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5 hours ago, Infernoplex said:

It's pretty telling of how desperate the situation in the Western VN scene is when most of us are fine with "good enough".

What do you mean by desperate? Sometimes I almost feel like there are too many titles getting picked up/released relative to the size of the western VN audience. I wonder if that pace is sustainable.

If you're talking about whether or not the VNs getting localized are any good, that's another (more subjective) matter

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Even with the original Japanese I can't decipher multiple screenshots.  The translations are definitely not right, but without context I can only guess what they're supposed to mean.  It's similar to the bewilderment of walking into a casual conversation at a random point, where the subject matter is cloaked by ambiguous pronouns and references known only to them.  The lines I can decipher are superficial and tell us nothing about the characters or setting.

Screenshots are supposed to be carefully chosen to highlight selling points and themes--not randomly chosen.  It makes you wonder if they even played the game they're selling.

Edited by sanahtlig
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edit: Looking at it some more, it's not actually that bad. There's some pun being made in the second screenshot that isn't wrong, but it's phrased a little awkwardly and is definitely bad to use for a promo screenshot. But, you know, an attempt was made. This might not be much worse than the average moege translation. I'd personally want something better, but at least it's not sakuragame...? Kind of sad that's where the bar is at.

Edited by Decay
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5 hours ago, Incynerate said:

What do you mean by desperate? Sometimes I almost feel like there are too many titles getting picked up/released relative to the size of the western VN audience. I wonder if that pace is sustainable.

If you're talking about whether or not the VNs getting localized are any good, that's another (more subjective) matter

By desperate, I mean how we are ready to accept most translations, excluding blatant MTL and straight-up terrible translations. I am not talking about the number of VNs coming out, or whether these VNs are any good or bad. Most of us are forgiving of bad to mediocre translations as long as we can read them. That's what I meant by desperate situation. We're getting more and more translations, but many of those aren't really of very good quality. But most of us are fine with it, so there's no real incentive for companies to put more effort into their translations.

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11 hours ago, Infernoplex said:

It's pretty telling of how desperate the situation in the Western VN scene is when most of us are fine with "good enough".

?

The definition of  'good enough' is that it is... good enough.  So while I appreciate time and effort spent going above and beyond to do excellent work, 'good enough' is perfectly acceptable.  That's what it means.

Where it gets weird is that 'good enough' changes over time.  Standards change.  Work that was 'good enough' for video game translations in the late 90's / early 2000's will generally not pass today's minimum standards.  Mostly, it doesn't qualify as 'good enough' anymore.  Companies have raised the bar over time to bring the average up enough that people demand better.

And that is the real threat here:  The VN scene still does bad enough business that SakuraGame's business model - 'burn the forest down and profit off the ashes' - probably provides a comparable profit to doing things right.  Some number of companies will look at the foreign 'market', see it an order of magnitude smaller than the Japanese market (even though Japan has shrunk so much since the heyday 10 years ago or so), and not care enough to pay attention and just sign with SakuraGame because they offered more money or it's easier.

Just like normal video games moved the bar up, but there's NISA and Tecmo Koei trying to drag it back down - the real threat is lowering the bar, so 'good enough' starts including bad work.

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10 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

The definition of  'good enough' is that it is... good enough. So while I appreciate time and effort spent going above and beyond to do excellent work, 'good enough' is perfectly acceptable. That's what it means.

To me, this "good enough" usually implies a negative connotation. As in... "it's not good, but we'll have to accept it because there's nothing better out there and there'll likely never be". Of course, what's "good enough" for someone is indeed a subjective matter, but for me, even if I consider something "good enough", I still think it's a bad translation. To some, bad translations can and will hinder the experience, no matter how much one tries to overlook all of its problems and think of the translation as "good enough".

10 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

Where it gets weird is that 'good enough' changes over time.  Standards change.  Work that was 'good enough' for video game translations in the late 90's / early 2000's will generally not pass today's minimum standards.  Mostly, it doesn't qualify as 'good enough' anymore.  Companies have raised the bar over time to bring the average up enough that people demand better.

That's indeed true. I can look back upon some old translations from the 90s and have a totally different opinion of them when I read them nowadays. Our standards did change, even if only for a bit. When you have good translations to compare with, you can see the underlying issues of old bad translations you may have thought of as good before.

