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The Broadcast Club VN Podcast Episode 4 - TL Quality ft. Gundam_Ace/John Hooper


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We're pretty excited about this one as our guest is one of the Dies Irae translators, Mr. John Hooper  (GundamAce) of Lemnisca (http://www.lemnisca.com/),  who was gracious enough to take time out of his schedule to talk with us.

http://thebroadcast.club/2017/05/15/episode-4-translation-quality/

Be sure to follow our twitter if you like what we do!

https://twitter.com/VNBroadcastClub

G_Ace/J_hopper can be found here:

https://twitter.com/jhooper_g_ace

General feedback or discussion about the episode is always welcome. Hope you enjoy!

Edited April 15 by NowItsAngeTime
 
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Nice! This was an interesting listen. A little bit of random commentary from me:

I have to admit I kind of roll my eyes whenever I hear people griping about Chrono Clock's localization, since it's honestly one of the better VN translations that's come out in the last year by my lights (I dunno, 80th percentile? 90th percentile?). I get that DD's Japanese interjections are controversial, and I admit I find them annoying as hell too, but I have yet to hear anybody offer any suggestion which I actually believed was a better alternative to capture her bizarre speech. One thing worth mentioning that I've heard is about the way DD is perceived by Japanese readers: apparently her constant English interjections in the original actually come off as incredibly annoying. So, if you find her annoying in translation, perhaps you could say the translator actually nailed her character.

I personally find Chrono Clock's frequent British slang even more off-putting, but that decision is even more clearly just a judgement call (if a bad one, IMO, purely from a perspective of sales). The bigger issues with the translation are the horrifying mixture of past and present tense (which I have yet to see a single other person complain about, but which seriously sets my teeth on edge), and the periodic awkward phrasing and mistakes which mostly lurked in some of the clearly unedited routes I played in the initial release. There are still a fair number of proofing errors in the script of the version I'm playing (which I think is the current 18+ release?). It's a shame they rushed the release to meet a deadline, instead of taking the extra month of polish the game could have used.

I also don't know how much access to writers people usually get when officially localizing a VN. My understanding, at least, is that that's the exception, not the rule. I'd love it if that became the norm, but I'm pretty sure the typical story today is that license holders and localization companies talk, and then the localization companies then typically hand off scripts to contractor translation teams who basically work on their own. The original developers and writers (i.e., typically not the Japanese license holders) usually don't get pulled in at all (after all, the writers themselves are often contractors as well, and they've long since finished what they contracted for). So, while that's a nice vision of the world, I doubt it happens all that often. But I do dearly hope things move more in that direction, and it does make me happy to hear it happens at least some of the time (this is, honestly, the first such anecdote I've heard).

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