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Let's translate one of the best looking VNs of all time.


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Since herkz dropped Mahoutsukai no Yoru for translation. People forgot about it. Which sucks because this game is worth the translation. So, I have a weird idea. We can crowd source the translation. Like we could put it on GitHub or something and translate what’s left of it. If you don't like this idea, how about we see how Mirror Moon is doing since I think they did a fantastic job with Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime. Or we could ask one of the bigger publishers like manga gamer to pick up the license. It will just be damn shame that this game remains inaccessible because of language barriers. I don't know how to translate, but I do know how to code and get shit done.

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So what's going to happen if, in a very optimistic scenario, both this and izzeybee's translation actually reach completion status? Will the two be compared mercilessly until it is decided that one of them is the better translation, leaving all the effort put into the worse translation go to waste? To be fair, I doubt we would even reach this scenario, but I think the possibility is there. On one hand, it might be good to have multiple translation projects just to have higher chances for one of them to reach completion. On the other hand, perhaps it might be wiser to merge any ongoing projects, just to avoid any work going to waste?

I recall that @izzeybee intends to work alone on the translation. Perhaps they'd be willing to reconsider, depending on who and how many people are willing to work on this?

Edit: What's going to happen with partial translations such as this? Are we going to start from scratch over and over again? I worry that the translation is never going to go anywhere at this rate. Wouldn't it be wiser, perhaps, to continue from where others left off?

Edited by URV
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14 minutes ago, URV said:

So what's going to happen if, in a very optimistic scenario, both this and izzeybee's translation actually reach completion status? Will the two be compared mercilessly until it is decided that one of them is the better translation, leaving all the effort put into the worse translation go to waste? To be fair, I doubt we would even reach this scenario, but I think the possibility is there. On one hand, it might be good to have multiple translation projects just to have higher chances for one of them to reach completion. On the other hand, perhaps it might be wiser to merge any ongoing projects, just to avoid any work going to waste?

I recall that @izzeybee intends to work alone on the translation. Perhaps they'd be willing to reconsider, depending on who and how many people are willing to work on this?

Edit: What's going to happen with partial translations such as this? Are we going to start from scratch over and over again? I worry that the translation is never going to go anywhere at this rate. Wouldn't it be wiser, perhaps, to continue from where others left off?

Now I feel sick. OoooooOoooOoooOOoooooOOGH!!!! :vinty:

I get super held back when I'm just one-person-armying anything big, but thankfully I get used to managing my time and sched for Mahoyo. It's taking a while to get that patch out (b/c editing, mygod I was a terrible translator 2 yrs ago haha). Look out for a probably sneak-peek?? Thanks!

Edited by izzeybee
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8 hours ago, Asonn said:

Yeah, sure let's start an open source where every monkey can put his TL without any quality control. sounds like a great way to ruin a VN. 

I swear, years ago I read these exact words on old VNDB forum posts when people were shitting on Aaeru for wanting to promote fan-translation. When did Fuwa turn into VNDB?

Not that your concern isn't valid, but if people want to put effort into something, I'm not going to stop them.

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4 hours ago, URV said:

So what's going to happen if, in a very optimistic scenario, both this and izzeybee's translation actually reach completion status? Will the two be compared mercilessly until it is decided that one of them is the better translation, leaving all the effort put into the worse translation go to waste? To be fair, I doubt we would even reach this scenario, but I think the possibility is there. On one hand, it might be good to have multiple translation projects just to have higher chances for one of them to reach completion. On the other hand, perhaps it might be wiser to merge any ongoing projects, just to avoid any work going to waste?

I recall that @izzeybee intends to work alone on the translation. Perhaps they'd be willing to reconsider, depending on who and how many people are willing to work on this?

Edit: What's going to happen with partial translations such as this? Are we going to start from scratch over and over again? I worry that the translation is never going to go anywhere at this rate. Wouldn't it be wiser, perhaps, to continue from where others left off?

 

4 hours ago, izzeybee said:

I get super held back when I'm just one-person-armying anything big, but thankfully I get used to managing my time and sched for Mahoyo.

I am going to clarify a few things.

I have no Japanese experience. I am more of manager guy, because from I have seen at the commie subs issue is that herkz, just did not put as much effort into it. It kinda fizzled out.

I am more than willing to help @izzeybee since they don't wanna one man army this thing. I just wanna help any way I can. I have experience managing people and coding. That's why I say, let's put the thing on Github and people can look to see if the translations work or not. Github is social coding, it allows people to agile develop projects.

For example, let's say we are building something. What do we do? We start by asking questions? What kind of questions? Questions that bring about a problem. We design a solution to fix this problem. The solution is an app. But, the app needs to be tested. Every  feature needs be tested at least once. They call these user case reports. If it passes the test. We add a new feature, and so on until completion. Ideally, there should be some progress every week. No need to bum rush it.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 9/3/2018 at 11:36 PM, Asonn said:

Yeah, sure let's start an open source where every monkey can put his TL without any quality control. sounds like a great way to ruin a VN. 

