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Summer Pockets English Translation


jansonseth

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Fan TL's are on the decline because so many localization companies have sprouted up, taking up a lot of works that VN consumers are passionate about. But to talk about the quality of releases when so many fan-TL projects are re-TLs of poor quality official releases is pretty comical. As a whole, fan-TLs have always been more polished than their official release counterparts because of the motivational discrepancy. Fan TLs passionately want their work to best represent the novel, official TL's tend to just want to make a quick buck, which is why so many are released with what seems like not even an editing pass from a native speaker and certainly not a TLC.

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7 hours ago, skrewball717 said:

official TL's tend to just want to make a quick buck

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never talked to any of the people actually involved with an official VN translation. If you want to say shit like this about the business types managing the licensing and whatnot, fine, I can see that. You may even be right. But the many professional translators, editors, and programmers I've met are universally passionate individuals who care deeply and want nothing but the best for the games they work on. They are sometimes more constrained by deadlines, due to the generally poor pay in the industry, but they all work hard. And if you think anybody is in the VN localization industry to make a quick buck, you clearly don't know anything about the pay rates...

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36 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

You do realize this is a dumb statement, right?

How so? It's an official localization however you look at it. Maybe it's not a representative example, but you can't deny it's an official localization. I for one will not take you seriously if you try to convince me how all official localizations are better than fanTLs.

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19 minutes ago, Infernoplex said:

How so? It's an official localization however you look at it. Maybe it's not a representative example, but you can't deny it's an official localization. I for one will not take you seriously if you try to convince me how all official localizations are better than fanTLs.

You're obviously trying to spin it as representative. There are bad agents in every system. In the fan TL scene, you see machine TL garbage on a daily basis.

At the end of the day, I have my opinions, but they're not terribly data-oriented (nor are anybody else's...), and I doubt anybody has the wherewithal to do the actual hard work of gauging translation quality on such a broad scale to make this into a meaningful argument. Can we all agree to take this on a case-by-case basis instead of making stupid arguments for which we have no evidence? Or do I have to resort to the "fake data" route of going through and citing  example after example after example after example after example of high-quality official TLs (note: I'm limiting myself strictly to games that I've personally read and that were released this year, or I'd be here all day, and am not including my own because I can't claim to be impartial...) until you all get sick of it?

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1 hour ago, Fred the Barber said:

 If you want to say shit like this about the business types managing the licensing and whatnot, fine, I can see that.

Pretty much what I was referring to. Sorry for not making it clearer. I'm fully aware many of the labor put it is done by passionate people, several of which started in the Fan TL scene. Also obvious that it is not an umbrella situation for the official TL scene. But the fact this is true of any licensing company, which undoubtedly it is of more than just a couple, is an issue in itself.

Edited by skrewball717
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2 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

You're obviously trying to spin it as representative. There are bad agents in every system. In the fan TL scene, you see machine TL garbage on a daily basis.

Ugh... Sorry. Maybe it came out wrongly, so it seemed like I was using Your Diary as a standard of official localizations quality (which it is obviously not). I used it merely as an example of an official localization gone wrong. My point was that not all official localizations are better than fanTLs.

Also, I disagree with you that the fanTL scene used to produce only MTLs, or that they were so prevalent back in the day to be on a "daily basis". Yes, most of them aren't of a very good quality, but they certainly aren't MTLs. I only know of a couple of such cases as Flyable Heart and some Eushully VNs MTLs. I can't remember any other known case of an obvious MTL fanTL. Besides, it's not like we had tons of fanTLs at those times anyway. If you look back a little bit, you'll see that we often had months of no new translations at all. Official localizations were still scarce and only a few companies were doing VNs, unlike today. That's why fanTLs came in to fill that gap that existed at the time. These people who we are trashing nowadays for their "poor quality translations" like Ixrec and TakaJun literally helped to shape this scene into what it is today. Yes, they weren't the best TLers, but they definitely weren't MTLers. Even the poor translations done by Dark Translations weren't MTLs. The guy just sucked terribly with his writing, had no editor, and was overall too literal, but not even he was MTLing. His and other fanTLers works, however bad or good, were used to popularize this medium, shaping VN community into what it is today. I seriously doubt any of this would have been achieved with "MTL garbage on a daily basis". In those times, we couldn't even know what was bad or good since no one really knew how a good VN translation was supposed to look like. Even official localizations didn't know the answer to that (yes, we had bad localizations even back then, and no, I don't mean just early MangaGamer stuff). And you know what? Most of us, me included, still enjoyed these translations just fine. No one was really asking for a masterful prose writer to TL these VNs, or some super capable editor to make it look like it was written by Shakespeare himself. People were just fine reading these VNs as they were. Very few, if anyone, were complaining about something being a shitty translation. And I certainly don't remember people talking how VN X was an MTL garbage, or how we were getting them on a "daily basis". If anything, people were constantly complaining how we had very little amount of good VNs localized, or how little amount of TLs in general came out that year.

