The VN community in Brazil and other Portuguese speaking countries

[Frost51]

While checking the forums, I found this really interesting thread on the Spanish language VN community. While I'm sure a lot of the users are from English speaking countries, the world is quite big and a lot of the interaction people have with visual novels are out of international reaches. 

So, I decided to write a thread on th Brazilian VN community akin to Okarin's original post, which is available at the end of this one. I'm not that aware of its current state in Portugal, Cape Verde and other Portuguese speaking countries. If you want to add any info on it, please feel free to add your comment in this thread.

The Need for FanTLs

While English is definitely the "international" language in the west, the majority of our country's population isn't really that knowledgeble on foreign languages. Portuguese is known for its difficulty, and most natives really struggle with high level formal speech; to the point legal documents are almost written in a different language by itself; it would be rather utopic to believe the average Brazilian would have the resources to learn English in this context. Especially given the fact that inequailty and low quality education are two challenges that our country is still struggling against. 

Believe me, it's definitely hard to study a different language when you are overworked and not being able to get an appropriate income. According to the British Concil, literally only 1% of our population is English fluent. The already mentioned facts are some of the main reasons, but it should also be stated that English sounds are rather alien to the average Portuguese speaker. To most of us, they are really hard to figure out and replicate.

Consequently, how would the community grow? The answer is simple: through fan translations. Back in the PlayStation 2 era, most games wouldn't get translations to our language, so a lot of the most avid players would eventually learn how to speak, listen and read English. These people would eventually focus on efforts that might date back to the early 2000s. Classics such as Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill have been translated to Portuguese and we have a rather big hacking scene, dominated by sites such as GameVicio.

VN FanTLs in Brazil

Curiously, VN translations in Brazil date back to the early 2000s! If you focus on the PC-98 niche, you'll find out that Divi-Dead and Immoral Study 1 - Reiko Shirakawa. While you had an emphasis on translating these games for the ecchi content, you already had a pretty solid setup, especially for those who wanted to research on the visual novel universe superficially.

More communities and translation groups would pick up inside the VN sphere after the mainstream success of Katawa Shoujo. Shortly after this game's success, you'll find that a lot of the mainstream titles, such as Tsukihime, Saya no Uta and Planetarian were translated to Portuguese by groups such as ZeroForce Translations and Matsuri Fansubs. 

There is a pretty nice catalogue available if you enjoy short VNs, but there sure is a lack of long kamige. While you have a really well received translation of Rewrite (which was just recently translated to English), even classic games such as Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni are still unavailable in Portuguese (partially translated only). For each translated Tsukihime or Clannad patch, there are a lot of games which won't probably see a Portuguese version any time soon.

One of the reasons is tied to how long these translation projects can go, and how small the niche is. The VN community is definitely growing in Brazil, but it can't be said that it is big crowd.

TL Quality

When you barely have any choice, it's hard to comment on quality. In a lot of the PT-BR translations, translating the text from English instead of the original Japanese script is almost a rule (and this is not exclusive to VNs). A lot of media in general is translated from a previous English TL instead of the proper, JP to PT-BR pipeline. I imagine how would picky JOPs feel about this lmao, but I think it isn't inherently a bad thing. While I'm sure anyone would pick a quality translation instead of one of those, availability sure is a thing; and I think people respect here anyone who spends their free time to get a given artpiece a bit more accessible. Except if it is offensively bad, but yeah.

Still, there are some projects that do take pride of their quality. For instance, Umineko's Portuguese translation was officially approved by The Witch Hunt and translated directly from Japanese. Since it's still a growing niche, we will have to wait to find out more on it.

Learning Japanese as a Portuguese Speaker

Curiously enough, Japanese is not a language that's as notoriously hard to learn in here than it might be to the average American. Brazil had a pretty big Japanese immigration wave since the 1900s and finding a Japanese neighborhood isn't that hard. If you don't mind spending a bit more of money, it isn't hard to find imported manga — ranging from Leiji Matsumoto's works to modern releases like Chainsaw Man. The community is also really friendly, especially if they notice that you know some Japanese. I personally got gifted a magazine on the region's attractions fully in Japanese; just because I bought one of my mangas while talking in Japanese (it wasn't even on purpose, the owner just assumed since I was looking for a specific manga lol).

Besides that, Portuguese's sounds are really similar to Japanese's, which makes the language really intuitive in terms of speaking. The only big barrier is (of course) reading and writing, so it's not rare to find Japanese descendents that know how to speak and listen the language fluently, but have a really hard time with kanji and kanas.  However, there are plenty of Brazilians who know Japanese in the international VN community and I'm sure that, if you interact frequently within it, you probably know one or two.

