Six whole months

You know what I could really go for, actually…

…Since we started the Hoshi Ori translation, and more than three since my last blog post. God dammit. How am I so incredibly bad about doing these more frequently, you might ask? I think it’s some combination of me not having much to say in the first place because I’m a relatively mild person (please), and the fact that in most cases I would rather spend my free time doing other things, like translating.

So what’s been going on with me since the last blog post? Excuse me while I go read that blog post to see what I even said last time.

So apparently I’ve only written up two blog posts this entire time while I’ve been TLing Hoshi Ori—three if you include this one. I feel kind of sorry for anyone out there who actually enjoys reading this kind-of inside look at the process, because that’s an actual garbage amount of content I’ve been producing. I just really don’t have that much stuff to talk about, I guess. I’m boring. Sue me.

Okay so first off, I actually did end up buying a digital piano after Rikka route. I’ve always wanted to start learning piano, and I guess that route was just the final push of inspiration I needed. I picked up a Roland FP-30 and I’ve been playing it pretty much at least two hours a day every day since I got it in January. I’m currently trying to learn Moon from the Umineko soundtrack, as well as Zense from the second Yorushika album.

I’ve also back to playing fighting games a lot more now. Kinda started with Guilty Gear Xrd and Melty Blood with some people from the discord server (which is arguably the only genuinely good part of that hellhole of a server now), and now I’m playing a lot of Under-Night In-Birth Exe: Late[ST] or whatever the hell the full name for UNIST is. If you ever want to play with me, just let me know and we can lobby and stuff. Join the discord, I’ll add you to the hidden fighting game channel, and you can just mute everything else because it’s worthless.

Anyway, onto talking about relevant things. I’m really sorry, but I don’t have anything amazingly important or poignant to say after finishing Hoshi Ori. Just kind of tired and melancholy in a deeper way than usual. What follows is going to be my usual stream-of-consciousness style of writing these posts.

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Natsuki route is out, which brings our translation project for Hoshi Ori Yume Mirai to a close. I’ll write an in-depth review for it sometime soon like I did for Hatsukoi, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how much I loved it. I’m probably going to at least give it a 7/10.

Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and reflect on what’s going on with your life.

Natsuki route’s pretty good. I have a few gripes with it, but those are more like complaints that I have with Hoshi Ori in general that seem especially apparent in Natsuki’s route. One of which is the fact that the other heroines pretty much completely disappear in the after arcs. I feel like Natsuki is so sociable that it would’ve made a lot of sense to have more scenes with the circle of friends in her after. Though Natsuki route’s after does have a day where Natsuki herself straight-up just doesn’t appear and instead you go out drinking with Shuuichi. I wish every route had a scene where everyone got together to hang out or something. I know it happens in some of the weddings in the routes, but still.

Otherwise, it’s a good route with what I consider to be quite the nice confession scene. I think Natsuki’s dynamic with Ryousuke is fun, though I think some of the HCG art could’ve used some work. There’s one in particular in the after that’s absolutely hilarious-nukige tier. The best part is that a cropped version of that HCG appears toward the end of the route ED after a very emotional scene and it toootally ruins the moment. It’s the funniest thing in the world and I just cracked up when I saw it.

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So now I’m done with Hoshi Ori. I’m repeating myself for the umpteenth time at this point, but once more. Hoshi Ori is the VN that got me to start doing visual novel translation in the first place. I’m really glad that regardless of what happens in the future, I got to finish the project that I had really been wanting to do all along. I’m sure I’m blessed for that, and that there are others out there who had to compromise on the projects they really wanted to do because of technical constraints or issues with continuing midway through. The former almost happened to us with Hoshi Ori, and I’m certainly not going to censure people for finding themselves unable to continue with a project. Oftentimes, real life ensues, or you just burn out. It can happen completely out of nowhere, without you even noticing.

