/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Better OP and pastebin recommendations are welcome.

Dumping some stuff to kick off discussion.

Sorry I kept you waiting!

Huh. This might be fun

Mou! Another vn thread??

>>19510551
It can't be helped.

Rate my localisation
Oniichan = Big bro
Oniisama = Esteemed older brother
Onii = Bro
Aniki = Bruh
Nii-nii = Brotagonist
Nii-san = Broski
Onii-tama = Brochacho
Nii-sama - Broseph
Onichan = Devilish brother
Takashi-san = Takashi
Takashi = Taka
Taka = T-bro
Taka-chan = Takacute

Info on project management by Aroduc:
tenka.seiha.org/2018/02/translation-is-the-art-of-failure/

>>19510495
Formal > Functional

Some more info on project management.
http://dpaste.com/39ZMM41

"Translation is automatically compromise. But compromise the right thing."

>>19510476
>Those top translators are SELF-DESCRIBED

>>19510556
Top tier

I've posted this before, but I'll post it again and revise it even further.

You should consider that some Japanese concepts can't truly be translated into English, and honorifics are among the hardest thing to translate without losing much of the relationship nuances. Sure, you can use English titles like Lord, Sir, Mister and the like, but I find that this rarely happens.

There's also the fact that the industry's main audience are weaboos. The type that watches ecchi seasonal anime subbed, wear stuff like cats ears and naruto headbands and are not ashamed to display the stuff publicly. NOT saying that the customer is always right (which is a garbage mentality), but they are the ones that buy the stuff so pandering to them is a logical thing to do, at least from the business standpoint.

So for stuff like moege and eroge that use "Modern Japan" (or that has a lot of Japanese cultural elements anyway) as their setting, honorifics are more of a necessity if not an outright requirement.

While for VNs that use "Western Fantasy", "Sci-Fi" and the like as their setting, honorifics are really not necessary and may even feel out of place.

"Western Fantasy" is also special in that it allows for the usage of Ye Olde English, which makes the translation of honorifics easier and may even add flavour to it, provided you have a good translator/editor or else you end with stuff like what Arunaru and Aroduc did, where they just removed honorifics and called it a day. The exception to this rule are "Appeal" characters that call you an specific way, like Gurigura in Evenicle, which calls MC "Onii-chan". While you can localize it as "Big Bro", it doesn't quite have the same appeal as if it where to remain "Onii-chan".

So yeah, you CAN do away with honorifics, but you or your editor also need a good command of English to translate them successfully, and also know when NOT to remove them.

Know the type of game you're translating and know your audience and you'll make a good translation.

This was a good post from VNTS a while back.

Personally I don't think excessive effort should be made in editing to "make the dialogue sound more natural", actions falling under this umbrella being removal or honorifics, adding of English expressions or colloquialisms, switching certain words for others, etc. I think the base translation should be extremely literal, and all editing should be there to do is make sure it is grammatically correct. In my opinion, this creates its own dialect of Japanese-translated-english that the characters speak with characteristics like honorifics and translations of Japanese expressions, colloquialisms, and exclamations. Rather than trying to emulate existent dialects of native English speakers, it feels more natural for the characters to be speaking something separate since they're not even supposed to be English speakers at all.

>>19510623
I second this

>>19510607
Feeling free to remove honorifics just because the work has a "western" setting is stupid, because you're still dealing with a piece of fiction created by Japanese people and their cultural perception will inevitably bleed through the script regardless. Just look at any Tales or Star Ocean game, even if the characters have western names and features the way they're written doesn't reflect how westerners act at all. Removing the honorifics in such a case just then creates a disconnect with these characters that are for all intents and purposes "Japanese" missing part of what makes them Japanese.

>>19510623
I agree with this as well.

I think translators should do whatever they want and EOPs should eat shit.

>>19510623
>>19510635
>>19510648
The orientalism is strong with these.

>>19510623
Is it weird that actually can't tell if this is a serious post

>>19510495
Formal is better.

>>19510648
I completely agree with this post, but when the setting is LITERALLY 19th century Britain, I think the translators should make an effort to at least see if it can be made to sound like the English of 19th century Britain. For example, did the original writer make that effort within the confines of the Japanese language? Maybe that would involve discussing the work with the writer himself. The dichotomy between literal and interpretive translations as a whole doesn't really make any sense, though. Different languages have points where they can't overlap but barring that, they also generally follow the same patterns in their structure and evolution.

To add, it's really stupid when I see western-fantasy styled Japanese fantasy with a Japan analogue in the setting, but ostensibly non-Japanese characters and concepts are still referred to with Japanese proper nouns, but it's even stupider when translators change those sorts of names. I think those idiosyncratic quirks that are so prevalent in Japanese fantasy play a part in what makes it entertaining.

>>19510556
You're hired.

>>19510745
The House in Fata Morgana serves as an example here. It's set in a variety of historical European and American regions and only has one Japanese character. For the most part they succeeded in removing particular Japanese quirks from the characters, except for one point where Giselle is noted to puff out her cheeks to appear pouty, which of course is not something anyone in the west would do. The writers also used colloquial modern Japanese, and so the translators used colloquial modern English accordingly. I'm not actually sure if the Japanese script used Japanese honorifics.
>To add, it's really stupid when I see western-fantasy styled Japanese fantasy with a Japan analogue in the setting, but ostensibly non-Japanese characters and concepts are still referred to with Japanese proper nouns, but it's even stupider when translators change those sorts of names.
Do you have some examples of this? I'm not really sure what you're talking about.

If the Japanese script had honorifics in it, it's infested with Japanese culture and it doesn't matter where the setting is.

This kinda shit is why I learned Japanese so I don't have to rely on flawed translations and why I don't translate stuff for others. It's all too complicated.

You know I gotta shill this shit here now as well, right? Honorifics survey. Do it.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdC78xb3vobwtZJRHVY9ITMQtED3Xn15kvT2kaOghBoedA8GQ/viewform

>>19510948
Make it less shit and I may consider it.

>>19510999
Are you sure you want to let it end this way? How big is the total number?

To me this always seemed more of a lacking of English than a problem of Japanese, so I would always use honorifics. They contain vital information on the relationship between people speaking.
Like those rare languages where the people like proper numbers after 3 or 5 or whatever. Screw translating to deal with their lacking, teach those motherfucking savages to count properly.

>>19510666
bpitt

My argument for honorifics is solely that I have never seen a TL get shit on or thought of as low-quality because they were kept in. Alternatively, it's pretty much a very likely chance that a TL will be shit on if they aren't

oh this looks like a fun thread

impress me dorks

>>19510666
Honorifics aside, now that most projects are official it often won't be as simple as the choice of the localization team. For example, the mixed reaction to Chrono Clock's localization choices reflected on Sekai as a whole, and the reception was poor enough that Sekai has been considering doing another editing patch. Regardless of what comes from that Sekai will likely have newer localizations on a tighter leash with regards to localization choices.

>>19513814
>Sekai has been considering doing another editing patch
I thought that was a done deal, based on dovac's post.

What do you want people to discuss in the vnts thread, you huge faggot?