Communities

Lately, the VN community has been growing a lot. I own a YouTube channel myself and I released a Full Metal Daemon Muramasa review some months ago. While I  was one of the only ones made videos on VNs the first time in 2018 or something (Saya no Uta), you have plenty of options if you know Portuguese and want some quality content. Takumi Enferrujado made a Fata Morgana review that was pretty well done, Steendy has some content elaborating on eroge like Rance and YU-NO, and Ferovsky is still tackling the Muv-Luv Trilogy; and he is in the army, thus he is taking ages to complete the MLA video.

YouTube has been the  latest source of the growing interest, but there are also other older communities such as Sekai Visual Novels and Visual Novels Brazil. Plenty of friendly people too, with a some of these communities dating back to the early 2000s. Brazilians also seem to be less shocked by sexual content in videogames, unlike a lot of international readers that are really averse to h-scenes and such.

Most of the readers consume English translations, but a lot of them also read in Spanish — the closest thing we have to a second language in Brazil — and of course, in Portuguese. Considering how unequal things are, there is some elitism and such; but this might be a problem the entire  international VN community has so I digress. 

The World Isn't Limited to English

This was a small effort at documenting a bit of this community's history and, if you feel there's something wrong or some info to add, feel free to. If you would like to talk a bit about how VN fans interact in your country, also feel free to add regardless of your nationality. I'm really interested on what you are able to say, especially if you are from a Portuguese speaking country that isn't Brazil. Cheers!
 

 

Edited August 19, 2022 by Frost51

[fujoneko]

Oh man, I just LOVED this post! First of all, thank you for this! It's lovely I'm from Portugal and read almost exclusively in English, but I only discovered VNs (back in 2016) through ZeroCorpse (a en > pt-br translation blog for RPGM) and through them, I came to find ZeroForceTranslations. For some reason, even though I had only played one or two VNs, I contacted them and tried for a translator position - and lo and behold, I never left them till this day haha it's a shame we had to formally close and stop our activities (mostly because we all had our adult responsibilities and couldn't keep up) and though it's now a closed chapter in my life, I'm so proud of all the gems we translated; I'm only with ZFT since the project for Little Busters, but those were fun times for sure. Nowadays I still help where I can - either independently, with an old translation buddy or with VNX+, the great group behind Steins;Gate's translation* and I'm helping to bring our lovely catgirls to Portuguese Sadly I can confirm just how bad some TLs are... I'm not giving names, but we only took an entire year to finish Clannad's TL because the previous group working on it had translated it pretty much in a literal fashion and worse, the English fantl they followed was even more literal. Yikes. I remember how many gems we had screenshoted for that game alone

Anyways, even though I'm not Brazilian (I'm from Portugal and no I do not know where the gold is), I am a Portuguese speaker and I want more people to know how amazing visual novels are! I've made so many wonderful friends over the years and it's such an important part of my life, hehe

Aaaa, hype hype!!  

Even though Sukinime is the known Brazilian group for BL translations, I might just one day help them with some project...

 

*more specifically, I've also helped with editing a lot of graphics and stuff (e.g.: that Toradora game for PSP, for which the English TL team didn't bother to translate the minigame's titles lmao; Amnesia: Memories; Gin'iro Haruka). Oh, and I partially fan dubbed Hiyoko for Danganronpa 2 but I ended up giving up due to anxiety and uni).

Edited August 18, 2022 by Fujoneko

[Frost51]

On 8/18/2022 at 6:52 PM, Fujoneko said:

Oh man, I just LOVED this post! First of all, thank you for this! It's lovely I'm from Portugal and read almost exclusively in English, but I only discovered VNs (back in 2016) through ZeroCorpse (a en > pt-br translation blog for RPGM) and through them, I came to find ZeroForceTranslations. For some reason, even though I had only played one or two VNs, I contacted them and tried for a translator position - and lo and behold, I never left them till this day haha it's a shame we had to formally close and stop our activities (mostly because we all had our adult responsibilities and couldn't keep up) and though it's now a closed chapter in my life, I'm so proud of all the gems we translated; I'm only with ZFT since the project for Little Busters, but those were fun times for sure. Nowadays I still help where I can - either independently, with an old translation buddy or with VNX+, the great group behind Steins;Gate's translation* and I'm helping to bring our lovely catgirls to Portuguese Sadly I can confirm just how bad some TLs are... I'm not giving names, but we only took an entire year to finish Clannad's TL because the previous group working on it had translated it pretty much in a literal fashion and worse, the English fantl they followed was even more literal. Yikes. I remember how many gems we had screenshoted for that game alone

Anyways, even though I'm not Brazilian (I'm from Portugal and no I do not know where the gold is), I am a Portuguese speaker and I want more people to know how amazing visual novels are! I've made so many wonderful friends over the years and it's such an important part of my life, hehe

Aaaa, hype hype!!  