1 hour ago, Fred the Barber said:

At the end of the day, I have my opinions, but they're not terribly data-oriented (nor are anybody else's...), and I doubt anybody has the wherewithal to do the actual hard work of gauging translation quality on such a broad scale to make this into a meaningful argument. Can we all agree to take this on a case-by-case basis instead of making stupid arguments for which we have no evidence? Or do I have to resort to the "fake data" route of going through and citing  example after example after example after example after example of high-quality official TLs (note: I'm limiting myself strictly to games that I've personally read and that were released this year, or I'd be here all day, and am not including my own because I can't claim to be impartial...) until you all get sick of it?

You totally understood me wrongly earlier xD (I didn't expect anyone to read too much into that post about Your Diary I made, so I didn't attempt to make myself clearer regarding my stance on official localizations) ...

Of course there are very good official localizations out there. Some of the best translations out there came from official localizations. That's a fact, and I don't need any evidence or data to show me that. Overall looking, I also think that official localizations are, for the most part, better than fanTLs. Still, I don't agree that they are all perfect translations (or that some are even good at all by the way). There are rotten apples in every system, but I wasn't trying to say how official translations are bad or anything. There are many examples of both bad translations in fanTL scene and official localization scene as well (you reviewed one such case not too long ago). That's all the point I was trying to make earlier. That just by being an official localization, something isn't automatically better by default.

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You do see MTL garbage on a daily basis if you take a wider look on fan translation because the LN / web novel scene exists (I think it's that bad? People tell me it's that bad. I don't really read LNs...). I'm not sure if Fred was pointing at that, though, and I suppose it doesn't have much impact on the VN scene.

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1 minute ago, kokoro said:

It's better by default because the creators get money instead of having their work pirated, lol.

You're saying people don't pirate official releases?

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

You do see MTL garbage on a daily basis if you take a wider look on fan translation because the LN / web novel scene exists (I think it's that bad? People tell me it's that bad. I don't really read LNs...). I'm not sure if Fred was pointing at that, though, and I suppose it doesn't have much impact on the VN scene.

LN/web novels translations are indeed full of MTLs, but we were strictly talking about VNs here. But now that you mention it, I know for a fact that many read those MTLed LNs too.

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5 hours ago, Zakamutt said:

You do see MTL garbage on a daily basis if you take a wider look on fan translation because the LN / web novel scene exists (I think it's that bad? People tell me it's that bad. I don't really read LNs...). I'm not sure if Fred was pointing at that, though, and I suppose it doesn't have much impact on the VN scene.

Yeah, the abundance of MTLs is the main reason why I don't pick up any new LNs anymore. And the retranslations to already ruined series are very rare. I personally believe that we should thank whoever decided to ban MTLs on vndb, because otherwise the situation with VNs would probably be pretty similar.

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54 minutes ago, Dreamysyu said:

I personally believe that we should thank whoever decided to ban MTLs on vndb, because otherwise the situation with VNs would probably be pretty similar.

It's only banned for unofficial patches. You can still find officially MTLed VNs on VNDB. I wish they banned officially MTLed VNs too.

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3 hours ago, Infernoplex said:

It's only banned for unofficial patches. You can still find officially MTLed VNs on VNDB. I wish they banned officially MTLed VNs too.

