Otakon speculation and discussion thread

[RikiSanic]

4 minutes ago, Basileus777 said:

That example doesn't really illustrate your point as all of those MG titles other than Kuroinu are fully translated and near release while those SP titles are in early stages and probably a year+ away from coming out.  Clannad is pretty much the only example of a major SP title that was translated internally that wasn't beset with delays.

That just means MangaGamer is better at announcing titles they've already begun translation work on. My main point was that publishers will add titles even if they have a backlog. As long as the new wave of titles is in a different stage of development, then that shouldn't affect too much what's being worked on currently (theoretically). Two of the big titles Sekai Project announced this year are using finished fan translations, so I still feel like their backlog is manageable and not out of control—not yet, at least.

One other title that was released timely from Sekai Project is KARAKARA. They estimated the release date back in February when the Indiegogo campaign launched and they managed to hit their date exactly. Pretty impressive for Sekai Project.

[Basileus777]

4 minutes ago, Chuee said:

Most of their translations are outsourced anyways. Not to mention translation is always done by individuals, not the organization as a whole. If a translation is going at a slow rate then that's because the people working on it don't translate as fast as others you're comparing them to. 

By internal I meant not using an already done fan translation, obviously everyone uses contracted workers. But it's a management issue if you are consistently unable to find translators that can work at a decent rate (or at a high quality considering some of the work SP has published). The WEE debacle and how they went through like 4 translators is a pretty glaring example of this.

[Chuee]

17 minutes ago, Basileus777 said:

By internal I meant not using an already done fan translation, obviously everyone uses contracted workers. But it's a management issue if you are consistently unable to find translators that can work at a decent rate (or at a high quality considering some of the work SP has published). The WEE debacle and how they went through like 4 translators is a pretty glaring example of this.

So you just want them to fire all the translators that don't work as fast as you want them to? Maybe you should manage the company then. I'm sure they'd be able to get work out at a much faster rate with 2-3 translators. The problem with some of the translations has to do with the fact that they started late. Wagahigh probably got off to a late start because, you know, the game didn't even release in Japan until this year. They probably waited until then or shortly before to begin translating it. Chrono Clock apparently they spent an assload of time sorting out engine problems (not that I would've waited on translation because of that, but it is what it is) and Tenshin Ranman had one of the planned translators quit abruptly (which is naturally going to set it off pace). Mangagamer and JAST have had plenty of translations run at a slow rate. Let's not forget that it took 3 years to translate all of Da Capo III, yet nobody's hounding them over their decision to not assign another translator to it. 

The WEE thing was an issue stemming from the fact that the existing translation for the first part wasn't done by them, and the translator that worked on for Mangagamer was fired by them for being mediocre. I have no idea what happened to it after that, except for the one translator they assigned to it but later replaced. To my knowledge that's the only time something like that's happened so there's no need to crucify them over it.

[Decay]

The only in-progress translation from SP I'm really confused about is Ley Line. But then again, I never fully understood what was holding it up when it was a fan project, either. I think what's most telling of SP's situation is Wagamama High Spec. They announced it long before the game's release, said they wanted to release it this spring and even entertained the possibility of a simultaneous release. Then after some delays they finally started listing progress a month ago, and it was at like 23% translation. It basically seems like Sekai Project has a manpower issue, they seem to have had some staff turnover issues that have kept some projects from progressing and generally don't have as many translators as they thought they would for handling everything in their pipeline.

SP actually have been announcing fewer big translations lately, though. At least, ones they'd have to handle from scratch. They announced SakuSaku and Baldr Sky at AX, both of which were adopted fan translations. Koikuma will be the big "everything must be done from scratch" project from AX. And nothing of particular note was announced at Otakon. As some of their smaller titles are releasing they're shifting staff onto bigger projects and are still finding new talent from outside the VN industry, which is a talent pool other companies haven't been able to tap into . The person they hired just a few weeks ago for Tenshin Ranman will have that as their first VN translation, for instance. 

So basically, things actually are progressing there now, and I think they're done announcing a large number of huge projects for the time being. It's interesting that the topic of SP announcing too much stuff for them to handle happened right after the con where they basically announced nothing.