>>19510666
Yeah, I love seeing things I enjoyed in Japanese get ruined by a total retard so that some fags who would be better off using a machine tl can understand it in "English".

>>19511400
Persona 5 got a fair bit of negative attention for people calling it a "literal" translation as it retained honorifics and had some awkwardly worded sentences, despite that the actual translation was just as liberal as everything Atlus shits out.

>>19513814
>Sekai will likely have newer localizations on a tighter leash with regards to localization choices.
Implying they give a shit. Sekai will never strive for anything above mediocrity.

>>19513896
If you can't tell that the translation is shit then you deserve to be reading it.

>>19513916
I don't care about the people reading it, retard, I care about something I enjoyed being dragged through the mud.

>>19513916
What if I can tell that the translation is shit but don't yet have the ability to read it raw?

>>19513900
Wasn't that mostly because some translator made a dedicated website to easily spread around? A lot of people didn't give a shit in the end.

>>19513930
Read raw until you can.

>>19510778
Not him but, fantasy settings in most japanese media (Anime, JRPGs, VNs) usually have an "Eastern Nation" that's basically feudal Japan.

>>19513947
The whole thing ended up as a bunch of dumb drama. The site was made by a guy who didn't know Japanese, and was part of a series of seemingly coordinated attacks on the translation, including shitty sites like Kotaku publishing inaccurate hit pieces about the game. Due to the massive shitstorm, basically ANY criticism of P5's translation, regardless of its legitimacy, was ignored by everyone except the people who started the whole mess, who were obviously just looking for any reason to start shit.

>>19513814
>that Sekai has been considering doing another editing patch.
Pffhahahahahaha

>>19510910
>and why I don't translate stuff for others. It's all too complicated.
Eh. Once you translate for a bit you stop worrying so much. There's no such thing as a perfect translation. Neither you nor any other translator will ever produce a perfect translation, or a translation loved by everyone. It's fine to just relax and produce what you personally think is a generally good translation. I can guarantee that despite all the whining you see in threads like this and on 4chan in general, 95% of people out there will be satisfied with pretty much any translation you could put out. If you ever get nervous that you aren't doing good work and people might not be happy, just google around and see thousands of people eating up broken machine translations with a smile on their face. At the end of the day, a decent translation will be enough to make the vast majority of people happy, and even a god awful translation will make a decent chunk of people happy.

The main reason to not translate stuff is because it's a fucking lot of work and eats up a fuckload of time but that's another story.

How do people feel about Japanese characters speaking English being translated as Spanish, French, or whatever else?

I'm currently playing the English translation of Evenicle and a character named Rocinante peppers his speech with some random French words. Most of his lines aren't voiced so I wasn't sure what his original lines were like, but when I finally got to a voiced part I found he uses lots of English and it was translated into French. I understand the intent behind the change. English is foreign to Japanese readers so they decided to go with something foreign (French) to English readers to retain the same meaning behind Rocinante's speech pattern. To be fair to Evenicle, Rocinante's lines seem to be handled quite well. It is not a direct 1:1 ratio of English words translated into French words. There are instances where he uses an English word and it is not translated as French. The changes occur mostly when it makes sense to do so and other lines are left as natural reading English. So to Evenicle's credit they did not go overboard with the character and result in another D.D. from Chrono Clock.

However, I still find the use of Spanish, French, and other Latin languages to be a bit awkward in English translations. Doubly so when I read some of these honorifics debates and one of defenses for removing honorifics is that English translations should only consist of natural reading English. Yet a translation that removes honorifics (Evenicle) still found it acceptable to insert Spanish and French words. What do people think about that? Is it acceptable because it is trying to convey the original intent of the lines? Is it okay because they are common foreign words that everyone probably knows the meaning of? Is it unacceptable because it isn't English? I'd love to know other people's thoughts.

>>19514154
Well, the original Japanese had a character inserting words of a foreign language into their speech. Cutting out honorifics for natural English, and preserving the fact that a character uses foreign words in their speech, are two entirely different things.

>>19514154
I think it's fine. It's the original intent of the lines, plus if you don't know the foreign word offhand, you can usually still hear the original English in the VA.

please do not discuss J-E translation if you do not know japanese and english is not your native language
thank you
/exits stage right

>>19514154
While pic related isn't quite the exact same scenario, I find, if the engine supports it, some kind of furigana usage might be a good compromise.
If DD's outbursts in Chrono Clock had the english word above then a lot of the complaints over it would probably vanish.

>>19513814
>Regardless of what comes from that Sekai will likely have newer localizations on a tighter leash with regards to localization choices.
Doubt it. What matters most to them is how well a title sells. WagaHigh had a fine translation, honorifics and according to the Steam leak only sold ~1370 copies on Steam and was a confirmed bomb by Dovac. CC had a kickstarter to fall back on that made around $87,000, gave away a bit over 1000 Steam keys and going by peak Steam player counts both titles are practically identical in popularity, just with CC being 5 months older. Neither one has an 18+ Steam patch, and I know WagaHigh has untranslated images but I'm unsure if that's also the case for CC.

People complain all the time about SP's translation choices and how they hate when they rely on kickstarters. WagaHigh is the perfect example that catering to that fanbase that complains doesn't actually help sales. That's why no amount of complaints (especially from here) will sway their decisions, because the ones complaining aren't the ones that buy their products.

>>19514154
But Evenicle used Spanish too.

>>19513930
>>19514196
Shitty translations are not just shit because of mistranslations.

>>19514128
>It's fine to just relax and produce what you personally think is a generally good translation
The bitching is because translators ignore the general opinion and try to push their shitty ideas like the stubborn retards they are.

>>19510666
This. Anti-EOP captcha on /jp/ when?

Another link to add to the OP:
https://legendsoflocalization.com/articles/
Site with tons of info on video game translations.

>>19514670
It's not going to become a general, idiot.

>>19514128
>It's fine to just relax and produce what you personally think is a generally good translation
I personally think this is a generally good translation.

While we're at it, let's discuss this too:
https://legendsoflocalization.com/tricky-translations-1-maou-daimaou/
And what the fuck was the logic behind Arunaru's "Archfiend".

Fuck off.

>>19514674
Yes it fucking will.
It's better than shitting the VNTS thread every week with the same arguments that have been repeated over and over again.
Keeps the cancer in one place.

>>19514677
Maou = Archfiend
Daimaou = Bobadook
It's not that hard.
>>19514716
Implying one guy who doesn't like a thing can come and change everything. I bet you're the retard who thought having vnts up constantly is an amazing idea.

>>19514716
What do you want people to discuss in the vnts?

>>19514716
>Keeps the cancer in one place.
You should have no problem staying in VNTS, then.

>>19514738
I bet it's dovac's twitter and chinese steam sales of fortissimo.

>>19514299
Sekai Project is a unique in that they went out of their way to spit in the face of the core visual novel fans. As a result, catering to core fans probably doesn't have the desired result. Personally, I will never buy a Sekai Project release while I have no problem purchasing visual novels from other companies. Dovac has only himself to blame for that. He said he didn't want my money and I wasn't part of his target audience, all while gleefully ripping apart 18+ titles and telling people to deal with it.

I would hope other companies find better results by catering to their core fans. Though it is hard to tell with this community, so that might be overly optimistic on my part.

