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ChronoClock Translation Re-Editing


LightningRod

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Before anything else, an exposition of motives for doing this:

Recently, SekaiProject released a translation for Chrono Clock.

While some people would consider this translation to have been handled relatively well, I would have to disagree with this.

Firstly, I mean absolutely no offense to the translator, the translation itself reads well and I'm sure it would have been difficult to localize the puns and jokes to make sense in English, i just disagree on the way it was handled.

1. The amount of slang in the script its so high, most of the time you would be on google searching for definitions instead of playing the game itself. Plus there where a lot of questionable decisions in regards of translating the meaning of some phrases. What does "guernsey" even mean? or "barmy"? Pack it up, "buster"; I sense this "sandman" is "taking the mickey" with us.  -"Roger, wilco".

2. Misaki addressing MC with "buster": Buster means criminal as in what a mother would call her misbehaving kid; The logic behind this decision is that Misaki addresses the MC with such reproach as if she were talking to a thug, mostly because she thinks he is one, but also because she's the classical Tsundere. Misaki's mannerism of speech could have been better handled by empathizing this; using more a more "rude" vocabulary rather than using words that people haven't heard in decades. Now, have any of you ever heard "buster" recently used in normal conversation? I sure haven't until a few days ago when the game dropped, but whatever to you, busters.

3. D.D.: Regarding her very character, she can actually speak Japanese fluently, she's just trying to imitate Kongou from Kancolle; It was even explained and referenced in the common route; hence her weird manner of speaking, which uses broken English in Japanese speech. How do you translate this? Not by using broken romanized Japanese in English text, contrary to what one would believe; this just makes it a chore to read. Your average Japanese will understand simple English words with relative ease, on the contrary, your average English-speaking individual will not understand Japanese at all; even the casual Anime watcher/Manga or VN reader has problems to pick up romanized words. Why is this? Because English is Lingua Franca; in Japan alone it is taught from primary school all the way up to University. How else they would have handled this weird manner of speaking then? Using Bold, Italics, or even [brackets] to denote the use of an English word would have been better than the current method of throwing romaji at people. "Douzo, lad" has become quite the meme to reference this game.

4. Some lines makes me believe this was rushed without proper beta testing just to avoid delaying the release date. Particularly, I believe the H-scenes weren't QC'd at all, and that there is a lot of switching between past and present tense in dialogue which makes it even harder to read.

For these motives, and because SP hasn't said a word regarding doing a patch to fix these issues, I've taken it upon myself to fix them. EDIT: apparently SP does plan to fix some of these issues; mainly the problem with the H-scenes, but not with the dialogue, so I will still fix this.

What I intend to do: Edit the script of the game to a more universal English while re-translating some parts that were translated way too liberally, the pack it in a patch that can be applied over the +18 version of the game.

The help I need: a Programmer, or packing tools.

I've already unpacked the script files and made some changes as a test of sorts; but now i can't seem to find a way to repack it, as I don't have the tools needed to do it.  The formats used for packing the script are purple-software/ps2 for the script files (.ps3) and purple-software/cpz6 for the container itself (.cpz).

I found  the unpacker source code at this direction, so all that is needed is to reverse engine it to make a repacker. The main problem is that i have close to zero knowledge of programming.

Notice that I don't advocate piracy: For all it's faults, I still recommend to buy the game from Nutaku here. It was SP effort that this game was translated at all.

If you want to help with this project, post in the thread or message me directly. Any help would be really appreciated.

Edited by LightningRod
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14 minutes ago, LightningRod said:

2. Misaki addressing MC with "buster": Buster means criminal as in what a mother would call her misbehaving kid; The logic behind this decision is that Misaki addresses the MC with such reproach as if she were talking to a thug, mostly because she thinks he is one, but also because she's the classical Tsundere. Misaki's mannerism of speech could have been better handled by empathizing this; using more a more "rude" vocabulary rather than using words that people haven't heard in decades. Now, have any of you ever heard "buster" recently used in normal conversation? I sure haven't until a few days ago when the game dropped, but whatever to you, busters.

Buster isn't common at all, but it's still used in many more contexts than the ones you've described. It's a humorous term that's a little derisive, but typically in a jokey way, no one ever uses it seriously. That Misaki uses it seriously is actually kind of appropriate and funny, considering how awkward she is.

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I should point out that 'guernsey', 'sandman, and 'roger, wilco' are all normal pieces of language. 'Barmy' is slang, but actually very, very common British slang. 'Taking the Mickey' is something you have to be a Brit or an Aussie to understand :3 'Buster' is a bit old fashioned, it was commonly used in the 90s but I think the definition has morphed since then? Anyway, like @Decay said, it has more meanings than what you think. Check out the lyrics of TLC's hit No Scrubs (1999) for example

A scrub is a guy that think he's fine and is
Also known as a buster (buster, buster)
Always talkin' about what he wants
And just sits on his broke ass

 

 

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Buster is very commonly used in modern english in "busta" form. Unironically using "buster" instead is a really awkward-white-guy-trying-too-hard-to-look-tough thing to do. Which is actually pretty appropriate for Misaki and why I found it to be a genuinely amusing bit of localization.

