Someone on /r/visualnovels ran a contest to determine the most desired VN English translation in the community.

[EntireInternet]

I want white album 2... whineeeeeee

[Sparteh]

3 hours ago, EntireInternet said:

I want white album 2... whineeeeeee

Wasn't it translated recently?

[Dreamysyu]

1 hour ago, Sparteh said:

Wasn't it translated recently?

 

On 10/15/2018 at 9:42 AM, VirginSmasher said:

It's a botched mess. Don't even bother giving it attention.

 

[Stormwolf]

For now its just rumors and speculation. Im not too eager to talk crap about the work of fangroups, and peoples tolerance range is so varied that a botched mess to one person can be perfectly readable to another. I'm just glad someone takes the time to do it, i respect that.

[VirginSmasher]

On 10/15/2018 at 12:42 AM, Stormwolf said:

Whats wrong with it?

1. It doesn't come close to capturing Maruto's writing and prose.
2. It's littered with grammar errors, clunky prose, and awkward sentences.
3. Extremely literal translation to the point that it could be confused with machine TL, which it has been.

Basically, it looks like it was done by somebody who'd just finished year 1 Japanese and decided to work on a VN without having any clue about how to properly translate.

[Stormwolf]

35 minutes ago, VirginSmasher said:

1. It doesn't come close to capturing Maruto's writing and prose.
2. It's littered with grammar errors, clunky prose, and awkward sentences.
3. Extremely literal translation to the point that it could be confused with machine TL, which it has been.

Basically, it looks like it was done by somebody who'd just finished year 1 Japanese and decided to work on a VN without having any clue about how to properly translate.

Sounds readable though. Personally thats all i need. Well, it has to make sense though. Keep in mind that we dont know japanese and have nothing to compare to. But honesty, over half of the decent translations i read sound so americanized with its changed sentences and additions, that if you want to capture the essence of the original writer, many fail. Terribly. official publications most of all.

Edited October 18, 2018 by Stormwolf

[littleshogun]

It's not like that most of the people out there wouldn't understand WA2 translation anyway, and more so if the people in question didn't get a clue of how Maruto's prose was supposed to be. Then again, most beginner VN fan out there wouldn't care much about prose and the like, as long as they could understand the story. For the last two points, well hard to say about that but I guess it's up to each people whether they'll be able to understand it or not. So I guess I'll leave to each own people in regard of WA2, and besides apparently the pointer was probably came from Reddit/4chan in which I'm not quite trusted them enough seeing that they'd been quite wild in the past. It's still nice though for a pointer for what to expect in regard of WA2 translation, and I think my concern here was more in regard that it was still untranslated.

Back to topic, and from what I see apparently it's just another attempt to satisfy the curiousity in regard of knowing what VN that people want to translate the most just like Conjueror. What I can say is that at least we'd see that Conjueror did manage to release the translation from the winner of the contest (Dies Irae), so it's only fair that we expect that the creator of this vote to translate WA2 possibly with supposed Maruto's prose intact. That said, I know though that the translation work is quite hard and time consuming, but I think that if he created this vote it mean that some of the people out there would assume that he'd be willing to translated the winner (WA2), so I hope that there's a follow-up from the vote here even though deep down I won't expect that the vote creator would do that.

Edited October 20, 2018 by littleshogun

[NowItsAngeTime]

Prose is the most overrated thing among the 'elite' VN readers

How the hell is slightly changing the way you write words about a story going to overall change how the story/characters actually play out? Some details are different but its the same thing

[Stormwolf]

2 hours ago, NowItsAngeTime said:

Prose is the most overrated thing among the 'elite' VN readers

How the hell is slightly changing the way you write words about a story going to overall change how the story/characters actually play out? Some details are different but its the same thing

Yeah, i will never understand this either. I wish people would understand that complaining about senseless stuff like this which doesnt matter unless you know the exact phrases in japanese will only serve to discourage people from starting projects because they get insecure about their skills, when they might be more than good enough. If you dont know the original phrase, which really means the same then it certainly doesnt matter one bit. Official translations should put some extra thought into it though to make it as good as possible though.

[Toranth]

Prose, overrated?  It's only the main point, and almost all of the content - it rather hope it'd be important!  Even ignoring the fact that "subtle details" are often fairly important (mysteries, anyone?), the straightforward text itself can save or ruin a story.

 

To give an example, would you enjoy reading a VN full of this:

Quote

The weather beaten trail wound ahead into the dust racked climes of the barren land which dominates large portions of the Norgolian empire. Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth. The tireless sun cast its parching rays of incandescense from overhead, half way through its daily revolution. Small rodents scampered about, occupying themselves in the daily accomplishments of their dismal lives.  Dust sprayed over three heaving mountsin blinding clouds, while they bore the burdonsome cargoes of their struggling overseers.

“Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian”, gasped the first soldier.

“Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!” returned Grignr.

A sweeping blade of flashing steel riveted from the massive barbarians hide enameled shield as his rippling right arm thrust forth, sending a steel shod blade to the hilt into the soldiers vital organs.

That's the beginning of The Eye of Argon, one of the most legendary (-ily bad) books ever written.  Here's a fisking of Chapter 1.  Imagine reading a 60 hour VN of this.

 

Prose - the quality of the writing - matters.  A lot.  I guarantee you I can take a scene from your favorite game and ruin it, while still translating it 100% accurately.

[Stormwolf]

But its only ruined if you know the difference. What you call ruined can or most likely will be thoroughly enjoyable to people who dont know the difference, but you might also call it ruined simply because you know its supposed to be different.

Prose in mystery will likely not change a thing if the translation is accurate. You get the very same hints, just written in a slightly different manner.

 

[littleshogun]

Now that you mention it, perhaps it may be the case that people who understand the original works were the one who complain about the translation, even though it may be not always the case. As for me, well let's just say that I'm more or less just satisfied whenever any work was get translated, as long as I managed to understand the story easily that is.

PS - There's always saying that 'Good work could still enjoyed through the bad/mediocre translation (Not MTL obviously), but bad work couldn't be saved through good translation' or something like that, and of course the saying in regard of good and bad were always subjective. As for the saying, let's just say that I agree with that.

Edited October 20, 2018 by littleshogun

[adamstan]

6 hours ago, Stormwolf said:

But its only ruined if you know the difference.

No, it can also be ruined on its own, when translators/editors style is so bad that it gets exhausting to read. I think that's why @Toranth referenced "the most legendarily bad written book".

[Nandemonai]

12 hours ago, NowItsAngeTime said:

Prose is the most overrated thing among the 'elite' VN readers

No, it's the most under rated thing among the apologists for low quality work

I am convinced that Recettear took off because its localization is one of the best I've ever seen.  There were other, better, quirky Japanese games that could have been the one that opened the floodgates.  Why Recettear?  Because someone at Valve saw the demo and was immediately taken by it.  Well, why did that happen?  Recettear is a low budget game and even its merchant sim mechanics aren't THAT special.

Indeed, Recettear being a smash hit in the West surprised everybody; Japanese sales were so-so.  Why is that?  I'm pretty sure it's because Recettear's localized script is better than the Japanese script.  I haven't actually checked, but I'll bet Recettear in Japanese is a fine script, but nothing spectacular.  The English version, in comparison, cranks everything up to 11 and is a laugh riot.

I've been thinking about this for quite awhile.  When I look back at what I consider the best games I've ever played, there is a very high correlation with the best localization work I've ever seen.  Nearly all the best translated RPGs and VNs have really good localization work.  I have a very hard time thinking of any I'd hold up as an example of best-in-class despite having a bad localization.  Because a bad localization kills the script.

Many RPGs that I ultimately wasn't impressed with have bad localizations.  Some are probably just... bad games.  But I'm now convinced many would have ranked much higher had they been translated by competent folks who knew what they were doing, rather than by inept companies that didn't give a rat's ass.  The Atelier series, for instance, has consistently awful localizations, which - combined with the already-fairly-weak plots - really hurts the games.  I checked out entirely: I quit halfway through Atelier Shallie because I just didn't care, and haven't bothered looking at any released since.  I have it on fairly good authority the Ar Tonelico series is good in Japanese; I couldn't get more than a few hours into either of the ones I tried because the writing was so. awful.

RPGFan makes the point better than I ever could:  Here is a review of the Japanese PSP version of Legend of Heroes: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch.  And here, of the English version.

Notice how every aspect of the game scored lower?  That's not only because it's a different reviewer.  That's because a good story does more than just hold your interest during the story segments.  It doesn't make the whole game better, but it makes it feel better.  It subconsciously makes people more willing to overlook flaws in the game as a whole.  People recognize this effect for graphics; they call it bling.  But they don't seem to acknowledge it's true for the text, as well.

Bad localizations destroy games.  They do it so effectively people don't even understand what happened, just that 'they didn't like the game'.  They think 'that game sucked' when the real problem was 'that game was translated by a company that cares so little that when one of its employees thought it would be funny to change a character's name to Esty Dee, they just left it in the game'.