>>19514154
Unnecessary and borderline meme-stupid.
You can use a different font type to indicate the guy talks in a foreign language different to Japanese, for example.

>>19514154
My backburner survey says 6 of 10 thinks English should be kept as English in bold/italic. Would be 7 of 11 if I actually answered it myself.

>>19514251
The complaints where that she loved Kongo, and you can't "translate" that into another language. That is like having someone love ramen and you claim they like taco bell.

If you want to add your opinion my localization survey is at
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc6fSQbmBLsiAqv5u1G8EQl0L02ligeuEyCSXbbUK0wh9o3Sg/viewform?usp=sf_link

I'm not spreading it outside of 4chan to not upset the guy running his honorifics survey. But if you don't care about that guy you can spread it if you want to.

>>19515241
>Kongo
Kongou

>>19515244
Congo.

>>19515251
Fuck off, nakima.

>>19515241

I voted for translate speech quirks, but not if they fuck up.

Like how so many fuck up "-ssu" either by addings s's to randoms wordss or Simply capitalizing every Single S that appearS becauSe Screw readability.

>>19515498
What do you think about NISA translating the Prinnies ssu as dood?

>>19515587
I like it. I can't imagine the prinnies any other way. But I don't think anyone should ever copy them.

>>19514675
I don't know what the original is supposed to say, all I know is that I'm struggling to deduce the meaning of the English script there, because the first two lines don't seem at all related to the last two lines.

>>19515241
I seriously hope all of you vote for patches being free.

>>19514731
>Daimaou = Bobadook
This was just idiotic. Changing it to a reference to an obscure Australian horror movie for no reason whatsoever. Of all the changes the localisation made this is one of the least defensible.
Speaking of, I noticed several other errors in Evenicle that I don't think were in that guy's Imgur album. So here they are.
https://imgur.com/a/5byLVLL
There's also pic related, which is wrong because Gurigura has a tail, and an earlier scene confirms that she can move it, somehow. But I can't say if this is an issue with the translation or with the original script.

>>19515957
Come on, it's super easy.
ちょっと前まではさして珍しくもなく街を歩いてた人型ネコたち。
それも今は愛好家が飼っているのを見かける程度になっていた。
逆に不幸な人型ネコが減ってバランスが取れた結果で、人型ネコの飼い主として喜ばしいことだと思う。

>>19514731
>>19514738
>>19514750
...actually, let me take that back.
Dismissing actual discussion as cancer wasn't exactly a good thing to do. I'm just a bit tired of seeing the same discussion pop up week after week, without any hint of variation. Excuse me while I go back to where I came from.

>>19516105
I finished Evenicle a few days ago and most of the grammar fuckups I noticed were near the end of the game, which makes me think it must have had something to do with time contraints.

>>19514443
What are you, a communist? Translators don't have to bow down to a mob of dumb people with shitty opinions if they don't want to.
>>19514675
This is a good example. Nekopara's TL wasn't so hot and had a fair number of TL errors, but nekopara is one of if not the best selling VN in the west. Nobody really cared.

People who buy English translated VNs on steam are fucking retards, translation quality is not something that even crosses their minds.

>>19517372
If nobody cares why don't translation companies fire all their translators and just use machine translation? It would be cheaper. Maybe keep one guy on to translate all the words the machine leaves in Japanese. Then again untranslated words never mattered for Sekai either.

>>19517384
You could have omitted the "on steam" part

>>19517386

>>19517384
Which is something a lot of people in this thread aren't really thinking about: the target audience. For example, this post: >>19510615

This guy gives a huge lecture on how important honorifics are in Naruto and how keeping them in would be the better thing to do. But he forgets that Naruto is literally a show for children, aired on literal television for children to watch. The target audience is not 30 year old anime addicts on 4chan arguing about translation philosophy, it's 10 year olds who don't even realize anime is from another country. The people actually watching Naruto aren't going to recognize a single honorific, and their inclusion will just make the vast majority of watchers confused. So in Naruto's case, it doesn't really matter how many arguments you make for how meaningful honorifics are, because at the end of the day, the target audience won't recognize them.

>>19514154
I hate it. Just italicise the English or something. Even EOPs should be able to pickup that they're trying to speak ENGLISH

>>19517403
And so logically we should go full 4kids and change the names to American ones and all the food to hamburgers and jelly doughnuts for the retarded American children, right? No, that's fucking retarded. You're just pushing for entertainment being dumbed down so people don't have to learn anything.

>>19517386
Sakuragame is literally a company selling machine translations and they are successful.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/712840/King_Exit/
Ungodly bad TL, broken English, nearly every line is inaccurate... very positive score with 1,500+ reviews.

Besides that, you can look at Light Novel fan translators using mtl out the ass. It's actually like McCarthy era USA in the LN fan translation scene where everyone accuses each other of using MTL for their translations, and they're usually right. And yet people read them and enjoy them. People just have low standards.

That said, there's a difference between a bad TL and a machine TL. A bad human TL will usually be bad in ways that can be ignored, but a machine TL will just constantly make no sense and be clearly wrong in ways that can't exactly be ignored. Some communities like the LN community and HRPG community will be fine with MTL quality, but usually VN fans are less accepting. I don't think any existing VN localization company would survive shifting to MTL since their fans wouldn't accept the MTL quality.
>>19517422
That specific example was about Naruto. Naturally entertainment for kids should be translated for kids so they can enjoy it the fullest. 4kids was mainly bad for censoring and cutting stuff, which is a lot different from stylistic translation choices geared towards helping kids literally understand what the characters are saying.

>>19517460
>Sakuragame is literally a company selling machine translations and they are successful.
Not really. They're a company selling Chinese translations who do English MTLs on the side.

>>19517460
>That specific example was about Naruto. Naturally entertainment for kids should be translated for kids so they can enjoy it the fullest. 4kids was mainly bad for censoring and cutting stuff, which is a lot different from stylistic translation choices geared towards helping kids literally understand what the characters are saying.
When I was a kid I thought it was a given that when watching any cartoon there would be a bunch of new terms and concepts for me to learn. But apparently this is beyond American children, who need everything dumbed down and homogenised for them because foreign cultures are scary and incomprehensible.

>>19517469
The number of positive English reviews reflect their success in the west.
>>19517500
>When I was a kid I thought it was a given that when watching any cartoon there would be a bunch of new terms and concepts for me to learn
Is it even possible to virtue signal harder than this? Your adult pride has nothing to do with children comprehending the speech in front of them.

>>19517505
>Is it even possible to virtue signal harder than this?
I don't think you know what virtue signalling is.
>Your adult pride has nothing to do with children comprehending the speech in front of them.
Children are capable of learning. When you present a child with a word they don't know they will then find out what the word means and gain a bit of knowledge. This is an experience they won't have if you insist on localising everything to prevent that.

>>19517523
Yeah, I really think you're overestimating how skilled kids are at that kind of things. Reminder that "nimrod" developed an entirely different meaning in English because it was used in a children's cartoon and nobody knew what it meant. Honorifics are too abstract to easily pick up from context. By the time kids watching Naruto at 6AM on a saturday morning know what all the -samas and -chans mean, the show will be almost over. Inb4 you think 10 year olds will both to research terms they don't know on wikipedia.

