Fortissimo FA to be "Translated" to English by SakuraGame

[TotallyNotAZA]

I know one director being vehemently against using shoddy machine translations and selling them dirt cheap for a profit. He has too much pride in his work to do something like that.

So, seeing a comment like yours make me happy, because I respect the director a lot.

Unfortunately, not every game company director thinks the way mine does...And if you just want profit and an 'easy way' to penetrate the english market...Well...

[Narcosis]

3 hours ago, TotallyNotAZA said:

Unfortunately, not every game company director thinks the way mine does...And if you just want profit and an 'easy way' to penetrate the english market...Well...

If they plan to leave such a "lasting" impression on both their fans and consumers, then it'll most probably be their last one.

[Nandemonai]

12 hours ago, Decay said:

Profit-wise they're making bank too. Even if they're making just a dollar off of every sale, they are routinely pulling in six-digit sale figures. Meanwhile, MangaGamer struggles greatly to reach even a tenth that, with many of their successful games only selling in the thousands. SakuraGame is most likely making way more money than any other localization company right now.

Except that the average MangaGamer game goes for roughly 40x as much money.  If SakuraGame moves 40x as many units as MangaGamer, then their revenue is broadly comparable.  And MangaGamer's translation rates are low, so their expenses aren't going to be that much more per game's.

It's closer than you think.  And I doubt very much SakuraGame's "success" will continue indefinitely if they keep this up.

(Of course, if they're actually producing real Chinese translations, and if the Chinese versions are priced traditionally, then all bets are off. I wouldn't know about that.)

[Mr Poltroon]

11 minutes ago, Nandemonai said:

(Of course, if they're actually producing real Chinese translations, and if the Chinese versions are priced traditionally, then all bets are off. I wouldn't know about that.)

I believe the crux of the issue is that they do exactly that, and that the English versions are a case of them telling the developers: 'Hey, BTW we also do those' and them replying 'k, cool'.

[Nandemonai]

Makes sense.  Then the total money they are making probably is way better than MangaGamer, even if the amount they make from their English-language versions specifically probably isn't.  But that doesn't really matter; their business as a whole is much more profitable which makes it appealing to those licensors who don't care about quality.

Edited May 28, 2018 by Nandemonai

[sanahtlig]

On 5/26/2018 at 2:42 PM, TakunDes said:

I wasn't trying to cause much fuss but actually, help him. Their translator has ruined many great games already and they had 0 intention of providing any updates to any translation release till this day. Chusingura was at least willing to fix their crap by listening to the community with translation errors, these guys did nothing, nor did they communicate in the forums. These ppl bring bad reputation towards the entire Chinese community, I am disgusted with them honestly

Unfortunately, no amount of proofreading (especially of the automated sort) will turn a bad translation into a good one.  At best, you can disguise the underlying issues.  That's actually not helpful.  When it's broken English, you can at least tell at first glance that it's shoddy work and make an informed buying decision.  More insidious is when the translation is bad and a casual player wouldn't be able to tell (because they don't know Japanese). 

[Sparteh]

Is Fortissimo any good in the first place. Never played it and heard people calling it as good as Fate, but that obviously sounds stupid...

[Infernoplex]

1 minute ago, Sparteh said:

Is Fortissimo any good in the first place. Never played it and heard people calling it as good as Fate, but that obviously sounds stupid...

You'll never get a good enough answer on that type of question. It's as subjective as it can get. I heard good things about it, but even if I didn't, it's still a VN with a semblance of a plot, unlike the usual SakuraGame stuff, i.e. random bad nukiges and H-RPGs.

[Testarossa]

Really sad news. I was waiting for an English translation to reread everything, I guess I'll stick with the original version.

 

6 hours ago, Sparteh said:

Is Fortissimo any good in the first place. Never played it and heard people calling it as good as Fate, but that obviously sounds stupid...

It's not as good, Fortissimo is better. 

[littleshogun]

On 5/29/2018 at 3:06 AM, Sparteh said:

Is Fortissimo any good in the first place. Never played it and heard people calling it as good as Fate, but that obviously sounds stupid...

As for whether Fortissimo here is better than Fate or not, well it's depend on each other like Infernoplex so I can't exactly say the exact answer here. Graphically speaking, I would say that it's better than Fate although it's because Fate was created at 2004 though. If you wonder whether Fortissimo is good or not, then perhaps the quickest answer here would be find out and play that in Japanese by yourself.

PS - Now that I look more on Fox Hime translation example, maybe I should expect that kind of text there XD. It's not like it would be my first experience reading the MTL-ed VN anyway if I read this, since I already survived Flyable Heart and Soukoku no Arterial here (And at least this time we have MCs speak, so maybe I'll be able to understand a bit of the story from the characters voices XDD).

[TakunDes]

On 28/05/2018 at 9:01 PM, sanahtlig said:

Unfortunately, no amount of proofreading (especially of the automated sort) will turn a bad translation into a good one.  At best, you can disguise the underlying issues.  That's actually not helpful.  When it's broken English, you can at least tell at first glance that it's shoddy work and make an informed buying decision.  More insidious is when the translation is bad and a casual player wouldn't be able to tell (because they don't know Japanese). 

Ye that's true, however, it's been well known that their previous games like King Exit or so were butchered by the horrible translation they made. and most if not all are grammar related issues. So if they use Grammarly on their previous games it could improve somewhat, sadly they're too lazy to update their previous games and would just leave it as is.  But ye you're right

The CN translation is actually fine, and with its price tag of £4, that's a steal no matter how you look at it, for a 50+ hours VN that's insanely cheap and the English release will probably have the same price

Edited June 2, 2018 by TakunDes

[Hetzer123]

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Edited October 2, 2019 by Hetzer123

[Decay]

On 6/2/2018 at 4:18 AM, TakunDes said:

Ye that's true, however, it's been well known that their previous games like King Exit or so were butchered by the horrible translation they made. and most if not all are grammar related issues. So if they use Grammarly on their previous games it could improve somewhat, sadly they're too lazy to update their previous games and would just leave it as is.  But ye you're right

The CN translation is actually fine, and with its price tag of £4, that's a steal no matter how you look at it, for a 50+ hours VN that's insanely cheap and the English release will probably have the same price

Grammarly really wouldn't help much at all. A lot of King Exit's text is so horribly mangled that Grammarly wouldn't know what to do with it. And it takes someone halfway decent at English to look at the suggestions and decide which ones are worth implementing and which ones aren't. Grammarly will frequently want to change perfectly acceptable informal English dialogue, for example, so I can only imagine the dumb suggestions it would give for a mangled machine translation. 

In general, the only real use I've found for Grammarly in translation work (with proper translations) is for finding double and missing words.

I would also argue that not all of the problems with SakuraGame's translations are grammar-related. There's a lot more to good English writing than proper grammar. Even if Grammarly could fix all of the grammar, it would still probably be a terrible translation not worth reading unless an actual decent editor came along and gave an extremely thorough editing pass. But you don't want to do that when the base translation is potentially inaccurate, and I really don't trust these translations to be accurate. Even if they get the broad strokes, they're missing so much of the smaller details, tone, and personality.

So really, SakuraGame's translations need to be thrown in the trash and incinerated, never to be seen again. Trying to help them improve is a fool's errand.

Edited June 3, 2018 by Decay