10 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

And that is the real threat here:  The VN scene still does bad enough business that SakuraGame's business model - 'burn the forest down and profit off the ashes' - probably provides a comparable profit to doing things right.  Some number of companies will look at the foreign 'market', see it an order of magnitude smaller than the Japanese market (even though Japan has shrunk so much since the heyday 10 years ago or so), and not care enough to pay attention and just sign with SakuraGame because they offered more money or it's easier.

Just like normal video games moved the bar up, but there's NISA and Tecmo Koei trying to drag it back down - the real threat is lowering the bar, so 'good enough' starts including bad work.

:cry:

Yeah, I am aware of what you said already. There's not enough money circulating in the VN localization business to make it profitable for companies to increase their product quality. And there are, of course, companies like SakuraGame to "burn the forest down". I know all of this. And I know that this is one of the major reasons why "good enough" is something most of us are satisfied with. The danger of lowering the bar of "good enough" is always present due to companies like you mentioned already.

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48 minutes ago, Satsuki said:

From the point of view of a non-native, I think the translation is pretty good (at least for the story and character background).

The screenshots though, are questionable.

What the hell is a "sighed dish"?

Makes me really wonder why they just didn't use "side dish" instead of "sighed dish" for this pun but maybe there is something my bad English doesn't know here.

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1 hour ago, Satsuki said:

From the point of view of a non-native, I think the translation is pretty good (at least for the story and character background).

The screenshots though, are questionable.

What the hell is a "sighed dish"?

The marketing materials could have been translated by a different team, been held to a more relaxed time schedule, or received more review.  As far as evidence hierarchy goes:
Random scenes from the main game > demo > screenshots > other marketing materials

If the screenshots are poorly translated, that's more likely to be representative of the game's translation than character profiles and such.  At least they're selling the game in Japanese so you can ignore the English translation completely if you want.

Edited by sanahtlig
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19 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

Even with the original Japanese I can't decipher multiple screenshots.  The translations are definitely not right, but without context I can only guess what they're supposed to mean.  It's similar to the bewilderment of walking into a casual conversation at a random point, where the subject matter is cloaked by ambiguous pronouns and references known only to them.  The lines I can decipher are superficial and tell us nothing about the characters or setting.

Screenshots are supposed to be carefully chosen to highlight selling points and themes--not randomly chosen.  It makes you wonder if they even played the game they're selling.

Which of the screenshots are mistranslated? They look fine to me. 

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Screenshots 3,4,7 read like nonsense.  A large part of this may be lack of context (they chose the screenshots, not me), but the Japanese in screenshot 3 contains no mention of sighing, 4 refers to herself and not the listener, and I have no idea where "side effect of intense aggression" came from in 7.  Could be censorship of a reading of 盛り, which is sexual.  The English in 7 in particular is an incoherent mess of sentence fragments.

I'll leave it to people who've played the Japanese version to untangle the mess of puns and fill in what these lines are actually supposed to mean.

Edited by sanahtlig
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18 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

Screenshots 3,4,7 read like nonsense.  A large part of this may be lack of context (they chose the screenshots, not me), but the Japanese in screenshot 3 contains no mention of sighing, 4 refers to herself and not the listener, and I have no idea where "side effect of intense aggression" came from in 7.  Could be censorship of a reading of 盛り, which is sexual.  The English in 7 in particular is an incoherent mess of sentence fragments.

I'll leave it to people who've played the Japanese version to untangle the mess of puns and fill in what these lines are actually supposed to mean.

Aside from the "sighed" thing there's nothing wrong with that line. But even then, it's fairly obvious to see that it's a pun on side. As for why, I don't know, but it probably has something to do with the original pun being with "soba".

The fourth one they just switched "I'm pitching to you" to "You're up to bat". Simple change, and this is done all the time in professional translations. 

As for the last one, I'm not sure what about it is "nonsense". The "side effect of intense aggression" is obviously referring to the からくるもの and not the サカリ part itself. If you look up to the SD image, you see the word testosterone. Testosterone is related to both sex drive and aggression. As for the sentence fragment issue, VNs are full of sentence fragments. The wording of the line here makes it pretty obvious that it continues off of a previous line so I'm not sure where the confusion lies.  

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