I’ll elaborate a bit on that, I guess. I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I have actually burned out from translation in the past. I took on a lot of series at once back when I was a TL in Red Hawk Scans, and I burned out. Burning out wasn’t anything dramatic or whatever. I just eventually realized that there was a kind of mental block over my enjoyment of translation. It’s not like I translate to learn Japanese or whatever like some people do (horrible idea by the way—don’t do it), so obviously the only real incentive for me to TL is the fact that it’s enjoyable for me. Well, one day, it just wasn’t. So I told the head TL that I think I burned out and I retired from all of my series. And now I recall saying this in an earlier blog post or something too, but when I finally came back from my hiatus I had found that the main series I was in charge of before (Beelzebub) had been taken over by a TL whose style I was nooot really a fan of. But, so it goes.

I guess this is a serviceable segue into a topic I said I’d go into more detail about in a previous blog post. I vaguely recall saying at some point that I personally find manga scanlation to be more stressful than VN translation. The reason for that is that scanlation put a lot of pressure on me timing-wise because of the way the chapters are parcelled out weekly or so. Back when I did a weekly series, I would have to ensure that I was very much free and ready to TL for a good two-hour block on a specific day of the week every week. I remember I built my university class schedule around the fact that our early raws for Shounen Jump would usually come in on Wednesday.

Old IRC logs of my PR for Beelzebub and I discussing our IRL schedules so we could line up script timings. Hopefully Epok won’t mind me putting this up.

Meanwhile, VNTL is this big, heaping, comforting pile of work that I only have to do eventually and I can just chip away at it whenever I feel like it for as long as I want. I mean, sure, Irru complains at me if I don’t TL some days, but I’d rather face his wrath than have to worry about fucking Mangastream sniping the series I work on because I took longer than an hour to TL the 1,800-word Nisekoi script for the week.

And yeah, the other thing is probably that the “scene” or whatever the hell people would call it for VNTL is markedly different from scanlation. In my experience, scanlation was pretty cutthroat. If a series was popular, you’d genuinely have to worry about people trying to snap it up by doing it faster than you. One thing that contributes to that kind of tense atmosphere is probably the fact that the majority of the population that reads manga is pretty much the absolute lowest common denominator of internet weeb who don’t give a single damn about quality as long as they get their weekly fix and they get it fast. In fact, I’ve complained about this very point before on this blog back when I was still trying to do Nisekoi after RHS dissolved. The gist of that story is that we lost access to the early raws we made use of back in RHS and so the Nisekoi reddit community took it upon themselves to essentially do some of the worst translation work I’ve ever seen and Irru and I hated it. I think back then I took a relatively mild stance but looking back on it now I’m super salty.

Meanwhile, the VN community at least kiiinda cares about script quality? And individual projects are such big undertakings that trying to “scoop” a VNTL is actually a ridiculous idea because it’s possible that you won’t beat the group that’s already working on it and then you’ll have wasted a huge amount of effort. But yeah, I see people discussing things like translation correctness and script quality on /vn/ and whatever. It also helps that there are vocal, named people within the community who have a certain amount of clout that let them bring topics of discussion up that in manga TL would be relatively inaccessible to the average reader. TLs who criticize and comment on poorly done releases, editors who talk about script quality, whatever.

So in a nutshell, VNTL is leagues more comfy than manga TL because there’s a lot less pressure. I can just take my time, relax, and TL bit by bit. Also a slightly less garbage community.

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Since I’ve already said that there’s not going to be any kind of pomp and circumstance to this post, I’m just going to carry on and talk about some more general translation stuff. This time, I want to vaguely muse over the idea of translation versus localization, and where I stand on the issue. Spoilers, but I’m just as mild on it as ever.

So back in the day, I used to be quite the literal translator. I think I discussed it briefly back in my post on writing quality as a TL, but my MO used to be to have a fairly literal translation of the Japanese and leave it to the proofreader to make it flow better. Obviously I’d finalize after the latter process to make sure the changes didn’t clash too much with the original Japanese, but my TLs were essentially just the Japanese sentence, but in English. Nowadays, I’ve become a lot more liberal, and the mental process of translation more becomes something along the lines where I read the Japanese line, think about what exactly it’s trying to say, and come up with an English sentence that says the same thing. Or multiple sentences. I’ve somewhat recently realized that a lot of Japanese sentences are much, much better phrased through multiple English sentences.