Like them or not, official MTLs are a notable release that people are going to engage with. There is value in chronicling their release both from a historical perspective, while also potentially serving as a warning to anyone who sees the release in the wild. Like, when NarutoVegetaXxX over on hongfire or what have you whips out a machine tl of a VN in a day, the information that this happened is not useful or interesting to many (if anyone). Adding those kinds of releases to vndb would only increase their exposure. But when Cuffs partners with DMM to sell a machine translation of Your Diary on Steam, that information is inherently much more interesting. And by tracking it on vndb, we can hopefully warn people of its quality.

That said, I choose not to list any MTLs on Fuwanovel VNTS regardless of whether they're official or not (or any extremely shoddy TLs in general). I see VNTS as serving a different purpose, though. I don't wish to give them any sort of recognition in VNTS whatsoever.

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Quite ironic that this thread had been active for a few days with the title 'Dropped' lol, even though I'm the one who bump this.

Anyway while both side did have some valid opinion, I would say that saying that the official translation is better than fan translation is not quite right to me - even though it might be the truth, because for some case there's even a chance where fan translation is better than official one (Cross Channel anyone? And yes I understand that both version did have faults). Besides I would say that most people wouldn't care the difference in quality anyway, or rather they only care whether they understand the story or not with the available translation. So perhaps what I can say is that people would still understand the story even with the less than average translation (Not MTL), but even high class translation wouldn't be able to save the inherently bad story.

So yeah, what I would like to think is that both of fan and official translation did probably have same situation with some translator is probably better than most of the other one, and we also know that some official translator did have started as fan translator, or in the other word I wouldn't fully agree with the saying that official translation is better than fan translation or something like that effect. Feel free to disagree with that, but in the end I would say that both side did have some merit and that's final.

Back to topic, while we still didn't have the update at least the project here did grab attention from Kazamatsuri (KEY fan community) so at least it's good enough I guess. Here's the Twitter from Kazamatsuri below.

 

Edited by littleshogun
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Another update, and apparently the team decided to delay the trial release because they decided to do some quality check. As for the new estimation release date, it'll be at 30th later in which it'll be coincide with Nekonyan's first announcement. So let's wait and see later, and here's the link to the blogpost in regard of the update.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Another update from the team even though I'd been late five days for this, and this time it's in regard of that they'd find an editor. Also currently they edited the trial's script and many other jobs, and they also said that they hope that they'll managed to release this by the end of the month. Here's the link to their update.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The title was still ironic here with the word 'Dropped', considering that we got a patch for Summer Pocket trial. And yes I mean it that Summer Pocket trial translation patch was released, so go get the patch here and just see by yourself whether the translation is good or not (As long as it's not MTL, then I'm content with that).

Edited by littleshogun
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  • 1 month later...

Another update from the team, and well the thread title was no longer ironic anymore because it didn't have the word dropped anymore. Here's the update from their blogpost, and from what I see apparenly they almost finished the common route translation. They'll release common route patch later, when they finished with the editing and get the minigames worked. That's all for the update.

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  • 5 months later...

Decided to bump this thread because we have a new patch in that it'll cover Shiroha's route, or in term of the whole it'll cover at least one third of Summer Pocket so it should be quite substantial enough. Get Shiroha's patch at the download page here, and have fun if you just want to play Shiroha's route.

PS - Just realized that Shiroha's seiyuu is Konomi Kohara, who is currently well known among PreCure fans because she voiced one of five STPC members (Hagoromo Lala/Cure Milky). Or if you've Kaguya fans you surely would know her as the seiyuu for Chika, and also she voiced Kukuri in Mahoujin Guruguru 2017 version.

Edited by littleshogun
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  • 1 month later...

Well, that predicated. 

19 hours ago, NeroDragon12 said:

Looks like official English version of Summer Pockets was announced by key to be in production.

 

I hope this project did'nt end up like Angel Beats. And this is statement Alka Translations on the official english release of summer pockets https://alkatranslations.com/statement-on-the-official-english-release-of-summer-pockets/

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On the one hand, I understand not wanting to abandon your own hard work. On the other hand, once a company has announced an official localization, the civil thing to do if you're a fan translation outfit is to talk to the developer and understand what they want you to do, not to say "fuck you, Key, we're going to keep releasing our fan TL patches". I hope these guys cool off a bit and have a conversation with the developer's English representatives to understand what their wishes are. Who knows? Maybe there's room for collaboration.

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