Even though Sukinime is the known Brazilian group for BL translations, I might just one day help them with some project...

 

*more specifically, I've also helped with editing a lot of graphics and stuff (e.g.: that Toradora game for PSP, for which the English TL team didn't bother to translate the minigame's titles lmao; Amnesia: Memories; Gin'iro Haruka). Oh, and I partially fan dubbed Hiyoko for Danganronpa 2 but I ended up giving up due to anxiety and uni).

Nice to hear a bit on how the VN community works in Portugal. I hear that europeans usually know more than one language — which makes sense given your physical proximity to a lot of different countries. As far as I know, you don't really have the need of a second language in Brazil or the US; given the fact that their territories are pretty big and most people have little to no contact with other frontiers.

Also glad to know I'm not the only one who has some worries on the state of Portuguese translations. Maybe because I'm a fluent English speaker for years, and because I have also helped in Persona 3 FES' Portuguese translation in the past, I'm quite aware that most projects don't have the care they deserve. Nowadays I am learning Japanese, and I hope I can do some justice on certain translations if I keep this hacking/translating hobby in the future.

I highly recommend you to try learning Japanese too. Translating from an English TL does create some noise, and the linguistic structure of English is a lot different from Japanese. I think the fact our native language is Portuguese kinda boosts our Japanese learning capabilities since we have similar sounds and our linguistic structure is not as alien to Japanese as English is. If you need any any help, I highly recommend this guide: https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/

Currently focusing on the N4 exam. Also hoping to get N3 by the end of next year. I'll keep immersing, studying and praying lol

[marcus-beta]

Well, I was invited to left a comment so, I here I'm.
I'm a hobbyist modder developer that act mainly in otaku games, My nick usually is marcussacana. but I'm not here to talk about me, so, let me complement somethings that only internal guys like me should know.
As said in the post the brazillian visual novel community still small, one day, Me and a friend called Sid started a translation project, Katawa Shoujo, in that age it was my first contact with modding and renpy as a open source engine it was easy to someone like me begin, Initially our group name it was Katawa+,  since we wanted translate katawa shoujo, and my friend Sid it was a big fan of the Nitro+, we called our group of Katawa+, just that.
After 4 years more or less, your project it was almost ready to be published, but we didn't wanted stop with just katawa shoujo, and a problem... our group, Katawa+, translating nekopara or steins;gate? a bit strange, right? So, we changed our name for VNX+, VNX where X means "incognito", so, this is the begin of our group, after publish the Katawa Shoujo, we started 2 translations, Nekopara and Steins;Gate;
Fun fact: We started Nekopara first, but we finished Steins;gate first.
I and Sid are ambitious guys, we wanted one day became the first official brazilian VN localization group.

And for that we found to need meet 3 requirements;
- A bigger visual novel community in brazil
- Contact with groups that already had experience in the market.
- Money

Maybe we are too naive and we should need many things to really do something, but we are really aiming to make that true.

So, the first requeriment it was a clear path, we should keep making translation of big titles, such as katawa shoujo and steins;gate, and wait for the community expand himself.

The second requeriment it was uncertain, isn't like we can just send a email for the support of a enterprise and say: "Hey, we want be friend to join in the market in the future".
So, we tried a certain aproach, we started contact some developers and we offered to translate their games for free, and we really did that, we did 3 translation that it was officially released in the steam for example, the biggest title for example, Fault Milestone.
Our objective here it was create a network of contact with developers that had success releasing things in the market.

So, the thrid requeriment, I never had idea of why, but Sid said me to don't care for money. Yup, I never had idea of why.
Sid passed away in the middle of our steins;gate project.
Our group continued our projects since Sid isn't a active member since the Katawa Shoujo project, but he was the one that are really trying make a official localizator in our contry, after lose him I really don't tried continue with his plan.

Our VNX+ group currently it was under administration of a new member, I gave the control of the group after IRL stuff take all my time, so the group still alive after all that.

About my group is what I can say basically.

Now, some curiosity about the fanTL community in brazil, the major part of the groups here are all friendly each other, with direct contact we helped each other when possible since our objective it was the same, share our love with visual novels with our contry, that's possible because our community isn't too large.

Currently the brazil have a new group trying to be the first official brazilian localizators, but I'm not sure if I can say any names, and who know if it will really became true.

The modding community in brazil is big, but major part of the modders don't care for visual novels, so, just look like we have few modders here.