>>19517403
I don't really give a shit about dub quality so long as it doesn't compromise the subtitles because it's directed towards that kind of audience anyways, but Naruto is a really shitty example. It ran from 1999-2014. People who were 5 when the series began would be adults by the time the series ended.

>>19517523
>>19517535
And in my opinion, you've failed as a translator if the majority of your target audience doesn't understand what's being said and has to research terms on wikipedia just to figure out basic speech. The point of a translation is to make a Japanese work comprehensible in English. Leaving in honorifics for a kids show fails that solidly.

>>19517535
>Inb4 you think 10 year olds will both to research terms they don't know on wikipedia.
Back in my day we had old paper dictionaries and encyclopaedias in the library and that didn't stop me or my classmates from looking things up when we didn't know what they were. You're not really helping the American case here.

>>19517543
The real problem here is that the original post was just using Naruto as an example to illustrate the information that honorifics can quickly provide and the other guy has interpreted it as a statement that Naruto's localisation should have retained them, rather than it simply being an argument for the importance of honorifics in general.

>>19517546
Oh my God, the virtue signalling.
>>19517554
No, I'm just pointing out that the post didn't consider the target audience. The following argument is irrelevant to the original example and is just people upset with that point.

Does Naruto even localize things? My only exposure to the series is stuff like this.

>>19517557
>Oh my God, the virtue signalling.

https://twitter.com/iiotenki/status/1022630223081361409

>>19517840
So faggots like this are lurking these threads. Pic related.
Also, it's fairly well known at this point that the Japs don't give a fuck and will believe anything that localisers say will help their products sell better, or they specifically request it be changed to accommodate western sensibilities because they don't believe westerners could appreciate it otherwise and need it altered to suit them. See Yoko Taro.

>>19517840
Nice to see Haro getting in on the circle jerk.

>>19517840
Christ. Imagine needing to take your bitching to twitter because of your insecurity and desperation for validation from others.

>>19514677
Majin -> Fiend
Maou -> Archfiend

Archfiend works if you can accept Majin as Fiend, but that translation doesn't work that well for the Rance series even if it works in SMT. The main reason I would argue that is because many Majin in the Rance series aren't monstrous enough for the term Fiend to work. All things considered, Dark Lord and Demon King are weird translations because Demon King isn't the first thing to come to mind when you think "Ruler of Dark Lords", but they feel more appropriate to the setting.

Archfiend is actually appropriate for Evenicle since Adan is the source of monsters anyways.

>>19517840
How about all you attention seeking e-celeb twitter faggots post here instead of just having an argument with a screenshot.

>>19517876
But that won't get them likes and retweets and internet cool points.

>>19517870
So what do you do when Dai Maou shows up? Great Archfiend?

>>19517881
Why not? If you want make it comedic, Hyper Archfiend works better. Or you could just cheat by using Satan or something nonsensical like Dark Seraphim.

>>19517881
Big Archfiend.

>>19517927
So you just throw out the actual meaning to have a dumb joke of a name or a blatant rewrite that you think sounds better? You should work for Treehouse.

>>19517941
Arch Archfiend.

>>19517951
Archerfiend.

>>19517881
What's wrong with Great Archfiend anyways? It even has less syllables than the original word.

What's with the autism?
Why not just write it as Evil King or Demon King?

>>19518079
But anon, it might be a girl, and then King would be wrong. We can't just use Lord instead because that's too sensible.

>>19518130
Anon, if they wanted to call her a queen they'd do Majoou. There's literally no reason not to use the literal translation here. You know if there's a loophole females can be called kings, too?

Is there an anti-EOP filter here? People who don't even know the language they have suggestions for shouldn't be posting.

>>19518130
Lord isn't really gender neutral. Lady is the female complement for that term. I guess you could use Demon Ruler and just be done with it though.

>>19518149
You should read >>19514677 because that's where they used "it might be a girl" as an argument against it. I was being facetious.

>>19517865

>>19517865
>orientalist

>>19510692
>orientalism
Hi Haro.

>>19517865
Shut the fuck up before I pull out your Boob Wars 1 translation, woman.

Why not put up some samples/stuff for anons to translate? I'm kind of curious how everyone would approach it.

>>19518634

>>19518634
This one's for the so called "top translators" who hate honorifics.

>>19518700
delet this

>>19518693
AGTP in 2008: Onii, what are you doing 今？
AGTP in 2018: Onii, 今、　何してるの？

>>19518634
おちんちん
^baby talk word for Penis, usually translated as weenie, wiener or pee pee.

>>19518710
ding dong
willie
twinkie
schlong
munchkin
super soaker

>>19518634
How about we use Hapymaher for it. Here's a conversation from it:

透:「そういう、部長だって……処女じゃない、ですか」
そう言うと、部長が腰を沈めるのを止めて、不機嫌そうに俺を見る。
弥生:「……ここまでしてる相手をそう呼ぶのはどうなのかしら」
透:「……弥生、さん？」
弥生:「さん？」
透: 「弥生」
弥生:「ええ、それでいいわ……せめて、セックスしてる時は……名前で呼んでね」

Several minutes later

弥生:「こら、またその呼び方に戻ってる。恋人なのに冷たいわ……」
透:「や、弥生さん。……弥生先輩？」
それだと咲と同じ呼び方になるなあ。
弥生:「呼び捨てで良いわよ。で、何でアリスの名前なんてよんでたの？」

I've never seen someone argue that first-person pronouns should be left untranslated because there is no English equivalent and they carry significant semantic information.

>>19518700
Scene from Fureraba:
>ひまひま、暇?
Where ひまひま (HimaHima) is the heroine's nickname and 暇 (Hima, free/spare time) is a question.
Translated, It's roughly: "HimaHima, are you free?"
In other words, a Kanji pun.

There's just no satisfying way to translate the pun, so it was left as is. And I'm perfectly okay with that.
MAYBE the tone itself can be translated, as in "HimaHima, you free?" or "HimaHima, ya free?" to denote casualness, but it doesn't actually change much.

One anon tried to translate it literally as "himahima are you freeMa" and was the laughingstock for a whole thread

Also the infamous "Holy Shit Mommy" scene from the same game. I've seen way too many people criticize it, but I've yet to hear a different approach for it.

>>19518755
> "himahima are you freeMa"
Pic related. Also, stuff like that is where TL notes would be helpful, but I suppose TL notes aren't very viable when it comes to games as opposed to anime and manga. Steins;Gate had the benefit of an in-game encyclopaedia to explain most of its references and cultural aspects but most VNs aren't that lucky.

>>19518726
Toru: "Chief, you ain't no virgin now are you?"
She stopped ridin my D and gave me the stank eye.
Yayoi: "Why are you calling me chief, we're friends aren't we?"
Toru: "How 'bout Ms. Yayoi?"
Yayoi: "Ms.?"
Toru: "Yayoi"
Yayoi: "Yes. That is correct. During the time we are doing the nasty, you shall call me by my name.