I know I localize to some extent in my scripts. One that came up recently is my choice to translate 台風 as “hurricane” instead of “typhoon.” The only difference between the two is the geographical location; they’re both the same tropical storm. But if you want to be precise, Japan experiences typhoons and never hurricanes. So why do I choose to use “hurricane”? The reason is because I’ve lived in the United States for like fourteen years straight now and I specifically translate into American English. You’ll note that I use “toward” instead of “towards” and don’t spell color with a u—in my scripts at least—my casual typing leans vaguely toward British English because I initially learned English from a Canadian teacher at an international school in Kyoto. I hope that stuff’s actually Canadian spellings and the dude wasn’t just bullshitting me the whole time. Anyway, to go into more detail. I use “hurricane” because it provides the same visceral reaction to most western readers that “typhoon” does for Japanese people. Honestly, from my own point of view, my initial reaction to hearing “typhoon” in casual conversation is to assume people are talking about a local sports team or something. Meanwhile, hurricane has a more instant connotation for me in that I more closely associate it with my mental image of an intense storm with gale-force winds and such.

Another example of me changing things around in favor of localization is when an anon on /vn/ pointed out that I translated “tanuki statue” to “garden gnome” in the scene where the others all get busted trying to peek on Rikka and Ryou about to kiss. Marika says something along the lines of, “Just keep going, pretend I’m a tanuki statues or something,” by which she essentially meant to pretend she was an inanimate object that you could find out on the street that you wouldn’t really pay attention to. I went with garden gnome because I figured that would mean more to a western reader than tanuki statue. But then I was told by that anon that anyone who watches anime would know what a tanuki statue is, which kind of got me thinking as to whether I should be translating for weebs or for a more general audience. I’d imagine most of the people who would read Hoshi Ori would be weebs, but I’m already doing random shit like translating karaage as fried chicken, so… Either way, whatever.

Apparently if you watch anime, you know what these are and what cultural significance they have. But come on, what kinda giganto-nerd watches anime?

The other thing I “localize” at this point is wordplay. Which isn’t really localization. I got away with it [not really though] back in scanlation through bullshit like TL notes in the margins to explain puns, but I can’t really do that in VNs (wish I had something like the TIPS screen from Umineko and stuff where I could put a glossary that explains the slightly more obscure Japanese stuff like Shichi-Go-San).

So yeah, nowadays I just make up new puns altogether. Like the one in Sora route that I surprisingly have yet to catch any flak for as of yet with the mustard. Ryou brings Sora something he thinks she’d like to try to have an excuse to strike up conversation with her. In the original Japanese, it’s a bag full of sweetened umeboshi (plums pickled in vinegar and usually also perilla) and the joke he’s trying to make is based on “hoshi” for star and “umeboshi,” because the bo is just what ho would become when hoshi gets linked to another word (e.g. like “nagareboshi” for shooting star). So I decided to go with mustard because it was a similarly weird food item for someone to give someone as a gift and that way I could actually make a mu-“star”-d to “star” pun. Plus mustard actually does go well with yakisoba bread. Also I spent literally like two days trying to come up with alternatives for that and mustard was the best I got. Kinda related, I also spent about an entire two days trying to think of how best to do the “advanced shiritori” scene from early on in Touko route. Not exactly satisfied how that one turned out either.

Now that I’ve talked about what localization I do, I guess I’ll talk about the localization I won’t do. I’m not really a fan of removing honourifics, but I’ve done it before. I only did it back when I did manga TL for series that weren’t even set in Japan or a Japan-like setting (i.e. Nanatsu no Taizai). I feel that if you’re going to have literally anything in your script that indicates this game takes place in Japan, then you might as well just use honourifics because it’s just another part of Japanese culture that’s going to work its way into how social dynamics feel. Also, if you don’t use honourifics, then you might as well not use last-name basis for non-intimate relations, and then what the hell are you going to do about the inevitable scene in a moege when the couple starts calling each other by first name? Just rewrite it completely? I might be a hypocrite somehow in saying this, but I feel like that might cross a vague line inside me somewhere for things I wouldn’t allow myself to do.