[littleshogun]

If that's the case, then perhaps we could say that Castlevania SoTN would be even more better example in regard of the bad translation lol. That said, while I did understand that the latter review did say a handful of localization problem and I also like to point out that it also happened in a lot of older RPG, it's also always a subjective matter if we talk about the prose out there so I believe that some people out there might be fine with Legend of Heroes localization out there. Also considering that RPGFan gave Higurashi score at 35 with the aspect that was dragged down the scoring was the gameplay (At 0), I would like to say that some of RPGFan review might be subjective so it might be not 100% objective. I also like to note that there's no other Higurashi review at RPGFan, so that site was stuck with opinion that Higurashi was bad, ignoring the issues like the infamous translation of that. 

As for whether the game would be receiving the higher score if it's better translated or not, well once again it's always depend on the game itself. There's some game that was quite infamous for the bad translation, and yet at the same time it was well achieved (FF7 and Suikoden 2). The same was also hold true, with the example that was Orion Heart nukige did apparently have good translation and obviously it's not good VN, so I would say that if the RPG was already bad in the first place then people would likely said thay it's bad even if the game in question did have better localization.

Back to topic, and in regard of VNs I think the only example that was could be categorized as bad localization would be Your Diary+, and that was because there's a lot of hard of understand lines there (Also Konosora default translation could be use as another example). Otherwise, I think so far I could understand the translated VNs out there. In the end, once again I'll say that as long as I could understand the lines in the VNs easily, then it's good to me here.

PS - As for Recettar thing, the other example that I could think of is Lunar. Perhaps there's always some exception in regard of the localization cases, but my opinion was more or less still not change here.

[VirginSmasher]

On 10/19/2018 at 11:09 AM, NowItsAngeTime said:

Prose is the most overrated thing among the 'elite' VN readers

How the hell is slightly changing the way you write words about a story going to overall change how the story/characters actually play out? Some details are different but its the same thing

Everybody else has already explained how absolutely moronic this statement is, so all I can say is you should not be working on any sort of project if you think like this.

[Thyndd]

On 19/10/2018 at 8:09 PM, NowItsAngeTime said:

Prose is the most overrated thing among the 'elite' VN readers

How the hell is slightly changing the way you write words about a story going to overall change how the story/characters actually play out? Some details are different but its the same thing

I would assume you are an English monolingual speaker? Correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't mean it as an offense, at all, if anything, I can perfectly relate. Unfortunately my Japanese is still not good enough to comfortably read VNs (nor it'll be any time soon if I don't get my shit together and start to take it seriously ), but I had a similar enough experience given that English is not my first language and there was a time when I couldn't read it fluently. My native languages would be Spanish and French, and for a very long time everything I consumed would be in one of those languages, especially Spanish. The thing is, the few translated VNs available would most of the time be a machine translation from English, which at the same time would usually be a pretty bad translation from Japanese. Just imagine how terrible that is. Needless to say, since I got my English up to par I completely stopped consuming this shitty translations, and I'm now a happier individual and the world is a better place.

And still, sometimes I replay VNs along with friends that can't speak English, so we download a Spanish patch... and I'm constantly thinking how much better those scenes were just by the way they were worded in English. The style and prose can definitely make or break a good scene. And before you retort that it's just because I've read the English translation first, nope, this goes both ways. I've checked the English translation of stuff I've originally read in Spanish/French and I still think it's way better. 

Either because you truly don't care or you are not yet aware that you do, I obviously won't try to force my view on you. I just wanted to let you know that I'm the farthest from a 'VN elitist' that you could get, and I still very much care for translation quality, as many others do.

Edited October 21, 2018 by Thyndd

[VirginSmasher]

28 minutes ago, Thyndd said:

I would assume you are an English monolingual speaker? Correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't mean it as an offense, at all, if anything, I can perfectly relate. Unfortunately my Japanese is still not good enough to comfortably read VNs (nor it'll be any time soon if I don't get my shit together and start to take it seriously ), but I had a similar enough experience given that English is not my first language and there was a time when I couldn't read it fluently. My native languages would be Spanish and French, and for a very long time everything I consumed would be in one of those languages, especially Spanish. The thing is, the few translated VNs available would most of the time be a machine translation from English, which at the same time would usually be a pretty bad translation from Japanese. Just imagine how terrible that is. Needless to say, since I got my English up to par I completely stopped consuming this shitty translations, and I'm now a happier individual and the world is a better place.

And still, sometimes I replay VNs along with friends that can't speak English, so we download a Spanish patch... and I'm constantly thinking how much better those scenes were just by the way they were worded in English. The style and prose can definitely make or break a good scene. And before you retort that it's just because I've read the English translation first, nope, this goes both ways. I've checked the English translation of stuff I've originally read in Spanish/French and I still think it's way better. 