Several minutes later

Yayoi: "I said stop calling me that! That's not how you address your bottom bitch..."
Toru: "Ms, Ms. Yayoi... Upperclassman Yayoi?"
But then I'd be calling her the same thing as that other thot Saki.
Yayoi: "Just call me Yayoi. So how about you tell me why you called that other cunt's name?"

>>19518755
Hey HimaHima, you Freemothafucka?

>>19518787
Wow I didn't know NekoNyan's translators lurked /jp/ too.

>>19518787
This brought up a pet peeve of mine. How would everyone like long vowels to be handled? Should 透 be Touru, Tooru, Tōru, Tohru or are you one of those people who would omit it completely?

>>19518821
No one cares about guys' names.

>>19518821
It's either Touru or Tōru. Tooru and Toru are both just plain wrong and Tohru is a romanisation that no one outside of mirror-moon uses.

>>19518755
>One anon tried to translate it literally as "himahima are you freeMa" and was the laughingstock for a whole thread
What's wrong with that? It sounds like a pro translation to me, maybe even better.

>>19518787
Go away Chuee

>>19518850
Anon please.

>>19518872
Well clearly I didn't pay enough attention when I looked at Rikaichan before making that post.

>>19518754
Much like honorifics, you can translate around them. And also like honorifics, it can be hit or miss.
Nobody has bothered to argue against translating them because it's rarely a problem as most of the time it's a Hit, and leaving them in pretty much DESTROYS the translation, and also because their meaning can be conveyed in either Audio or Visual manner. The same could be said of honorifics too, but rarely they break a translation and depending of the type of game, are plot relevant. Also the weeb crowd. But make no mistake, they should absolutely be removed when there's no need for them just like the Japanese Pronouns are translated to their English equivalent.

But see, that is a really good question, anon. How one does translate pronouns 我々, わっし, わたくし, 俺, 俺様 etc. in a satisfactory manner? Like I said, translating around them:

I recall MG using "Royal We" for one of the characters from Funbag Fantasy.
I've also heard one instance of "Ore-sama" being translated as "My bad self" from Crunchyroll.

>whole twitter is making fun of /jp/

>>19518928
It's fine, I'm sure their egos need the kind of boost that can only come from making fun of anonymous people behind their back.

>>19518925
>Much like honorifics, you can translate around them
Do this >>19518726

>>19518925
>But see, that is a really good question, anon. How one does translate pronouns 我々, わっし, わたくし, 俺, 俺様 etc. in a satisfactory manner? Like I said, translating around them:
Wareware is easy, you just use the royal We for that, like you mentioned. That's what the Majikoi translators did for Hideo as well. The rest aren't as easy.
>I've also heard one instance of "Ore-sama" being translated as "My bad self" from Crunchyroll.
Yeah, that was Schwein in Netoge no Yome wa Onnanoko ja Nai to Omotta.

>>19518928
And /jp/ has been making fun of them for years now.

How about an English translation of a German game in which the Japanese voice acting consistently uses different honorifics?

>>19518726
>T: "Speaking of which...aren't you a virgin too boss?"
>(as I said that, she stops sinking her hips and glares grumpily at me instead)
>Y: "We've come all the way to the point of doing THIS together and you're still calling me that?"
>T: "Yayoi...san?"
>Y: "-san?"
>T: "Yayoi."
>Y: "That's better. Call me by my actual name when we're having sex at least..."

Several minutes later

>Y: "Come on, you've got back to calling me "boss" again... Kind of cold when we're supposed to be lovers..."
>T: "Y-Yayoi-san. ...Yayoi-senpai?"
>(Ehh, that's no different from how Saki addresses her.)
Y: "It's fine to just use my first name, sheesh. Anyway, you going to tell me why you were calling Alice's name?"

r8, comment and subskrib

>>19519411
Obviously I mean without honorifics. Doing it with honorifics means simply translating, I'm interested in cartel's rewrite bullshit.

>>19519423
I'm not smart enough to articifially create scenarios where I can "localise" stuff to make myself feel clever, sorry. Where's Chuee when you need him

>>19519453
But Chuee likes honorifics. He's our guy.

>>19519423
>I'm interested in cartel's rewrite bullshit.
You already got that. >>19518787 is exactly how herkz would handle it.

>>19519423
So did MG's translation have honorifics?

>>19519483
Of course. There's a shitton of scenes about honorifics, or rather how the characters are addressed, in Hapymaher. Ironically enough, there are also at least 2 scenes where personal pronouns are important, so there's that.

>>19518925
I've seen 'its ya boi' which I thought was too weird because the only person I can think of that says that still is Asmongold.

>>19519930
youtube.com/watch?v=DaJ5tQWPS9A

>>19518755
Free-a time-a, himahima?

>>19518928
It's ok, we're used to it.

>>19520288
Imagine if fast food employees were making fun of the customers who complain that there's rat meat in their burgers.

>>19520388
I mean, it's normal to tell bad costumers to fuck off. Encouraged even. Well, if your boss isn't a piece of shit, of course.

>(which we clearly don't)
Does that mean the poster in OP's pic is just another salty American ""Japanese""?
I wish it was just a meme, but every nip born in the US I've ever met acts like that.

>>19520465
Too bad those "bad customers" are your core audience.

>>19520557
>IPs: 51
Anon...

>>19520590
That's more than the number of people who bought Maitetsu.

>>19520655
Can't fault you there

What's supposed to be wrong about what they're saying on twitter? They're right as far as I can tell, as long as you don't go to 4kids levels of localization you should keep as little japanese as possible in your translation.
If you know so much Japanese what are you doing reading translations?
Honorifics are fine in most cases though, considering even the most normalfag audience know about them at this point.

>>19520810
They're a bunch of failed writers who decided changing other people's works is a great way of contributing. I get it, they work on vidya. Of course you want to reach out to dumb normalfags who can only understand Amerifat culture, but that normalfag isn't going to buy your porn game, unless it's a memege that is.
So people who translate porn games are pointlessly trying to appeal to a crowd which doesn't want their product, while alienating the people who want their product.

>>19520897
>So people who translate porn games are pointlessly trying to appeal to a crowd which doesn't want their product
Not really. People working on vns don't really care about money or customers, otherwise they'd be on a better paying job. They do it because they want to translate stuff however they see fit.

>>19520914
No, they do it for the money, and the only job that they can get with their low quality barely translation skills is VN/game translation.

>>19520914
Like I said, failed writers who want to at least make their mark on the scene in this way. Shame that it's the readers who suffer because of it.

>>19521052
You can keep believing that, but they still don't give shit about what you or any of us think. You're setting up yourself for disappointment.

>>19520810
Localization itself is an exercise in marketing.

>>19521122
They spend a lot of time sniping away on twitter for people who, apparently, don't give a shit.

>>19510476
>the concept doesn't exist in English so translate it as something else entirely
I understand not adding a ton of TL notes to anime, but for a visual /novel/ it should be used if appropriate. People who call it amateurish are insane. If actual professionals who translate thicc philosophy texts have to make use of them, I think they're a better measure of what professionalism and quality entails than some half-jap on the internet translating eroge.

>>19520810
They stray pretty fucking close to 4kidz.

>thanks, Satan
From that angel sol show.

>>19521559
You mean Thank the Dark Lord, Amen.