[Chuee]

9 minutes ago, Decay said:

The person they hired just a few weeks ago for Tenshin Ranman will have that as their first VN translation, for instance. 

Just for clarification, that person worked on 2236 AD. When they finished working on that they got put on Tenshin Ranman (probably because they want the game out faster). 

[RikiSanic]

Hm, I had no idea that the Tenshin Ranman translator needed to be replaced; no wonder it didn't get much progress for a long time now.

I will say that the KARAKARA translation was pretty damn solid from what I can tell. Definitely one of Sekai Project's best releases, translation-wise. Hopefully that trend continues.

[Fred the Barber]

4 hours ago, RikiSanic said:

Hm, I had no idea that the Tenshin Ranman translator needed to be replaced; no wonder it didn't get much progress for a long time now.

I will say that the KARAKARA translation was pretty damn solid from what I can tell. Definitely one of Sekai Project's best releases, translation-wise. Hopefully that trend continues.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the Karakara translation. But Chuee's point is relevant there, as well - like all the translation companies, SP isn't a monolith. Even after one high-quality release, you can't really expect high-quality releases to become the new norm, unfortunately. You do have me wanting to find out who did that translation and what they're doing now, if anything, though...

[RikiSanic]

11 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

I also thoroughly enjoyed the Karakara translation. But Chuee's point is relevant there, as well - like all the translation companies, SP isn't a monolith. Even after one high-quality release, you can't really expect high-quality releases to become the new norm, unfortunately. You do have me wanting to find out who did that translation and what they're doing now, if anything, though...

True. The hope is that if a translator does a good job Sekai will hire them again, and eventually, after working with a number of good and reliable translators, they'll finally have a "team" of quality translators, similar to the way MangaGamer operates now. All it requires is someone at Sekai Project who can spot the good from the bad. I don't know whose responsibility that is but I hope they're keeping a lookout.

For starters, though, they should definitely hire KARAKARA's translator again, if they're open.

[sanahtlig]

32 minutes ago, RikiSanic said:

For starters, though, they should definitely hire KARAKARA's translator again, if they're open.

Isn't the translator in the credits?

[RikiSanic]

9 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

Isn't the translator in the credits?

Just checked and it didn't mention any localization staff. :\

[VLOCKUP]

16 hours ago, Chuee said:

Let's not forget that it took 3 years to translate all of Da Capo III, yet nobody's hounding them over their decision to not assign another translator to it. 

As for someone who did followed Mangagamer blog or tweets(and the forums before it got bombed and still haven't recovered T_T), Da Capo III is a huge game. The prologue itself is big, The common route is also big. Overall DC3 is pretty much comparable to more or less Koihime Musou length which was the longest VN MG had worked on at the time. IIRC, perhaps Koryuu has compared words length of DC3 to LOTR novel length.

As for 3 years, Koryuu is the only assigned translator on it and it's mainly because for keeping the translation quality consistent as opposed to 2-3 translators on the project.

The point is: DC3 was never expected to be released within small timeframe after its announcement. And people who may want something similar to Da Capo has Princess Evangile for their fix. But most important of all, MG Project Status is steadily updated so people knew of its progress.

16 hours ago, Decay said:

So basically, things actually are progressing there now, and I think they're done announcing a large number of huge projects for the time being. It's interesting that the topic of SP announcing too much stuff for them to handle happened right after the con where they basically announced nothing.

Well, aside from cons, SP did announce titles outside of them after all, and people may be including what accumulating to "announcing too much" backlog.

[wyldstrykr]

2 hours ago, VLOCKUP said:

As for 3 years, Koryuu is the only assigned translator on it which is Koryuu and it's mainly because for keeping the translation quality consistent as opposed to 2-3 translators on the project.

what about aaeru? how long did she translate DC III on ~44%

and yes, i just assume her gender

[Decay]

DC3 definitely progressed slower than a VN of its size normally does even with one translator. MG has had similarly sized projects that have progressed much faster, such as Princess Evangile, which was announced and released within the duration DC3 was in translation for. And even that was delayed for like six months during the beta testing process. Kouryuu often has other duties at MangaGamer as their head translator, though, which probably accounts for DC3's delays. I don't think anyone would dispute this, Kouryuu himself was saying how they were aiming for a 2014 release back when they announced it. They really were expecting it to finish and release it a good two years ago. Shit happens, though.

