Majo Koi Nikki Patch Poll

[Aizen-Sama]

Hello guys. Basically doing this because a problem has arised and we decided that leaving this matter to the community would be a far better idea then deciding this ourselves.

Basically what happens is that some of the translated lines end up being long, so some of them don't fit entirely in the text box. We can't "create" new lines in order to fit the entire text, so there are two options for this:

1. We make the font size smaller, which would mean hardening the patching process of the game (e.g: you would need to delete all of your save files if you have those, you should patch before starting the game or else it will give problems with font size).

2. We try to shorten the lines without touching the font size, which would mean harming the translation. By this we mean, we can rephrase some lines to shorten them, that's why Editors are for anyways, but some of these lines are very long, so this can't be applied to all of them.

Anyways, I'll leave this at your hands.

[Arcadeotic]

Give us an example of the original font size and the smaller font size

[Aizen-Sama]

2 minutes ago, Arcadeotic said:

Give us an example of the original font size and the smaller font size

First line would be the modified size, second line is the default size, followed by a smaller size (forget that one), third line is default size too.

[Arcadeotic]

Changing the font is the easier choice, but if you like editing more, the other choice is the way to go

But I like the changed font, so I'll go with that

[Aizen-Sama]

1 minute ago, Arcadeotic said:

Changing the font is the easier choice, but if you like editing more, the other choice is the way to go

But I like the changed font, so I'll go with that

I actually posted a pretty shitty example, I'll just post a few screenshots comparing both fonts in a moment.

[Aizen-Sama]

[Arcadeotic]

24pt is pretty perfect

[Dergonu]

Apperantly I suck at everything, and voted for the wrong one  

But yeah, the smaller text is a better alternative. It would suck to lose some of the line's meaning, and like you said yourself, it simply wont be possible for all the lines. Not a very ideal fix. 

[Erogamer]

Is there no way to make it continue the lines in a new empty box when you hit enter? I have seen that in other translated visual novels.

[Codesterz]

Yeesh that is an ugly font. Why not change to a font with less spacing between letters and less ugly.

[Decay]

Indeed, maybe you could go with a decent proportional font, if the engine allows it. That, with a slightly smaller font size, could solve all your woes.

[Aizen-Sama]

17 hours ago, Erogamer said:

Is there no way to make it continue the lines in a new empty box when you hit enter? I have seen that in other translated visual novels.

There is a way, but in order to do it the entire bytecode of the game should be decrypted first, and that is pretty difficult and is too much work.

15 hours ago, Codesterz said:

Yeesh that is an ugly font. Why not change to a font with less spacing between letters and less ugly.

Sadly there are no other options for font. And believe me when I say that theprevious font was even more horrible than this one. 

14 hours ago, Decay said:

Indeed, maybe you could go with a decent proportional font, if the engine allows it. That, with a slightly smaller font size, could solve all your woes.

For now this is the only decent font we've discovered that the engine allows, but if we find another one that offers better possibilities we will definitely look into it.

[VirginSmasher]

24pt font is the perfect sizing, at least to me.

[twdarkeh]

24pt looks great, and even 21pt is entirely readable.

[Darbury]

I tend to think most translations benefit by being edited to fit, so I voted shorter. Besides, I'm old and do most of my reading on an 8" tablet, so I'll always opt for larger type when given the choice. 

[Fred the Barber]

Brevity is the soul of wit.

[ittaku]

1 hour ago, Fred the Barber said:

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Can you elaborate?

Go with the smaller font. English is rarely as concise as Japanese and you'll never keep the nuance if you're forever trimming text. I did the same in ToHeart2 but then that was a massive font with fullscreen walls of text.

[Darklord Rooke]

1 hour ago, ittaku said:

English is rarely as concise as Japanese and you'll never keep the nuance if you're forever trimming text.

I agree with this. 

HOWEVER @Aizen-Sama, double check the lines which are too long and make sure you have eradicated needless redundancies. Also make sure you can't reduce the number of words by replacing weak words with a stronger word (e.g. 'one of my friends' -> 'a friend', or a weak verb with adverb with a stronger verb.) It's a natural thing to be incredibly inefficient in language use, so double check you aren't needlessly taking up space by adding words that serve no purpose.

You could also shift some text to the next screen in certain circumstances, with a little rearranging. You might not be comfortable with that, though.

Actually, could you paste a couple of those long sentences here. I'm curious  

[Aizen-Sama]

2 hours ago, Rooke said:

I agree with this. 