Either because you truly don't care or you are not yet aware that you do, I obviously won't try to force my view on you. I just wanted to let you know that I'm the farthest from a 'VN elitist' that you could get, and I still very much care for translation quality, as many others do.

He's not talking about translation quality. He's talking about prose aka writing quality in general and how it's overrated to keep it as long as the story events remain the same. Basically, he has no idea about what prose does to a story and therefore is pretty uneducated when talking about it.

[Thyndd]

4 minutes ago, VirginSmasher said:

He's not talking about translation quality. He's talking about prose aka writing quality in general and how it's overrated to keep it as long as the story events remain the same.

Well, I guess it's a matter of definition. For me, good prose is an integral part of the translation, but I can see the line might get blurry, especially when approaching the more artistic component and the style itself is conveying sensations that weren't even there in the original.

In any case, the way I see it, saying that 'the writing style doesn't matter so long as the events remain unaltered' is like saying that it's the same thing reading a poem and an essay explaining what the poem is about.

[ArgentstR]

On 2018-10-19 at 8:09 PM, NowItsAngeTime said:

Prose is the most overrated thing among the 'elite' VN readers

How the hell is slightly changing the way you write words about a story going to overall change how the story/characters actually play out? Some details are different but its the same thing

Hmmm. Well how about you imagine a movie that you liked, but all camera work is replaced by a static 45 degree downards facing camera 3 meters above each scene, for the entire movie.
Nothing about the story or characters would have changed, it would still play out the same. Would your enjoyment be the same? Would that emotional scene still have the same impact if it's kinda hard to make out the characters expressions and body language because of the awkward angle? Would that blood pumping action scene be the same with you stuck up in the corner?

The prose of a piece of writing serves a similiar purpose to what camerawork does for a movie, it's about the framing of the story and characters. It can make the mundane gripping for a moment. The fantastical, dry and boring.
Compared to books, visual novels have a bit of a crutch for poor writing in the form of BGM, voice acting and well, visuals, the writing however still holds significant power, even should you not notice it.

[Nandemonai]

3 hours ago, Thyndd said:

Well, I guess it's a matter of definition. For me, good prose is an integral part of the translation, but I can see the line might get blurry, especially when approaching the more artistic component and the style itself is conveying sensations that weren't even there in the original.

It's not possible to have a good translation with bad prose (well, okay, maybe if the original has bad prose to begin with), but it's very possible to have good prose that isn't a terribly good translation (because it isn't faithful to the original text).  That's also a problem that most people wouldn't be able to recognize.

[Thyndd]

32 minutes ago, Nandemonai said:

it's very possible to have good prose that isn't a terribly good translation (because it isn't faithful to the original text).  That's also a problem that most people wouldn't be able to recognize.

Well yeah, namely everyone who hasn't read the original 

But you bring up a very interesting point. People usually underestimate how much is left unsaid in language, and how important context, either common sense knowledge or cultural stuff, actually is. With a great understanding of the work and the language you are translating from, you may be able to pick up on these contextual clues and translate them in a fairly accurate and natural sounding manner, but then there's the fact that the translator is not inside the author's mind: sometimes, probably fairly often depending on the type of work, the author will intentionally or unintentionally leave things ambiguous and the reader will give it their own interpretation. This makes any translation more accurately described as a "reinterpretation" of the original. Although unavoidable, I think a good translator should strive to minimize this effect, but it's not that I can't see where those 'elitist' that insist that you won't get the exact same experience reading a translation are coming from.

Edited October 21, 2018 by Thyndd

[ChaosRaven]

A litte question about the winner: What's so special about White Album 2?

While the anime was a surprisingly decent made love story, I wouldn't exactly say that the love triangle plot itself was particularly praise-worthy. Is there a bit more to it than just a well done nakige?

[onorub]

52 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

A litte question about the winner: What's so special about White Album 2?

While the anime was a surprisingly decent made love story, I wouldn't exactly say that the love triangle plot itself was particularly praise-worthy. Is there a bit more to it than just a well done nakige?

Anime only covers Introductory Chapter. The part that is one of the best-rated VNs is the Closing Chapter. I can't explain further because i didn't read either.

Edited October 21, 2018 by onorub

[Stormwolf]

32 minutes ago, onorub said:

Anime only covers Introductory Chapter. The part that is one of the best-rated VNs is the Closing Chapter. I can't explain further because i didn't read either.

Spoiler

what? I always thought the anime covered introductory chapter and closing where Kazuza left. With coda being the one where she returns.