>>19521569
You mean rub a dub dub thanks for the grub

>>19521574
That is what CR's line was in that very show, idiot.

>>19510476
I like the approach to honorifics that japanese styled characters use them, especially if they're from the world's faux japan/far east.

>>19521569
Right, it was even worse. Thanks for the grub is unironically a better translation. Ignoring the fact that she was basically a foreigner imitating a Japanese custom.

>>19518755
>Also the infamous "Holy Shit Mommy" scene from the same game. I've seen way too many people criticize it, but I've yet to hear a different approach for it.
"Look, Mommy!"
Can I pick up my Pulitzer now?

>>19521698
The kid was admiring what the mother did. The original line is retarded, but so are you.

>>19518700
Anii = Bruh
Onii-sama = Esteemed Older Brother
Onii-tama = Beloved Older Brother
Ani-ue-sama = Esteemed Beloved Older Brother
Nii-sama = Broseph
Aniki = Bro
Ani-kun = Brosky
Anigimi-sama = Bruhsky
Ani-chama = Beloved Bro
Nii-ya = Brotagonist
An-chan = Brolad

>>19521781
This, but unironically.
The hyperbole of some of those aside, this would actually be a pretty alright translation, considering that even in Japanese most of those are ridiculous and are supposed to be funny shit nobody would actually call you.
Works better than leaving a joke untranslated because "muh original jap feeling"

>>19521727
>t. hasn't read the visual novel
The roginal line is referring to one of the heroines playing a rhythm game. A kid walks by, and, appreciating the heroine's gaming skills, states "holy shit mommy". Refrain from making statements showing your own ignorance, retard.

>>19521969
Don't ever try to correct me, crossboarding scum. I hope the irony of your post makes you kill yourself.

>>19520810
>If you know so much Japanese what are you doing reading translations?
You'd like that wouldn't you? If people who knew what they were talking about stopped calling you out on your bullshit.

>>19522035
And where, pray tell, am I crossboarding from? The only other board I use on this god-forsaken website is /vr/, and I don't think that's what you were thinking of.

Either way, I wasn't paying attention. I think I was legitimately half-asleep for the entirety of the game. The only thing that even made an impact was Chuee's wonderful ESL diction and stupid amount of cursing.
So here's a corrected translation:
"Really? Cool..."

>>19522349
If that was true, you wouldn't abuse the quote function.

>>19522349
Really looks like a post from someone who posts on /jp/ doesn't it.

>>19522293
>implying I'm a translator
I studied a bit of Japanese but I'm at best an N5, which is probably more than most of the people complaining about the quality of translations.
I'm not even defending mistranslations, I'm just saying a translation should only be as accurate as it can possibly get while still being in English. Why do you want weebspeak in your translations so much?
Why does it make you so mad that now normalfags are part your VN readers sekrit club? Japanese culture has been pretty much mainstream for the last ten years.

>>19522399
The only part of your post that I give a shit about was the part I replied to. Anyone suggesting that the only people capable of giving legitimate criticism of a translation should stop doing so is either retarded or actively out to defend garbage. Now fuck off back to /vg/.

>>19522369
>>19522376
>acting so assblasted

>>19522417
>the only people capable of giving legitimate criticism of a translation
That's completely wrong. Many things can be wrong with translations aside from mistranslations.

>>19522426
Who are you quoting?

>>19522426
fuck off

>>19522430
And the vast majority of those problems are only going to be obvious to the people that read the original.

>>19522442
Shitty English writing, grammar errors, and shitty localization are obvious to everyone.

>>19522417
I think I misunderstood your post.
When did I say that people that actually know what they are talking about can't criticize a translation?
What I meant by this: >If you know so much Japanese what are you doing reading translations?
Is that why are people complaining that they are not keeping more Japanese terms in translations, when they obviously don't know enough Japanese to read the original text?
People complaining about translators getting stuff wrong is a totally different matter and should not be forgiven of so called "professional" translators.

>>19522399
>Japanese culture has been pretty much mainstream for the last ten years.
If it is so mainstream then they will know things like honorifics and food names already.

>>19522438
Fun fact: greentext doesn't have to be literal. That said, I'm not suprised you think it does; this entire board is filled with idiots trying to act like oldfags.

>>19522441
xddd le upboat man

Let's just not translate any term that a weeb should be reasonably expected to know. Who hasn't been frustrated to hear a Japanese person say "minna" and having it translated into "everyone" or "guys" when both are out of place? All stock phrases should also stay because they're exceptionally Japanese constructions, knowing where all the shikata nais and yoroshikus are is essential to an understanding of the Japanese mentality. Be sure to keep "go-" and "o-" whenever it's used because otherwise you might forget all about the uniquely Japanese way in which people talk to their superiors.

The goal of every translation should be to translate as little as possible.

I'm playing xenoblade chronicles 2 and it's less a localization and more a complete rewrite. And seemingly just because they felt like it rather than to raise the compatibility with an English-speaking audience.

>>19522472
You are so mad right now.

>>19522465
Did you even read my first post? I said honorifics are fine, and localizations shouldn't go to 4kids level, it's pretty clear I mean you shouldn't translate onigiri into burgers.

>>19522472
Yes, we are only allowed to have extremes of overly literal and heavily locaised.

>>19522474
Treehouse is infamous for liberal (at best) translations.

>>19522452
Except when those things are supposed to be off because they were off in the original. I remember people getting upset about an arrow to the knee joke in Dungeon Travelers (I think it was DT), and assuming the translators were just being faggots and shoving memes into their translations until someone who had played it in Japanese came along and told them that it was in the original too.

>>19522464
It's clear from just reading the thread that several of the people here that support "more Japanese terms in translations" already know enough Japanese to read the originals.

>>19522474
blushy crushy

>>19522493
But that is what these people on twitter are saying needs to be localized.

>>19522496
So let me get this straight. If I go and release and machine TL of a random VN, the only people who are allowed to criticise it are the ones who have read the original? Sure.

>>19522496
>It's clear from just reading the thread that several of the people here that support "more Japanese terms in translations" already know enough Japanese to read the originals.
Is my reading comprehension that terrible, or are you implying that the target audience for a translation should be people that already know the source language?
If it's not a mistranslation and it conveys basically the same meaning there's no reason to use a Japanese term over an English one, and I say basically because it's literally impossible to 100% accurately translate anything.

>>19522465
>If it is so mainstream then they will know things like honorifics and food names already.
Why do people try to translate or make equivalents to Japanese food names? No one would try to translate Risotto or Crème Brûlée or Borscht or anything, so why do they act like even the most basic Japanese food is some sort of incomprehensible meal from Mars? Even if they don't know what it is, I'm sure they wouldn't actually care what's in it. Even if they're using it a reference and saying boobs look like nikuman or hair looks like odango or pussy looks like an abalone or something, do people generally even know what an abalone is off hand?


Same with stuff like references to celebrities or historical people or businesses. It doesn't matter whether the reader gets the reference or not. You could probably make a reference in their native culture that they wouldn't get. If they really care, they can go to wikipedia or google.

>>19522537
>>19522452
Those are not really problems with the translation though. Proper English grammar and such should be a given and it's a totally different matter. You could have the most innacurate translation that's edited to sound perfectly normal in English.