Edited August 30, 2022 by marcus-beta

[Frost51]

On 8/29/2022 at 9:06 PM, marcus-beta said:

Well, I was invited to left a comment so, I here I'm.
I'm a hobbyist modder developer that act mainly in otaku games, My nick usually is marcussacana. but I'm not here to talk about me, so, let me complement somethings that only internal guys like me should know.
As said in the post the brazillian visual novel community still small, one day, Me and a friend called Sid started a translation project, Katawa Shoujo, in that age it was my first contact with modding and renpy as a open source engine it was easy to someone like me begin, Initially our group name it was Katawa+,  since we wanted translate katawa shoujo, and my friend Sid it was a big fan of the Nitro+, we called our group of Katawa+, just that.
After 4 years more or less, your project it was almost ready to be published, but we didn't wanted stop with just katawa shoujo, and a problem... our group, Katawa+, translating nekopara or steins;gate? a bit strange, right? So, we changed our name for VNX+, VNX where X means "incognito", so, this is the begin of our group, after publish the Katawa Shoujo, we started 2 translations, Nekopara and Steins;Gate;
Fun fact: We started Nekopara first, but we finished Steins;gate first.
I and Sid are ambitious guys, we wanted one day became the first official brazilian VN localization group.

And for that we found to need meet 3 requirements;
- A bigger visual novel community in brazil
- Contact with groups that already had experience in the market.
- Money

Maybe we are too naive and we should need many things to really do something, but we are really aiming to make that true.

So, the first requeriment it was a clear path, we should keep making translation of big titles, such as katawa shoujo and steins;gate, and wait for the community expand himself.

The second requeriment it was uncertain, isn't like we can just send a email for the support of a enterprise and say: "Hey, we want be friend to join in the market in the future".
So, we tried a certain aproach, we started contact some developers and we offered to translate their games for free, and we really did that, we did 3 translation that it was officially released in the steam for example, the biggest title for example, Fault Milestone.
Our objective here it was create a network of contact with developers that had success releasing things in the market.

So, the thrid requeriment, I never had idea of why, but Sid said me to don't care for money. Yup, I never had idea of why.
Sid passed away in the middle of our steins;gate project.
Our group continued our projects since Sid isn't a active member since the Katawa Shoujo project, but he was the one that are really trying make a official localizator in our contry, after lose him I really don't tried continue with his plan.

Our VNX+ group currently it was under administration of a new member, I gave the control of the group after IRL stuff take all my time, so the group still alive after all that.

About my group is what I can say basically.

Now, some curiosity about the fanTL community in brazil, the major part of the groups here are all friendly each other, with direct contact we helped each other when possible since our objective it was the same, share our love with visual novels with our contry, that's possible because our community isn't too large.

Currently the brazil have a new group trying to be the first official brazilian localizators, but I'm not sure if I can say any names, and who know if it will really became true.

The modding community in brazil is big, but major part of the modders don't care for visual novels, so, just look like we have few modders here.

Why don't you contact the publishers? I'm quite sure some of the smallers ones would be eager to work for some short game translations. Even bigger ones like JAST might be interested on that. Just don't expect them to contact you spontenously, usually people who want stuff like that have to go after a contract and stuff

[marcus-beta]

On 9/4/2022 at 8:44 PM, Frost51 said:

Why don't you contact the publishers? I'm quite sure some of the smallers ones would be eager to work for some short game translations. Even bigger ones like JAST might be interested on that. Just don't expect them to contact you spontenously, usually people who want stuff like that have to go after a contract and stuff

Maybe, but the market still very small yet, and by nature, even though we have a lot of anime and manga consumers, visual novels have a negative stigma here, not as eroge, but as 'a pointless game where all you do is click and read', so even anime fans a lot Sometimes they don't go out of their way to give visual novels a chance, at least until recently, dokidoki literature club went viral and now visual novels are much more recognized by the general public, but haven't aroused as much interest in other titles.
Currently the 'biggest' visual novel group in Brazil, as far as I know (If i'm wrong someone recommend me a bigger community, I really want join it), is the "Visual Novel BR" group, which has only 3,000 members, worth mentioning, a group that was created by Sid years ago.
So, with such a small audience it might be the wrong time for companies to try to invest in our country, the biggest disaster would be to fail once and lose future interest.
It is worth mentioning that even among the 3 thousand members, most of them know English, and just as Americans hear those who keep saying "Just learn Japanese", here the members usually say "Learn English" instead of trying to give national projects a chance.
I'm also already a little away from translations, so I shouldn't invest so much time in projects now.

Edited September 8, 2022 by marcus-beta