3 hours ago, wyldstrykr said:

what about aaeru? how long did she translate DC III on ~44%

and yes, i just assume her gender

Aaeru was basically machine translating it. You shouldn't use her speed as a judge of anything.

5 hours ago, VLOCKUP said:

As for someone who did followed Mangagamer blog or tweets(and the forums before it got bombed and still haven't recovered T_T), Da Capo III is a huge game. The prologue itself is big, The common route is also big. Overall DC3 is pretty much comparable to more or less Koihime Musou length which was the longest VN MG had worked on at the time. IIRC, perhaps Koryuu has compared words length of DC3 to LOTR novel length.

As for 3 years, Koryuu is the only assigned translator on it which is Koryuu and it's mainly because for keeping the translation quality consistent as opposed to 2-3 translators on the project.

The point is: DC3 was never expected to be released within small timeframe after its announcement. And people who may want something similar to Da Capo has Princess Evangile for their fix. But most important of all, MG Project Status is steadily updated so people knew of its progress.

Well, aside from cons, SP did announce titles outside of them after all, and people may be including what accumulating to "announcing too much" backlog.

I don't fully trust that DC3 is as long as MangaGamer would lead us to believe. From what I can tell, it's about on par with Princess Evangile and many of the other long-ish moege getting translated out there. It's not some incredible epic of unprecedented length. And if MangaGamer's forums were still up you could see posts in 2013 from Kouryuu stating they were aiming for a spring/summer 2014 release. Again though, I don't really blame MangaGamer and I'm not harping on them for this.

As for SP, they haven't really been announcing any Japanese VN translations outside of cons for the last few months to my knowledge.

[WinterfuryZX]

DCIII is listed as a 30-50 hrs game on vndb. It shouldn't be that long.

[ChaosRaven]

Apparently it has more than 4 MB of text so it should be the longest VN they've ever translated, since Koihime and Evangile just had about 3 MB. (Not sure about Umineko though...)

VNDB length infos are pretty unreliable since everything >= 2 MB seems to get the long description.

Tokyo Babel has about 2 MB of text and is listed as long. But Shin Koihime Musou too with almost 6 MB (!!!) of text.

So yeah, VNDB length infos suck pretty hard.

[Conjueror]

I think I saw it mentioned that Da Capo 3 has about two million characters, which is about twice the length of an average VN (TB and Himawari have around one million). That would take 1-1.5 years for me if I was working on my own.

If you combine all episodes of Umineko, I think you end up with around 3-4 million so that one is way more insane.

[VLOCKUP]

3 hours ago, Decay said:

DC3 definitely progressed slower than a VN of its size normally does even with one translator. MG has had similarly sized projects that have progressed much faster, such as Princess Evangile, which was announced and released within the duration DC3 was in translation for. And even that was delayed for like six months during the beta testing process. Kouryuu often has other duties at MangaGamer as their head translator, though, which probably accounts for DC3's delays. I don't think anyone would dispute this, Kouryuu himself was saying how they were aiming for a 2014 release back when they announced it. They really were expecting it to finish and release it a good two years ago. Shit happens, though.

Aaeru was basically machine translating it. You shouldn't use her speed as a judge of anything.

I don't fully trust that DC3 is as long as MangaGamer would lead us to believe. From what I can tell, it's about on par with Princess Evangile and many of the other long-ish moege getting translated out there. It's not some incredible epic of unprecedented length. And if MangaGamer's forums were still up you could see posts in 2013 from Kouryuu stating they were aiming for a spring/summer 2014 release. Again though, I don't really blame MangaGamer and I'm not harping on them for this.

As for SP, they haven't really been announcing any Japanese VN translations outside of cons for the last few months to my knowledge.

I know Kouryuu has other duties aside from translating VNs and what you said so it is not out of bounds that he finished later than expected.

As for SP, true. But then again, it feels that their priority is sometimes juggle between doujin, OEL and All Ages VNs. I mean, so far they have mostly released those. Aside from being Sakura and Neko Publisher.

Also, out of topic but relevant, Sekai Project announced two titles at AnimeFest.