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JAST should hire fan hackers to do their localizations!


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JAST and Mangagamer should hire fan hackers to do their localizations.

Let the fan translators do the entire port. Our hackers have all the tools. Why do we have to wait on them in the supply chain? They are too inefficient!

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Wanted to link to this really good article too, which ReTrans shared me... http://p2pfoundation.net/Shanzhai

Shanzhai is a term referring to the counterfeit goods manufacturers in China. The term itself is degenerative and the mention of it in the media often come with redicure and dismissive attitudes. However, for those who are willing to see behind the skin deep counterfeit enclosures of these "shanzhai" products, there is a super efficient and organically emerged open innovation ecosystem to be discovered and studied that would serve as a model of open innovation we are trying to promote here.

The Shanzhai factories clustered in Shenzhen started out as counterfeiting cell phones from brands like Nokia and Samsung. However, in the recent years, the ecosystem has developed into a major industry of its own estimated to be shipping 300 millions cell phones a year which accounted for a quarter of global mobile phones productions. The main market for these shanzhai phones are China, India, South America, Middle-East, and Arfica. Recently G'Five, a 4 years old Chinese brand from Shanzhai overtook Samsung as #2 cellphone vendor in India and is expect to pass Nokia for the #1 spot in the next few years.

The informal economy accounts for the livelihood of 70% of all human population in developing countries and 15% in developed countries (and those are conservative estimates). i.e. they make their living on the black market.

now if only fan translation can speed up the economies that have been given monopoly protections. Because they are dragging us back.

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I'm not entirely sure what "black market" means. But I do remember buying some knockoff wallscrolls and fansub tapes at comic book stores. A few fans will sell custom game cartridges for games which were never formally translated or released. Oh yeah, and to this date, it's not difficult to find "region zero" DVDs on eBay.

Over the last few years, there's been several collaborations with companies and fan translation groups:

* It took some time, but No Name Losers and Minori eventually worked out their differences, and worked with Mangagamer to release the first Ef game.

* Dakkodango created a full translation of a worksafe Windows version of Eien no Aselia. Some time later, JAST licensed this game. They had talked about working with the original game creators on the translation, but ended up working with Dakkodango instead.

* Sekai Project had already made a great deal of progress on School Days when JAST got the rights to the game. The two groups worked together to release it.

* Shuffle! was being translated by some fan when Mangagamer got the rights to it. This was a frustrating experience, because I foolishly imported the untranslated game...

* Several VNs that began as TLWiki's projects were eventually licensed.

I'm probably forgetting a few. There have been a few console game creators that acknowledge the existence of a previous fan translation. (For instance, the people who translated Front Mission for DS were familiar with the fan-made translation of the same game on SNES.)

Always remind yourself that it could be worse. Remember the days when Himeya Soft would release professional translations with an absurd number of typos and inconsistencies? Remember the slow, frustrating DVD-ROM format that Hirameki often used, and how the company made foolish decisions such as censoring blood in Anima Mundi?

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But the economic value here is the creation of new translated works for society. The end user could care less what process it took to create these translations. They want more translations. For more games. They want to be able to play more of these awesome japanese titles. Not even 1% of VNs coming out today have a chance of being translated.

* If NNL didn't work with minori, they would be releasing Supipara, Eden and the Ef fan disc by now. These 2 years have been completely wasted. NNL managed to put out ONE HALF of a game that had already been released! (i.e. 2 years where we got nothing)

* Dakkodango would have put out Seinarukana anyway without JAST. Just as they put out the prequel without JAST.

* Sekai Project would have put out School Days anyway without JAST.

And then a whole range of games on TLWiki was put on backburner. Steins;Gate, Muramasa. The partnership with peter payne has delayed all of these indefinitely. if it weren't for the partnership these would already be in the world.

It is the use of monopoly privileges and the hoax of IP that causes these people to make decisions that are economically insane. A form of tyranny of the mind.

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The important thing about Shanzhai is that it works because it isn't only copying, but copying and innovating. Here's another good read about it.

One of our goals as a localisation technology provider is to streamline the process from text extraction to patch creation, but we still need translators to do the bulk of the work. The bottleneck to getting more translations out isn't "hacking", it's finding enough people to translate all those VNs. Encourage the consumers to get into learning Japanese and doing their own translation, to give back into the ecosystem (as you mentioned about the gift economy). Make it easy (and fun) for them to do that, not "shoot them down before they can fly" unlike what the "old culture" was doing, and translators will increase.

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JAST and Mangagamer should hire fan hackers to do their localizations.

Let the fan translators do the entire port. Our hackers have all the tools. Why do we have to wait on them in the supply chain? They are too inefficient!

The fan translators doing the localizations also have the tools (and sometimes also damn good hackers far better than the original programmers). The Japanese companies just want their own tools to be used, by their own people.

It would be much more efficient if it were done by the people who can do it most quickly, but the Japanese side has a lot of negotiating power - if they insist on doing it themselves, there's not much the people doing the localization can do about it.

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How much does it cost to license a VN?

Nobody tell how much they paid to license whatever anime/manga/game. The only source I have is for Shin Koihime Musou :

For Shin Koihime Musou to be feasible, we would need to be confident that one of the following was certain to happen:

A/ Sell over 2,000 copies at ~70-90 EURO a piece.

B/ Sell at least 2,000 copies of each third of the game at 30 EURO a piece.

C/ Sell over 6,000 copies at 35 EURO

that's more than $200,000 (for the voiceless version!!!) and that's probably just to break-even the licence cost.

edit: I don't "count" the price asked by Key for Kanon ($1,000,000) because they just don't want to have their games licensed.

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All of the articles linked to from this post have been very interesting. Something I noticed while reading each article was my innate, immediate linking of Shanzhai products with "cheap knock-offs" and poorly constructed products. Clearly, Shanzhai refers to something greater and more ideological. While I don't agree with all of the tenants I read on those articles, it did remind me of a TED talk that I really enjoy:

TED Talk - Kirby Ferguson: Embrace the remix (nine minutes)

PS: Aaeru, do you still have the link to that one TED talk of the guy who makes (purses? saddles?) and talks about blatantly stealing from others in the process of creativity?

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