Anyway, though none of the things the OP mentioned besides the lack of QC in the h-scenes are actual issues that SP needs to address, let alone fix, they did post an update to their kickstarter detailing an update plan: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sekaiproject/chronoclock-limited-edition-box-set-and-exclusive/posts/1828698

As they said prior to launch, they will patch in the rest of the editing as it finishes. Hopefully the update coming Monday fixes the blatant issues in the h-scenes.

Edited by Decay
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Hmmm, whilst I understand your POV regarding re-editing Chrono Clock; I'd have to say I find it pretty pointless IMO. Not trying to rain on your parade, but personally I thought the translation was handled surprisingly well. At first like you I didn't appreciate the translator's choice to change DD's usage of english in japanese sentences to japanese in english sentences, as I felt it disrupted the flow as a reader. But as people have pointed out that was a personality quirk of the character and on reflection it makes sense to invert the translations, as this retains the feel of a character who is mixing languages somewhat haphazardly.

I can think of at least half a dozen translations off the top of my head that could've used more editing, but Chrono Cross ain't one IMO.

  • Edelweiss (Mangagamer) - admittedly they later came and re-translated/edited this, but most had already played it.
  • Kono Oozora ni, Tsubasa o Hirogete (Moenovel) - Ageha's route made little sense and over-censoring butchered parts of the game. Thankfully the restoration group are putting forward a great effort to fix Moenovel's translation.
  • ChuShingura46+1 - Again over-censorship, I mean removing nudity I understand (for steam), but surely people can deal with innuendo.
  • Draco-riot! - A bit rough around the edges. Getting some editing and polishing by Fuwanovel's Decay and co.
  • Gin'iro - Very sad, apparently an interesting story, but unplayable IMO with the in-house translation provided by NekoNeko Soft.
  • Flyable Heart - Editing would not be enough to help this effort by Retransinternational. Sad mostly because it stopped others from thinking of picking up this game for translation, a good example of nothing being better than anything at all and the pitfalls of machine translation.

For me the issue with Chrono Clock is more of a translator's stylisation choice than a lack of editing, that said there is definitely some people who would appreciate your efforts, judging by the chatter and reviews. Regardless, I wish you luck with your endeavor.

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I have to agree with Kiriririri on that.

It would not be good idea to retranslate Chrono Clock, you would only ruin the game.

I'm sure Sekrai are going to make fix patch for Chrono Clock before or later.

the only reason why they have not make fix patch for Chrono Clock it's because nobody have reguest for it.

but I'm not going to stop you.

You are very welcome to retranslate Chrono Clock and ruin the VN.

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5 hours ago, Darklord Rooke said:

I should point out that 'guernsey', 'sandman, and 'roger, wilco' are all normal pieces of language.

What does guernsey mean here then? Because as a Brit, Guernsey is an island south of the UK, right next to Jersey. I've never heard it used to mean anything else.

Edited by Kelebek1
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30 minutes ago, Kelebek1 said:

What does guernsey mean here then? Because as a Brit, Guernsey is an island south of the UK, right next to Jersey. I've never heard it used to mean anything else.

Why would you even ask such a thing in the age of the internet, an age where it takes 2 seconds for me to look it up and fake knowledge? xD

I'm going to assume guernsey wasn't used in Chrono Clock to reference the animal, in which case take a quick look here:

http://guernseydonkey.com/?p=2327 

EDIT: In Australia we use it to refer to our footy code's jerseys, and that will forever remain the superior meaning of guernsey the world over.

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Good luck with the project I guess, although it's probably quite redundant though. As for my opinion I'd quite fine with this translation although maybe it could be help though in regard of DD. As for no QC-ed H Scenes, I already survived Flyable Heart so this should be fine although I won't deny that the symbol was distracting though.

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10 hours ago, LightningRod said:

While some people would consider this translation to have been handled relatively well

I'd actually love to know them :makina:

ChronoClock was released only partially edited, propably why. Purple Software rushed the editing and demanded a timely release on SP's behalf. In other words, we got an unfinished translation released and being paid for, because japanese suits got impatient SP was taking their sweet time to polish the translation and that one wasn't the easiest. Hence the results we got. If there's anyone to blame, you can blame Purple Software, as they also refused to help SP with translation and literally made things harder by not releasing, nor sharing the game code, nor engine with SP, either.