>>19522537
I didn't say they were the only ones allowed to, I said they were the only ones capable of giving an informed opinion on the translation. Obviously anyone with a brain is going to be able to tell when everything is complete garbage, but when something is that bad it doesn't deserve criticism, it deserves to be completely ignored by everyone because it's trash.

>>19522442
So if the translation is so bad that the reader mistakes it for terrible writing because they don't know the original language, that's fine to you?

>>19522548
>>19522465
What translation are you refering to? I don't think I've seen this in anything aside from Pokemon and Phoenix Wright, and in those cases is "understandable" because they were aimed at small kids who don't know shit about fuck.

>>19522474
the whole thing is done by some autismo obsessed with making things different from the source material just for the sake of it
- translating names into different languages that ends up making them even more vague to english-only monolinguals
- translating names BACK to japanese
- changing characters' accents and personalities
the worst part is there are actually retards eating that up and congratulating them.

>>19522564
>it deserves to be completely ignored by everyone because it's trash
Saying that is also criticism. Someone needs to make that call, and you're saying that the people who haven't read the Japanese version are not qualified to do that.
>>19522560
>Those are not really problems with the translation though
Technically, everything put together is a localization, but that word has a different connotation nowadays.

>>19522572
>I don't think I've seen this in anything aside from Pokemon and Phoenix Wright, and in those cases is "understandable"
For the sake of argument lets go with this because I want to say, in original American kids shows, they don't give half a damn about using foreign food names or talking about shit only the writers of the show, who are probably older than the kid's parents, remember. Localizing to modern pop culture references and well known foods is something only Jap-Eng translators will do.

>>19522568
Of course it's not, but how the fuck are the people who need the translation going to know either way? People already do that for things like FSN and the only ones who can really argue otherwise are the those that read the original. Opinions on writing quality is going to vary from person to person too. Lots of people think Cross Channel's translation is totally fine. They're wrong, but I wonder if and how a proper translation would have changed their opinion of the game.

>>19522583
Okay, I'll restate my opinion. People who can't read the original are only capable of giving informed criticism on a translation when it's so bad it isn't worth bothering with the translation at all. Better?

>>19522572
>because they were aimed at small kids who don't know shit about fuck
A kid is still going to know what they are being told is a donut does not look like a donut, so it ends up a bit flimsy as an excuse.

>>19522638
>Okay, I'll restate my opinion. People who can't read the original are only capable of giving informed criticism on a translation when it's so bad it isn't worth bothering with the translation at all. Better?
It's not better. You keep saying the same thing over and over again. Who gets to decide that the translation is not worth bothering with? What are the specifc factors which make us, disgusting EOPs, worthy of dismissing a translation because of its writing or grammar i.e. criticing it? What if the original script had shitty writing or grammar on purpose?

>>19522638
>how the fuck are the people who need the translation going to know either way
You can have the ability to translate a limited amount of phrases/words without being fluent enough in a language to read/listen to it in real time without assistance. There's a couple dozen examples of that and
>>19521569 is one of them. Everyone and their dog knew it was retarded. The fact that most of them couldn't speak Japanese at a fluent level didn't make them shrug their shoulders and ignore it. It just drew into question what other garbage translation they could have missed.

>Opinions on writing is going to vary
That's just an excuse. Idiots not noticing or caring is just an excuse for poor work.

>>19522660
>What if the original script had shitty writing or grammar on purpose?
Yes, that was basically my original argument. What if the original did have shitty writing or grammar on purpose? Anyone reading just the translation probably wouldn't be able to tell and would just assume it's a shitty translation, just like the arrow to the knee joke.

>>19522668
>Everyone and their dog knew it was retarded
I wonder how many people would have called it out if that's what he had actually said.

>>19522700
>Yes, that was basically my original argument. What if the original did have shitty writing or grammar on purpose? Anyone reading just the translation probably wouldn't be able to tell and would just assume it's a shitty translation, just like the arrow to the knee joke.
So you didn't answer this >>19522537.

>>19522700
>I wonder how many people would have called it out if that's what he had actually said.
The girl said itadakimasu. Everyone knows itadakimasu. Your what-ifs are pointless.

>>19522700
>that's what he actually said
Completely irrelevant hypothetical. The reason it was even laughed at by plebs posting on the CR forum is because no one is going to confuse itadakimasu with THANK THE DARK LORD, AMEN.

>>19521569
It was localized as Through the Dark Lord. Amen.

The best received localizations have typically been on the liberal side, but they also need to consider what a typical reader can pick out (especially for voiced works). For example, no matter how clever you might think changing itadakimasu to Through the Dark Lord Amen may be from a script writing perspective, the person watching that is going to read one thing and hear another, and think "these subs are bullshit" instead of "the translator is a clever genius".

>>19522714
I did, but I'd like to hear how you think my previous post is in conflict with that one.

>>19522732
>>19522740
I'm glad you guys got it under control then. I guess you won't be needing anyone checking the translations from now on.

>>19522780
>I did, but I'd like to hear how you think my previous post is in conflict with that one.
>Who gets to decide that the translation is not worth bothering with? What are the specifc factors which make us, disgusting EOPs, worthy of dismissing a translation because of its writing or grammar i.e. criticizing it?

>>19522780
Yeah, if I don't suck a translator's dick when he gets something so obviously wrong that EOPs can tell, that means I consider all elements of translation and all translators/QC are worthless. Retard.

since it's very important to preserve every possible cultural artifact of the original japanese let's come up with faithful literal translations for each of the following:

nantoka shite

~
yo
ne
kure
kure yo
kureru?
kureru no desuka?
kureru no deshouka?
kurenai?
kun'nai?
kurenai no?
kuremasuka?
kuremasenka?
kudasai
kudasai ne
kudasai yo
kudasai yo ne
kudasaimaska?
kudasaimasenka?
kudasaimase
kudasaimashi
kudasaranaika?
kudasaru no deshouka?
itadakemasuka?
itadakemasenka?
itadakeru deshouka?
moraeru?
moraenai?
moraeru deshouka?
choudai?

remember if you overlap anything you're eradicating original context that will be lost forever

>>19522830
No one's arguing for this, sperg. The difference between -san and -chan is a lot more impactful to characterization than between kudasai yo and kudasai yo ne.

>>19522830
directly transliterate them

dont give any translation notes, as that is both unprofessional and colors interpretation of the authors intentions

really, translations shouldnt exist at all. we should just romanize the original language when needed and let the readers decide what it means on their own

>>19522880
Maybe you should change your posting style from plebbitor to a normal poster if you don't want your samefagging to be so clear.

>>19522844
>kudasai yo and kudasai yo ne
explain the difference to me since you're so informed about these particles

>>19522893
yeah there's only one lower case poster in the history of /jp/

you got me

>>19522898
You forgot your ellipsis redditor-kun.

>>19522911
explain... the difference to me... since you're so informed... about these particles...

>>19522911
>>19522893
…

>>19522966
Oops, wrong pic.

>>19522760
Don't know why you guys like complaining about that scene, out of all things.

