sticking random words at the end of a sentence and I believe the word is very much translatable. If you think English doesn't have the depth to imitate the effects of that word, then you have a poor view of the English language. 

    This reminds me of Contance Garnett, who was a ferocious translator and a trailblaizer, but one of the main criticisms levelled against her was that when she got to a sentence that was too hard, because she was focussed on speed she’d just skip the sentence and keep going. It’s one of the reasons why people don’t recommend her translations for quality, because others had no problems translating the lines she omitted. Just like Koestl had no problem localising speech ticks, Conjueror hasn't an issue with it, and indeed most localisation studios have no problem with it.

    So please give me something that neither "putting random English words at the end" nor "making the character sounds like a 3-years-old learning to speak"?

    And when did I even make that leap again? There were some people suggested that, and some fan translation groups did that before, so I just took them as example, that's all.

    onomatope*'s lastest title - Kyuuketsuki no Libra - is coming to Steam

    in Visual Novel Talk

    Posted

    Before anybody gets funny ideas, like say trying to connect the usage of 'adios' with the usage of 'desu', and concluding that 'adios' is a foreign word which needs no explanation and so neither should 'desu', allow me to point out that while the word 'adios' descends from Spanish it has a very long history of being used in the English speaking world. It is used frequently in everyday English conversations, so much so that I can walk to my trusty American Merriam Webster dictionary and find adios defined inside. If I flip to 'D'... nope, no 'Desu', and that's because it has never been used in the English language. Which is why it needs to be explained or localised.

    The reason why Spanish words are okay is because major English speaking countries also have many Spanish speakers from surroundings countries which causes  their culture to sift in. As a result, almost every English speaker in say the US will now a few Spanish words like say Uno, Adios, Amigo, etc. It's basically the same thing as how Japanese has a shitload of English words in the language that people know and use all the time, but to a lesser degree. The same thing doesn't really hold true in English for Japanese save a few cultural words like Samurai, Ninja, Sushi, you get the idea. Putting in desu in a translation isn't a smart idea because the vast majority of English speakers, yes even in the anime community, aren't going to understand what it means even if they know of the word. 

    If they want to translate the game only for US audiences, then fine, throw as much Spanish in as you can. Yes, I know the fact that you guys in US UK learn Spanish at school. But most other countries don't teach Spanish but English at school, so putting a bunch of "only-US-and-Spanish-people-can-understand"'s words is just dumb.

    And if you want to translate it, make it "please", like Izuna

    onomatope*'s lastest title - Kyuuketsuki no Libra - is coming to Steam

    in Visual Novel Talk

    Posted

    In Makina's case, pretty much her whole sentence is "corrupted", so yeah, of course you have to try to work around with it.

    In this case, it's different. You can't just rewrite the whole thing differently just because of the "desu". If they could even throw "adios" (?) and stuff like that in, then desu should be fine too (yup, I don't know French. Or Spanish. Actually, I'm not even sure what language is that.). And yeah, if necessary, just make some kind of footnote/glossary to explain the meaning, just like some games did to explain the honorific.

    Btw, I don't know about you, but I knew about "desu" before I knew about honorific (since most Vietnamese translation groups throw honorific out of the window).

    onomatope*'s lastest title - Kyuuketsuki no Libra - is coming to Steam

    in Visual Novel Talk

    Posted

    I'm totally fine with keeping that. I mean, it's an English translation, doesn't mean we have to try so hard to translate everything into English, even the untranslatable ones. That's almost a "trait" of the character, so there is just no reason to cut it off or change it into some weird English words that cannot sound dumber. And seriously though, is there anyone here who doesn't know about the word "desu"? Hell, if anyone here follows Umaru manga, you will see that readers even demanded the translation group to include "desuwa" in Sylphi's lines.

    Rozen Maiden dub was horrible, btw.

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