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It’s now been about three days since I wrote that last section. I thought I was going to finish and publish this blog post sometime over the weekend, but I felt extremely lethargic the entire way through. It must be all my pent-up procrastination working its way out after finishing Hoshi Ori or something.

As a brief aside, I vaguely want to mention a new release for VNTL that I somewhat have thoughts on. It’s really only worth mentioning because it’s rare for me to know anything about something other than what I’m working on at all, much less have an opinion. An English translation patch for Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai was recently “leaked” by the translation team. I’m sure anyone reading this probably knows already (better than I do, even) but I put quotes around “leaked” because the details behind the release are just that the TL pretty much vanished a while ago so they decided to push the patch out because they got sick of waiting for him to reappear.

Someone on /vn/ brought up some comments that Quof had to me that were criticizing the translation quality of the project and asked me to confirm what he was saying. I don’t have the image on me Quof was using, but from what I saw with the comparisons between the original JP and the English translation, my impression is that whoever was TLing that VN wasn’t fluent in Japanese. I could see several errors that were pretty egregious that I couldn’t ever see someone who understood Japanese ever making. I won’t bother nitpicking through the script because this isn’t that kind of blog and I don’t really feel like it. But in addition to the errors, I also saw several lines that flowed well enough, but appeared to be missing half of the meaning from the original Japanese. From that, my guess is that the project suffered from a combination of a TL who tried for something that was a little outside the bounds of his capabilities and an editor whose changes weren’t finalized by someone who knew Japanese. I’d imagine the latter would’ve been difficult to avoid, but it’s still worth noting for anyone who is or is considering reading Daitoshokan. Also something to consider is that Quof told me that the image he used to back up his claims (and thus what I’m referring to as the errors I looked at) were just the things he found within the first ten or fifteen minutes or so of reading. I hear it’s still a pretty entertaining read though, so do whatever. Not like I read VNs myself.

It just goes back to something I’ve always harped on from up on my soapbox that I think a finalization step is always necessary for translation scripts. The translator needs to have a good grasp of how far a line can be stretched with a liberal translation before it becomes a different sentence with a different meaning entirely. Which means that a good translator should be just as proficient in English as they are in Japanese (assuming of course they’re fluent in Japanese). An editor is still necessary—having a fresh, different set of eyes look over lines written by someone whose brain has to constantly switch between Japanese and English grammar etc. is useful for obvious reasons. But, I think that the very least a TL should have and should exercise the right to be the final arbiter on changes made to his own script. Or at the very least there should be someone who’s fluent in Japanese look over the changes and make sure things are still okay.

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Anyway, I think I did enough preliminary introspection over the weekend (probably, at least—it’s not like I actually spent time on it or whatever) to maybe start musing about how I feel after finishing Hoshi Ori? We’ll see where I end up.

Irru and I have been doing VNTL for a little over two years now, as I reflected on in my last post. It’s not really that long compared to how long I scanlated for in terms of “how many years have you been doing this for?”, but I think hours-wise, I’ve sunk just as much time into this stuff as I did for manga, if not more. Back in those days I was a part of a large group and I had a large number of people to talk to over IRC and stuff. Nowadays, it’s just Irru and me, and now I have this hilariously degenerate Discord server which apparently self-moderates via the fact that I really don’t care at all as to what goes on in there. I have a few acquaintances or maybe even friends who are also VNTLs, but things have definitely changed since back then.

As to whether it’s a positive change, I’m not really sure. My current job doesn’t really afford me the luxury of being “on call” to TL like I had to be for scanlation, so I don’t really think it’d even be an option for things to be the same for me at this point as they were back then. But I do still wonder occasionally what the RHS people are doing nowadays. I know Jag still does manga stuff with his own group, and I bet that the RHS channel on IRC still exists, considering people are really lazy and will probably never take it off their startup list. I just don’t try to get in because I’d need to somehow figure out how to PM FKS or someone and ask them to re-add me to the admitted list and then register a nick and all that stupid IRC stuff.

Things are definitely more comfortable for me right now with VNTL. Like I’ve always said up until now, at this point translation is just a way to relax. Was never really the case with manga TL, as you might guess. And I definitely enjoy translating VNs more than reading them. Even while I was reading moege or Umineko with Irru, I always had trouble working up the motivation to agree to resume reading. It’s a miracle I got through something of Umineko’s length, honestly. Meanwhile TLing is such a low-activation-energy activity that I can just start it up whenever I have time.

