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Hello I don't really know what to call this topic but I just went with that title. I am very curious as to how to help with translation. Mainly I would like to know what I require to be the Translator of the current team. For example, I would require to be able to learn how to read kanji and stuff. I would like to know what I would need to be able to help with translation. Because I was sad about a translation project being cancelled like 3-5 years ago I figured that if I want a translation to be possible I might as well try to help. So, it might take me 1-3 years (I'm really just sitting at a computer I can use all my free time learning Japanese) but I will practice everything that I require/need to be able to help with a translation project. But that is not all. I would also like to know about certain roles of a translation team and what they do and they're requirements. Also I would like to know if I would require a certain age, credit card, you know some of the normal requirements other than the role that I want to know about. Advanced thank you for all answers. :D

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I wouldn't sweat about all the ins and outs of translation just yet. If you're serious about doing it in the future, just focus on learning Japanese and improving your English for now. Becoming familiar with Japanese culture would be helpful as well, because translating requires a lot more than just transferring words from one language into the other.

You don't need to be of a certain age or have a credit card or anything like that for a fan translation; nobody gets paid on fan TL projects unless it gets picked up by a localisation company. If you're trying to work for a localisation company you'll need some experience under your belt. Localisation companies have different requirements, but you can probably get an idea of what they expect from their websites.

Translation teams usually consist of one or more translators, TLCers [that check the accuracy and quality of the translation],  editors, and QC / proofreaders. There are also other roles like hackers that work with the game files / script and image editors for English-ifying CGs or decensoring mosaics among other things.  You can learn about editors and what they do from Darbury and Fred's blogs if it interests you. 

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3 hours ago, StrategyMasterz said:

I am very curious as to how to help with translation. Mainly I would like to know what I require to be the Translator of the current team.

I take the liberty of assuming you ask me directly (or someone like me). I started with fan translation as a programmer/hacker in 2011. Today I'm the project manager of the Musumaker translation project where I'm in charge of recruitment and assigning tasks to members. I'm also experienced with other projects, most noteworthy Majo Koi Nikki where I worked together with Fred and Darbury (the editor bloggers mentioned by @Zander). I would like to think I have an idea of what I'm talking about regarding a topic like this.

 

First of all, there are no formal requirements for fan translations, though obtaining the VN you are supposed to work on is a really good idea. If the translation ends up being licensed, then you have to sign a contract, meaning all members of the translation project have to be 18 for the signature to be legally valid. However since you are nowhere near the skills needed to do licensed work, it's not something you should be concerned with for quite a while, if ever.

 

3 hours ago, Zander said:

Translation teams usually consist of one or more translators, TLCers [that check the accuracy and quality of the translation],  editors, and QC / proofreaders. There are also other roles like hackers that work with the game files / script and image editors for English-ifying CGs or decensoring mosaics among other things.  You can learn about editors and what they do from Darbury and Fred's blogs if it interests you. 

There is no need for me to repeat that. Regarding a wishlist for new people, the priority is as follows: translator, editor, the rest. It's not that "the rest" is not important. Instead it's all about man hours needed for a translation. Example: Tenkiame got announced today. It's 12k lines and the translator can do 500 lines each week, or 24 weeks of work for one translator. If the engine is well known and the tools are already available, a hacker could do what's needed in one week at startup and one week when finished. This mean in this example we would need 12 translators to keep one hacker working. This mean it would be stupid to aim to have a 1:1 ratio of people on the forum looking for projects to join.

Another reason to put translator first is because it's the most critical. You can skip editing, image editing and that stuff and still get an end result. It's of poor quality, but it's there. Starting out without a translator and you have no project.

 

Regarding removal of mosaic. While it could be time consuming to go through all CGs (particularly a nukige), I did not put this on the top of the priority list. The reason is that most translation projects skip this step entirely. As a result, this task is not one of those, which are in risk of killing a translation project. Don't get me wrong. I would be happy if people would do this, but I just can't justify calling it a critical task when most fan translation patches do just fine without this.

 

Work as a translator:

In theory, it's simple. You get a bunch of lines and then you write the same line in English. It's not up to the translator to get the Japanese lines or figure out how to get the translated lines back into the VN. In other words this task is purely translating from Japanese to English. Usually people know enough English for that not to be a problem and the act of translating itself is often a learning by doing thing, meaning speed will increase as you get more experienced. This mean you likely shouldn't really care about anything other than studying Japanese. It was mentioned earlier that knowledge of Japanese culture and customs is a good idea and I agree. if you for instance translate a story where they spend an entire day on tanabata, then it would be a good idea to know what it is or the translation could end up being... unique.

There is a thread on how to learn Japanese and I will not go into details with that. However I will say a bit about the act of reading Japanese text, which is not entirely the same as learning Japanese. The thing is that you have the Japanese text as plain text and you can copy paste it. This allows you to use tools to assist you, like online dictionaries. However you can get even more assistance than that. I had a good experience using translation aggregator. It's actually written with text hooking in mind and can forward the text into various machine translators. However it will use whatever you copy, meaning you just select the entire line and copy it. If you disable all the machine translators and enable jparser, it will write what you just copied, but it will split the words for you and if you hover the mouse over a word, it will look it up in a dictionary. It can also insert furigana in both hiragana and romaji. This greatly reduce the need to study kanji and it helps with the vocabulary. When those becomes less important (in the startup phase), you can focus on grammar and particles, something the tools will not help you with. Well it will to some extend with particles, but it's still good to study those and understand how they are used.

There are other tools as well, but fundamentally they all do the same thing: you copy paste into the tool and it will analyze the text in some way. Other tools can identify each component of a kanji and stuff like that. I'm not saying TA is the best tool available (I don't know if it is). What I'm saying is that I got it to work and it's a great improvement compared to just a dictionary.