I know it's a joke, but at one point I actually decided to make a translation project open source. I'm not ashamed and since it's actually an interesting story I will share it.

 

Musumaker was released on the 19th of December 2008 (disc only). On the 25th, somebody on HongFire published extraction tools and a translation started (that was quick). People just uploaded the files as attachments on the forum.

I showed up in 2011, downloaded all the scripts and wrote a script to convert them into a format the VN engine could understand. This allowed the text to show up ingame, something nobody had accomplished so far. However it turned out that the project was nearly dead and only one translator was left. Fearing that the translation project would die completely, I ended up putting all the scripts on a git server and made it public.

Software development has a tendency to attract people by simply sharing the source code, be an interesting project and be at a visible location. I figured translators could show up in the same way. Well that didn't happen. Some people showed up, but never really accomplished anything useful. I added a script to make a progress report, which would then always be in a specific file on the server. People could then see the progress without asking.

In 2015 the focus changed from just keeping the project alive to quality. The whole translation was re-translated to improve quality and a 15% patch was released. This did create some hype, but it didn't turn into new translators.

Late 2015 we moved from HongFire to Fuwa because HongFire is not the place to be if you want to translate a VN. Besides HongFire seemed to be past its prime at the time. That didn't help regarding recruiting more translators.

Early 2016: merge with Luna Translations and worked moved to Majo Koi Nikki. The target quality for Musumaker suddenly became the same as MKN.

May 2016: Musumaker HD remake was released. When I had to move the translation from one engine to another, I decided to start over and use the workflow used in Luna. This required a new file format (partly due to the new engine as well) and as such it made sense to use a new git repository. This time it became closed source.

Status today (2.5 years after the 15% patch): more than 50% translated, 1.1% translated during the last week. Quality is higher than ever and around new year 2017-2018 recruits started coming in.

 

 

In the end I will actually not recommend using open source for a translation. However there is no question that the translation of Musumaker, which has now lasted almost a decade would have been long dead due to inactivity had it not been due to having a public display/proof that it was alive. In fact the translation has done a number of things I would not recommend doing due to high risk of low quality, but in this case it was needed and the end result will not suffer from it.

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On 4/5/2018 at 9:20 PM, tymmur said:

I know it's a joke, but at one point I actually decided to make a translation project open source. I'm not ashamed and since it's actually an interesting story I will share it.

 

Musumaker was released on the 19th of December 2008 (disc only). On the 25th, somebody on HongFire published extraction tools and a translation started (that was quick). People just uploaded the files as attachments on the forum.

I showed up in 2011, downloaded all the scripts and wrote a script to convert them into a format the VN engine could understand. This allowed the text to show up ingame, something nobody had accomplished so far. However it turned out that the project was nearly dead and only one translator was left. Fearing that the translation project would die completely, I ended up putting all the scripts on a git server and made it public.

Software development has a tendency to attract people by simply sharing the source code, be an interesting project and be at a visible location. I figured translators could show up in the same way. Well that didn't happen. Some people showed up, but never really accomplished anything useful. I added a script to make a progress report, which would then always be in a specific file on the server. People could then see the progress without asking.

In 2015 the focus changed from just keeping the project alive to quality. The whole translation was re-translated to improve quality and a 15% patch was released. This did create some hype, but it didn't turn into new translators.

Late 2015 we moved from HongFire to Fuwa because HongFire is not the place to be if you want to translate a VN. Besides HongFire seemed to be past its prime at the time. That didn't help regarding recruiting more translators.

Early 2016: merge with Luna Translations and worked moved to Majo Koi Nikki. The target quality for Musumaker suddenly became the same as MKN.

May 2016: Musumaker HD remake was released. When I had to move the translation from one engine to another, I decided to start over and use the workflow used in Luna. This required a new file format (partly due to the new engine as well) and as such it made sense to use a new git repository. This time it became closed source.

Status today (2.5 years after the 15% patch): more than 50% translated, 1.1% translated during the last week. Quality is higher than ever and around new year 2017-2018 recruits started coming in.

 

 

In the end I will actually not recommend using open source for a translation. However there is no question that the translation of Musumaker, which has now lasted almost a decade would have been long dead due to inactivity had it not been due to having a public display/proof that it was alive. In fact the translation has done a number of things I would not recommend doing due to high risk of low quality, but in this case it was needed and the end result will not suffer from it.

With the help of your profile pic, it was really easy to imagine an old man telling a story as to why open sourcing a translation of an Japanese Visual Novel.

Thanks for your story, it gives a lot of context to the reality of the situation.

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