HOWEVER @Aizen-Sama, double check the lines which are too long and make sure you have eradicated needless redundancies. Also make sure you can't reduce the number of words by replacing weak words with a stronger word (e.g. 'one of my friends' -> 'a friend', or a weak verb with adverb with a stronger verb.) It's a natural thing to be incredibly inefficient in language use, so double check you aren't needlessly taking up space by adding words that serve no purpose.

You could also shift some text to the next screen in certain circumstances, with a little rearranging. You might not be comfortable with that, though.

Actually, could you paste a couple of those long sentences here. I'm curious  

What @Rooke said is totally on point. Double checking those long sentences in order to get rid of needless redundancies and  elements like "..." is a way to solve some of these problems. Like the image below, which as you can all see, just by eliminating the extra "..." located in the text that phrase could be saved without having to do anything else.

Same thing could be applied in this one, eliminating the parenthesis phrase "(mostly boys, of course)" could be done, since it could be taken as something obvious for the player to know and needless to put in the phrase in this case, although I consider it risky.

However, there are some cases where the problem gets harder to solve. This phrases of course can be re-done in order to fit the text box, but since they contain a lot of information rephrasing them could be a risky bet for me, since I could potentially harm the translation, which could harm the player's experience and the overall consistency and meaning of the text. 

By the way, we managed to achieve widening the text box, this means that more text can fill the box, and this problem could be probably solved. 

Since I'll be posting the weekly update on my blog today at some point and I'll give a full explanation there if you want. Anyways, hope I enlightened you a little bit with this short explanation and have a nice day. 

[Decay]

25 minutes ago, Aizen-Sama said:

Same thing could be applied in this one, eliminating the parenthesis phrase "(mostly boys, of course)" could be eliminated, since it could be taken as something obvious for the player to know and needless to put in the phrase in this case, although I consider it risky.

Well, you could do a number of things with this line. I'm guessing the cut-off word there is "help"? So, the part that is actually unnecessary in this sentence is not the parenthetical phrase (at least, not the first half of it). It's the "for her help" bit, since that is very easily assumed from the context. "She's very self-assured and is significantly popular with boys and girls alike (mostly boys) thanks to her kindly giving advice to anyone who asks."  If I'm counting characters correctly, that would fit while improving the natural feel of the sentence. The "mostly boys" bit is a key part of the line's humor (such as it is), I feel, so removing it would definitely be wrong. 

Anyway, figuring out where the fluff lies is definitely an art, and not one I'd expect someone who doesn't have a native-level mastery of the english language to be proficient at. If you ask rooke, he'll give a fifteen paragraph explanation and a much better line than what I gave.

[Fred the Barber]

Here's what I would do with these particular ones. Note that I don't claim to be an authority; rather, these are just my thoughts on how to make the lines read better, which also coincidentally make them shorter. And please don't take this as me being negative about the translation or the editing - this is simply my opinion on what I would do if I were editing.

19 hours ago, Aizen-Sama said:

Simple things: In addition to, as you noted, dropping an extra ellipsis, drop "looking at it", and probably drop "very".

If you're feeling more adventurous: "And... with the clock tower looking so beautiful and mysterious from a distance, I'd hate to have that impression ruined by" whatever comes next.

 

19 hours ago, Aizen-Sama said:

Simple things: Cut "very" and "significantly", leave the parenthetical intact. In this sentence, those adverbs aren't buying you anything you don't already get for free from the adjectives they're modifying. 

Decay's suggestions are great, too; I wouldn't have thought to do them, apparently, but I do think they make the sentence scan better.

19 hours ago, Aizen-Sama said:

Simple things: "architectural professionals" => "architects", drop "in order", and, it goes without saying, fix the run-on sentence...

19 hours ago, Aizen-Sama said:

I think the previous lines only improve from my suggestions, but this one's a little harder to improve while simply cutting text, for me at least.

Anyway, simple things: drop "just", consider changing "negative" to "bad", maybe swap "let me down" for "disappoint me" (which is actually slightly longer... but sounds better to me).

More adventurous: Depending on the larger context, maybe you can shift the tense of "I haven't been thrilled" out of present perfect and reclaim a few characters, but it kind of feels like the right tense here, even if it is an unfortunately verbose one...

Most adventurous, but most likely to work out: Rewrite the whole second sentence's simile into something both shorter and more glib. The precise details of the original simile are almost certainly irrelevant to literally everything else in the script, though of course you'd want to confirm that... it's possible that ten or a thousand lines later there's some reference back to that negatively-reviewed tourist spot, but that's extremely unlikely. I've rewritten a handful of little throwaway lines like this in my small time editing, and maybe one of that handful has come back to bite me later (in the form of having to go back and rewrite it once again, closer to the original...).