 

Work as an editor:

This is the task of rewriting what the translator has translated. The goal is to make it appear as it was written in English to begin with and make it feel natural in English. This is both within each line and the flow between the lines. Some Japanese skills is to be preferred and good English skills is an absolute must. You need to master English with a good vocabulary as repeating the same words over and over becomes boring to read. I highly recommend reading what Fred and Darbury have written about editing if you want to know more details on what this is all about. Even if the translator is skilled enough to be an editor as well, the editor step shouldn't be skipped because nobody can translate and edit at the same time. Also as Darbury wrote about, you can't be objective about your own work (nobody can), meaning just the fact that translator and editor are two people will help improve the quality.

Some of the details about translators applies to editors, like it's about working on text without caring about the technical issues regarding how to get it in or out of the VN.

 

TLC is the next step and it checks the edited lines compared to the Japanese to ensure the editor did not go too far from the original meaning. Often translators can also be used as TLC, but not for the lines they translated themselves.

 

I will not go into details with programming, hacking or image editing. If you know how to do those, then great. If not, then you won't learn it from reading just a single forum post.

 

 

Last, but not least, if you feel like you can do anything mentioned in this post, feel free to PM me. Musumaker can use more people ;)

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22 minutes ago, blendedfart said:

Realistically, one could translate+edit tenkiame in 1-2 months.

That's not realistic at all. The speed required to translate that fast would be a daily speed of what most translators can handle in a week, if not faster than that. A realistic speed would be 6-12 months for a single translator of normal fan translation speed. They apparently claim to be able to do it in around 5 months, but that's around max realistic speed for one translator. If people claim to work faster than that, odds are that they sacrifice quality to gain that speed.

I should add that I'm not involved with Tenkiame. It's calculation based on the numbers they provided in their thread combined with my experience regarding how fast translators can work. It's hard to maintain a constant speed because language difficulty varies and some scenes takes more time to translate than others even if they are the same number of lines. Predicting speed is hard and almost always wrong for a number of reasons.

Edited by tymmur
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I can be used as an editor then. Even though my main language is not English I am pretty good at it because I spent most of my life sitting on the computer and talking to people as a kid and until now. If an editor just takes English skills and grammar skills for that and knows a little bit of Japanese, then I can help. It's summer here so I can spend all of my time just sitting here helping and I'm currently learning Japanese using https://www.duolingo.com/skill/ja/Hiragana-1/3 and http://hiragana.training/. I admit and it's hard, but after spending about 2-4 hours I got used to the symbols and I even learned some new words. So I don't know if I have the requirements for an editor. But if I require something else other than what I said earlier. Please tell me

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59 minutes ago, tymmur said:

That's not realistic at all. The speed required to translate that fast would be a daily speed of what most translators can handle in a week, if not faster than that. A realistic speed would be 6-12 months for a single translator of normal fan translation speed. They apparently claim to be able to do it in around 5 months, but that's around max realistic speed for one translator. If people claim to work faster than that, odds are that they sacrifice quality to gain that speed.

I should add that I'm not involved with Tenkiame. It's calculation based on the numbers they provided in their thread combined with my experience regarding how fast translators can work. It's hard to maintain a constant speed because language difficulty varies and some scenes takes more time to translate than others even if they are the same number of lines. Predicting speed is hard and almost always wrong for a number of reasons.

You can definetely finish in a month or two if you translate/edit between 2-4 hundred lines a day.

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49 minutes ago, StrategyMasterz said:

I can be used as an editor then. Even though my main language is not English I am pretty good at it because I spent most of my life sitting on the computer and talking to people as a kid and until now.

That description doesn't really tell me if you have the skills or not. Try take a look at Fred's and Darbury's blogs. I'm not telling you to memorize every single detail. It's more like getting an idea of what editing is all about. I think this entry could be the best regarding telling the idea of editing.

Read this and figure out if you could see yourself do work like this. Ideally your English skills should be of a level where you get the difference between each version of the same line. Also you should have the mindset where you care about details like this.

If you feel like you can do it and still want to be an editor after reading this, then we should talk.

39 minutes ago, blendedfart said:

You can definetely finish in a month or two if you translate/edit between 2-4 hundred lines a day.

Your math sounds right. It's just a shame that I have yet to see any translator do more than a 100 lines a day 5 days a week. Attempts has been made to go faster, but it seems that 100 lines is what the brain can handle for one session and doing multiple sessions in a single day is not a valid approach for most translators. It's not like people can treat unpaid translations as a full time job.

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Looks like I understand what you mean about it. I think I can do it, it's going to be my first time. It's also a good practice to change my sentences I use. Forgive me if I'll make mistakes but I think I can do it. I forgot what it was called the way he was changing the word's position, I remember how to do it just forgot the name. But I think I can do it. If that is a good enough answer for you. Give me an example that I have to change just like what he did in that post and see if I qualify.

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19 minutes ago, tymmur said:

Your math sounds right. It's just a shame that I have yet to see any translator do more than a 100 lines a day 5 days a week. Attempts has been made to go faster, but it seems that 100 lines is what the brain can handle for one session and doing multiple sessions in a single day is not a valid approach for most translators. It's not like people can treat unpaid translations as a full time job.

You are def right bro. But imo you should always approach a fan tl position with the intent to sell out. Especially nowadays when you got fan tl teams selling out left and right.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/26/2018 at 7:40 PM, Fiddle said:

WORDS HARD

TGfeH65.gif

 

On 4/27/2018 at 9:09 AM, Fred the Barber said:

Pictured here: most people involved with fan translation.

LOL So true! Couldn't agree more:wahaha:

 

Opps sorry double post, my browser went crazy:reeee:

Edited by Templarseeker
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