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2 hours ago, Fiddle said:

Can confirm. "Busta" appears in almost all of Mitt Romney's rap albums.

mhh am I just too young for this shiit or is it normal that I don't know of it.... 

Edited by Asonn
engrish is hard okay
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12 hours ago, Decay said:

Buster isn't common at all, but it's still used in many more contexts than the ones you've described. It's a humorous term that's a little derisive, but typically in a jokey way, no one ever uses it seriously. That Misaki uses it seriously is actually kind of appropriate and funny, considering how awkward she is.

+1, this is pretty much impeccable usage of the word "buster". On a personal note, I've actually already used the word once in the Majo Koi Nikki edit, from the mouth of a similar character, in a situation where she was upset with the main character. So, yeah, it didn't seem even remotely out of place to me when I read it in Chrono Clock. I also think you're wrong about the D. D. decision. Your suggestion would lose a great deal of the flavor of the character, and I frankly think the line "Douzo, lad" is freaking hilarious.

By all means, do complain about the lack of edit on the release - there are actual problems, like the proofing errors you found (or constant maddening flipping back and forth between past and present tense, which makes me want to cry), and they're working on fixing the ones you pointed out (but probably not the tense issues, whyyyyyyy). And I think it's also fair to question the heavy use of British English, which you're implicitly doing in point 1, when describing all the shit you don't understand (which, sorry, is mostly your failing, not the game's). Using British English is honestly not a normal thing in English-localized releases that end up in America; this was clearly a conscious decision, but that doesn't make it a good one, and IMO it's one I'd like to see them not make again (because, as an American, I have a pretty biased opinion about which English I'd rather read, and there are more of us, so there :D).

That said, I agree with the general sense I get from this thread: I'll be satisfied by them fixing most of the typos and editing the unedited scenes, and there are much bigger fish to fry in the world of VN editing than the problems you're pointing out, even considering only already-officially-released VNs. Also, you didn't even point out the constant, maddening tense errors, whyyyyyyy.

Edited by Fred the Barber
grammar
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Thank you for your honest opinions, everyone. Even if you guys think I'll be ruining the VN, what SP did was arguably worse. I'm still willing to make a patch.

13 hours ago, Huang Ling Yin said:

you cant use unpacker to make repacker...

You actually can if you follow the code, according to a programmer i poked but didn't want to, saying that the source code was a huge mess.

38 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

Also, you didn't even point out the constant, maddening tense errors, whyyyyyyy.

I though i already covered it with point 4. but i guess clarifying further doesn't hurt.

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1 hour ago, LightningRod said:

Thank you for your honest opinions, everyone. Even if you guys think I'll be ruining the VN, what SP did was arguably worse. I'm still willing to make a patch.

You're wasting all of your time for literally only a handful of people that will actually use this, and the actual game experience won't even be changed. 

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New person here and I can hardly believe what I am reading. You are all out of your minds. Shouldn't people be encouraging OP? The CC translation job is an absolute mess and someone is actually willing to go out of their way to improve it. Then you're all saying not to do it & that noone will appreciate it? WTF?

 

What's the deal here?

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25 minutes ago, Being said:

New person here and I can hardly believe what I am reading. You are all out of your minds. Shouldn't people be encouraging OP? The CC translation job is an absolute mess and someone is actually willing to go out of their way to improve it. Then you're all saying not to do it & that noone will appreciate it? WTF?

 

What's the deal here?

Okay, there's an assumption implicit in your statement which is that LightningRod is qualified to improve the script, and that's a big assumption to make. IMO it's not very likely that LightningRod is qualified, and his clumsy attempts to make things more understandable for those with a grade-school English vocabulary will not be desirable.

Furthermore, his idea of using bold, or italics to denote a word spoken (but not written) in a different language is ... not correct usage. Neither are these [].

TL;DR no, I don't look forward to his attempts because I doubt he's qualified to make them. 

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The CC translation is far from flawless, but none of its biggest issues are even addressed by the OP, and instead he singles out subjective localization choices he disagrees with, hinting that he'd prefer to turn it into a really dry, overly-literal experience. This reaction is because it looks like we're seeing something on the level of that god-awful attempt at "fixing" the good Gabriel Dropout CR subs.

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17 minutes ago, Darklord Rooke said:

Furthermore, his idea of using bold, or italics to denote a word spoken (but not written) in a different language is ... not correct usage. Neither are these [].

Er, yeah to elaborate further on this, mentioning that she talks like Kongou is pointless, because there is no standard way that Kongou is translated. The Japanglish is probably the most accurate choice (even if there are problems with it), for both DD and probably Kongou too (after all, Kongou is british). By using italics or whatever, you're relying on the reader to already understand what she's doing in Japanese, otherwise it just looks nonsensical. 