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I guess the natural question after typing out all this stuff about how I enjoy VNTL is whether or not I’m going to be continuing. Hilariously enough, it turns out that after reading something like 3.5k words in this post, there is absolutely no payoff. My answer is that it still hasn’t been enough time for me to figure it out quite yet.

I’m vaguely leaning toward continuing at the moment, but that’s mostly because I’m still hot on momentum immediately after finishing Hoshi Ori. Working on Hoshi Ori had become somewhat of a routine these last six months, to the point that I didn’t really know what to do with myself on the weekend immediately after finishing. I would very, very much like to do GinHaru. The motivation is there for sure, but what’s really required for a long project isn’t just motivation, but also discipline and a kind of long-term stability in terms of my state of mind. I’ve already been distracting myself as of late with various other hobbies (fighting games and piano), an d my actual job is—as I always say—relatively high workload.

There’s also the fact that my PI wants me to do my thesis proposal sometime in the middle of May. Which means that even if I do decide to continue, I will be taking an actual, extended break from translation so I can focus on getting my proposal together. This is a relatively big step in terms of my entire career I’m facing down, so I need to buckle down and do good work that I’m satisfied with. The rest of April and the beginning of May I’ll be focused on my stuff for work, while also drafting out a review for Hoshi Ori in my free time.

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I guess it’s time for a closing statement, as this blog post is apparently now over 4,000 words long. It’s somehow ended up even more rambling and disjointed than usual, without much in the way of profundity to speak of.

My final thoughts on things? Hoshi Ori was wonderful. There’s a part of me that is completely fine with that being my final translation project. Working on it was fulfilling, relaxing, and satisfying. It was everything I wanted out of my braindead moe TL work and more.

Real talk though I’m gonna reread Marika route at some point for sure.

I do once more still have a few regrets about the release though. If you recall, we weren’t able to translate the note that appears at the end of Runa’s ED in Hatsukoi because we don’t have any way to repack the movie files that play in-game. Unfortunately, there’s a similar issue in Hoshi Ori where there’s a very wonderful scene in Touko’s ED where a signature card appears and everyone’s comments celebrating Touko and Ryou’s wedding appear on it one by one. We couldn’t edit that movie and repack it into the format required by the game engine, so we had to make do with including a still image in the patch. Which is a goddamn shame and I’m actually livid that we weren’t able to do it in-game.

I got started on editing an extracted video together and everything…

But in spite of our failings on the technical stuff, I’d like to think we did a pretty good job with Hoshi Ori. I’m very glad we did the projects we did before it too, at least in retrospect. We all know I personally enjoyed Hatsukoi a lot, but Tsujidou was also a good experience in that it got me to think more about wording and including personalities into dialogue in a natural way. It was also beneficial in that working on Tsujidou was so abysmal for me that it got me to power through something like fifteen h-scenes for the Hatsukoi appends in about three weeks total just because the latter was so much more bearable. Improving my skills while on the road to getting to work on what is essentially a grail project for me was really satisfying for me, and I think it makes for a nice story. A really boring, mundane story, but nice to me, at least.

My busy month and a half or so starts this week, starting with a first draft of my written proposal that I want to have done by Monday. I’ve been outlining what I want to discuss in a review for Hoshi Ori, so I’ll start working on that when I have time. In addition, I’ll probably have another blog post in the near future discussing my future plans in more concrete detail, regardless of how things end up.

Thank you to everyone who has read the things I’ve TLed, whether that be manga or VN, and to everyone who has recommended, criticized, corrected, enjoyed, complained about, hated, or improved my work both directly and indirectly. And Irru because he just bitched at me about not mentioning him by name. This sentence and the last one are the two most recent ones added to this post. Anyway, I’ll be back to talk and probably ramble again here soon enough.

But for now, goodbye.

REUSING MATERIAL ARE YOU KIDDING ME
RUIN THE MOMENT MORE WHY DON’T YOU