Edit:

22 hours ago, ittaku said:

Can you elaborate?

My translator and senpai, to expostulate
What editing should be, what grammar is,
What day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time;
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit;
And language its merest limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble VN is rad.

Edited May 29, 2016 by Fred the Barber
typo when I repeated the quotation - brilliant!

[Darklord Rooke]

5 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

but this one's a little harder to improve while simply cutting text, for me at least.

Anyway, simple things: drop "just", consider changing "negative" to "bad", maybe swap "let me down" for "disappoint me" (which is actually slightly longer... but sounds better to me).

More adventurous: Depending on the larger context, maybe you can shift the tense of "I haven't been thrilled" out of present perfect and reclaim a few characters, but it kind of feels like the right tense here, even if it is an unfortunately verbose one...

Most adventurous, but most likely to work out: Rewrite the whole second sentence's simile into something both shorter and more glib. The precise details of the original simile are almost certainly irrelevant to literally everything else in the script, though of course you'd want to confirm that... it's possible that ten or a thousand lines later there's some reference back to that negatively-reviewed tourist spot, but that's extremely unlikely. I've rewritten a handful of little throwaway lines like this in my small time editing, and maybe one of that handful has come back to bite me later (in the form of having to go back and rewrite it once again, closer to the original...).

It becomes a little easier once you realise (only if you watch the video) that the comments he's talking about directly precede that screenshot. Therefore, if you move his reaction to her comments to directly after her comments (that is, to the beginning of the sentence,) he no longer has to specify that his reaction is to her comments (what else could it be? If it's anything else, it would likely need to be specified.) It becomes implied. So instead of 'her comments let me down a little bit' -> 'My spirits fall a little', 'I'm a little dispirited/deflated' etc. You could put 'I feel a little deflated', but the 'feel' isn't really necessary in first person. Could use dispirited instead of deflated, but deflated is more juvenile and means the same thing (the losing of enthusiasm.)

"I'm a little deflated. I haven't been thrilled about the outing, but it's like hearing bad reviews" etc etc

EDIT: You could still use 'down' or 'disappointed' if you want.

"I'm a little down/disappointed. I haven't been thrilled about the outing, but it's like hearing bad reviews" etc etc

[Chuee]

Hmm, yeah I'd always go with more space. Japanese has the benefit of being a pretty concise language. No spaces, subjects are implied a lot of times, and words rarely go beyond 4 kanji in length. English just naturally takes up more space, so it's nice to be able to write lines without worrying about going over a limit. Concision is good, but there are also plenty of times when you want a line to be extremely detailed. 

[Darbury]

Some more quick opinions on how these samples might get edited down. (Guessing at the missing portions, of course.)

ORIGINAL
And... ... since the clock tower looks very misterious and beautiful looking at it from a distance, I wouldn't like to get disappointed by ruining m(y impression of it?)

EDIT
And seen from a distance, the clock tower is mysterious, beautiful. I'd hate to ruin that impression.

Much of the meaning is already implicit in the bones of the sentence. Paring down is fairly painless. 

ORIGINAL
She's very self-assured and significantly popular with boys and girls (mostly boys, of course) because she kindly gives you advice if you ask for her (help?)

EDIT
She's confident and always has a kind word of advice when asked. As a result, she's quite popular — mostly with the boys, of course.

This just needs a little shortening to fit. Plus, reordering cleans up the ambiguous cause/effect relationship — i.e., she's not self-assured because she gives advice.
 

ORIGINAL
Their first family head was obsessed with education, he even hired architectural professionals in order to reproduce an ancient greek building on this (plot of land?)

EDIT
Their first family head was obsessed with education. He even hired architects to recreate an ancient Greek building on the grounds.

This one just needed superfluous words cut, as others have pointed out.

ORIGINAL
I haven't been thrilled about the visit, but her comments let me down a little bit. It's just like hearing negative reviews about a tourist spot that (is supposed to be great?)

EDIT
I was already down about the visit, and her comments aren't helping. It's like hearing bad reviews of a supposedly great tourist spot.

I think Rooke's got the right of this one re: context, but I took a stab at keeping "comments" anyway. "But" is also an odd conjunction here, since her words amplify matters rather than contradict them.

[Aizen-Sama]

Yeah, you can see from miles away that you people are by far more experienced than I am regarding this position. I'll do my best and will try to not dissapoint you by bringing a poor quality edit.

By the way, I'm taking notes, reading these comments really opened my eyes in many ways. I've still got a lot to learn, that's for sure. 

Thank you guys.