Also, it's worth noting that I've heard people who read it in Japanese say they were annoyed with DD's talking, so it's not like it's something the English text made up. 

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17 hours ago, LightningRod said:

Before anything else, an exposition of my motives for doing this:

Recently, SekaiProject released a translation for of Chrono Clock.

While some people would consider this translation to have been handled relatively well, I would have to disagree with this.

Firstly, I mean absolutely no offense to the translator; the translation itself reads well and I'm sure it would have been difficult to localize the puns and jokes to make sense in English.  I just disagree on the way it was handled.

1. The amount of slang in the script its is so high, most of the time you would be on google searching for definitions instead of playing the game itself. Plus there where were a lot of questionable decisions in regards of translating the meaning of some phrases. What does "guernsey" even mean? or "barmy"? Pack it up, "buster"; I sense this "sandman" is "taking the mickey" with us.  -"Roger, wilco".

2. Misaki addressing MC with "buster": Buster means criminal as in what a mother would call her misbehaving kid; The logic behind this decision is that Misaki addresses the MC with such reproach talks down to the MC as if she were talking to a thug (mostly because she thinks he is one) but also because she's the classical Tsundere. Misaki's mannerism of speech could have been better handled by empathizing  emphasizing this; using more a more "rude" vocabulary rather than using words that people haven't heard in decades. Now, have any of you ever heard "buster" recently used in normal conversation? I sure haven't until a few days ago when the game dropped, but whatever to you, busters.

3. D.D.: Regarding her very character,  She can actually speak Japanese fluently.  She's just trying to imitate Kongou from Kancolle; it was even explained and referenced in the common route; hence her weird manner of speaking, which uses broken English in Japanese speech. How do you translate this? Not by using broken romanized Japanese in English text, contrary to what one ['one' vs 'you' is inconsistent] would believe; this just makes it a chore to read. Your average Japanese will understand simple English words with relative ease; in contrast, your average English-speaking individual will not understand Japanese at all; even the casual anime watcher/manga or VN reader has problems to pick up understanding romanized words Japanese. Why is this? Because English is a Lingua Franca; in Japan alone it is taught from primary school all the way up to University. How else they would have handled this weird manner of speaking then? Using Bold, Italics, or even [brackets] to denote the use of an English word would have been better than the current method of throwing romaji at people. "Douzo, lad" has become quite the meme to reference this game.

4. Some lines makes me believe this was rushed without proper beta testing just to avoid delaying the release date. Particularly, I believe the H-scenes weren't QC'd at all, and that there is a lot of switching between past and present tense in dialogue which makes it even harder to read.

For these motives reasons, and because SP hasn't said a word regarding doing a patch to fix these issues, I've taken it upon myself to fix them. EDIT: Apparently SP does plan to fix some of these issues; mainly the problem with the H-scenes, but not with the dialogue, so I will still fix this.

What I intend to do: Edit the script of the game to a more universal English while re-translating some parts that were translated way too liberally, then pack it in a patch that can be applied over the +18 version of the game.

The help I need: a programmer, or packing tools.

I've already unpacked the script files and made some changes as a test of sorts; but now I can't seem to find a way to repack it, as I don't have the tools needed to do it.  The formats used for packing the script are purple-software/ps2 for the script files (.ps3) and purple-software/cpz6 for the container itself (.cpz).

I found  the unpacker source code at this direction link, so all that is needed is to reverse engine it to make a repacker. The main problem is that I have close to zero knowledge of programming.

Notice that I don't advocate piracy: For all it's its faults, I still recommend to buy buying the game from Nutaku here. It was due to SP's effort that this game was translated at all.

If you want to help with this project, post in the thread or message me directly. Any help would be really appreciated.

What was it they say about glass houses and throwing stones?

Now, I want you to understand I'm not doing this to be mean.  (How did you say it?  I mean absolutely no offense.)  I want to make sure you understand what you're getting into.  Before embarking on a course of action that will take you at least eighteen months, you should seriously consider this: Either you didn't proofread your original post, or you didn't notice anything wrong with it.

The problem is, when you make a post like this, you are asking strangers to help you.  For free.  This is a big ask, and the people who you're asking are going to judge you as if this were a job application.  Because - basically - it is.

So aside from the fact that I fundamentally disagree with, well, all of your complaints aside from the lack of QC (which Sekai has admitted and already plans to fix literally in a few days), I have to question the viability of your project solely on the basis that you are unlikely to attract the help you need.

Edited by Nandemonai
correct formatting issue
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The only people qualified enough to fix the translation are the exact same people who made it in the first place.

TL&DR They will do it, just give them time. No one is happy with the way things currently are and it's obvious the editing got rushed out of reasons SP had no impact on.

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