"itadakimasu" is one of those words that can be translated differently based on context. "Thanks for the food" is the most common translation because it fits most settings, but you can also translate it as "Let's eat" or "Bon appétit" and it would fit no problem.

The setting is "A Demon family in Hell having dinner together". It's also a comedy, and the family in question all (but the youngest son that acts as the straight man) have a pompous attitude, as if they were a high class Demonic family when in fact they are mere commoners. Taking that into account, "Through the Dark Lord. Amen." fits the tone well and adds into the comedy aspect.

>>19522972
you got me im like mamiya takuji times a billion
nice meme xddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

>>19522980
Obviously the only way to translate it is "buen provecho".

You guys, seriously.
Can we stop with the shitposting, plebbit accusations or hiding behind twitter and have some ACTUAL discussion please?

The anon saying that only someone who knows Japanese can criticize a translation has a point: you need to know moon to spot mistranslations unless they're way too obvious.
HOWEVER:
EOPs have every right to criticize the Editing itself. Namely: obvious grammar mistakes, atrocious tone and words/idioms used out of context. For example, how crappy >>19522564 is, the dozens of grammar mistakes in Fureraba and the disaster that was Chrono;Clock editing.

>>19522980
I would argue the philosophy behind that line was perfectly fine, however in practice it didn't work out in this case because much of the audience can recognize the original audio and would expect to see something along the lines of Thanks for the Food or Bon appétit. You have similar localization choices all over the place that work out well, the difference though is that they are localizing words or phrases which the target audience (English viewers) isn't going to draw anything from the audio.

>>19522980
>A demon family in hell having dinner together
No, it's not. Why the fuck are you making shit up? Is this your fan fiction? It was one demon girl, Vignette, in her one room apartment in Japan saying itadakimasu to herself. She doesn't have a pompous attitude at all. You're confusing her with Satania, whose family didn't even appear in the anime. If I go to Japan and say itadakimasu when I'm about to eat some instant ramen, would you translate it as Ave Maria because I'm Italian? What is wrong with you retards?

>>19523178
I'm a bit torn on this, on one side it's a funny enough joke, and what we were supposed to get from that scene is that a demon has good table manners, which is supposed to be funny, so the intent of the scene is conserved. On the other side, one might argue that who are translators to decide when to spice up the dialogue, but as any bilingual person can tell you, it's almost impossible to translate anything without doing it, literal translations that also make sense are a myth, and anybody that knows enough Japanese to understand what itadakimasu means already gets the original intent from the audio, so I don't see what the big problem is anyway.

>>19523314
So because everyone knows what itadakimasu really means, it's okay to not translate it properly. Let me know what other words are on the "okay to be rewritten" list.

>>19523178
You don't say anything before eating in English like how they say itadakimasu in Japanese. She's by herself so saying "thanks for the food" makes no sense either because why would she say that out loud. Some people pray before eating but she's from Hell so praying to God wouldn't make sense. They changed her to praying to the Dark Lord instead because it fits better for her character.
That's the thought process of how "Through the Dark Lord. Amen" came to be.

>>19523178
Well, fuck.
It seems that my memory failed me and mixed it with that scene from ep. 10 about Satania's family. Excuse me while I go rewatch Gabriel Dropout.
But my point about "itadakimasu" still stands, and >>19523353 explains the logic behind it better than I would.

>>19523353
You don't need someone to directly make the food for you so that you can be thankful for the food. You can be thankful to the farmers or the fishermen for their hard work in getting the food on your table. Normally you'd be thankful to God (or gods in pagans' case) for their blessing as well, but the fucking Satan is hardly going to bless the field for better yield. Dumb amerifats, I swear.

>>19523314
The problem in a case like this is when people hear one thing and read something they recognize as different, they begin to think that the translator is making shit up and doubt the subs as a whole. However this is more of an exception as you won't find many phases in isolation where this is a potential problem.

>>19523374
>You can be thankful to the farmers or the fishermen for their hard work in getting the food on your table.
It's good to know that Satan is a conscientious eater who always thanks farmers for the food she eats before every meal.

>>19523392
One of the devils who doesn't actually act like a devil. You already got corrected on this once. Goldfish fucking memory.

>>19523374
There's no need to externally voice the "thanks for the food" like that in English though. The only time when you're alone and vocally thanking yourself for the food you just made yourself in English should be to point out how crippling lonely the character is in the scene. That's not the case here so what fits best would be she's praying because she already has her eyes closed and hands put together and if she's from Hell she'd be praying to the Dark Lord instead of God. It's not that hard to follow.

>>19523331
Except that's not what I said. I said that if you know enough Japanese to know what itadakimasu means, you shouldn't need a translation to tell you what it means.

>>19523416
>There's no need to externally voice the "thanks for the food" like that in English though.
Well, that's great. The show is Japanese though. The culture in it will be Japanese. Shocking, I know.

>>19523424
>I said that if you know enough Japanese to know what itadakimasu means, you shouldn't need a translation to tell you what it means
Yeah, that's why I want itadakimasu in the subs. Or a translation, if that's what you prefer. But not a meme rewrite.

>>19515988
All except the "Patches are stupid" and "I don't give a shit because I pirate" do.

>>19518821
Depends. Touhou is definitely spelled Touhou.

>>19523400
I'm aware without watching GabDrop that Satania is some sort of ludicrous clown imitation of what one might expect Satan to be. But whether she thanks farmers and fishers for every meal she eats would be a character trait that would been invented out of whole cloth in translation based solely on the fact that the characters of GabDrop abide by Japanese cultural customs.

>>19523552
Satania has nothing to do with this conversation. She doesn't appear in the scene.

>>19523552
>But whether she thanks farmers and fishers for every meal she eats would be a character trait that would been invented out of whole cloth in translation based solely on the fact that the characters of GabDrop abide by Japanese cultural customs
She abides by Japanese cultural customs in the original script. The author made her do it. You want to change that. That's not translation.

>>19523591
>That's not translation.
Neither is inventing a character trait out of whole cloth. If you're an absolute stickler for preservation of the inseparable Japaneseness of the original work "itadakimasu" is the only acceptable translation.

>>19523591
This. If you can help it, never sacrifice the author's intent just so you can insert memes. And if you have no choice because of constraints put a short TL note on it.

>>19523602
Yeah, I did say itadakimasu is acceptable. Using an extremely common translation for a phrase is not making up character traits, by the way.

>>19522464
>Is that why are people complaining that they are not keeping more Japanese terms in translations, when they obviously don't know enough Japanese to read the original text?

Because the translators failed to translate bare basics that any non-japanese reader can notice. That is the whole point of honorifics discussion. It is so easy to understand and see in Japanese that when translated wrong, everyone and their blind grandmother spot it.

Typical example: Girl on the street calls a random stranger "big sister". You just instantly go "Ah, here they failed translating it to a non-awkward english verison".

Keeping it as oneechan wouldn't be very good either, but it beats failing at translations as you can claim "Oh, but weebs love this word so I kept it". So it is more about not admitting you suck, but having a poor excuse.

If you actually don't suck, you can probably remove all honorifics and not a single person will notice.

what about female characters who use their own name as a first-person pronoun

translate? don't translate? have at it, you pedantic faggots

>>19523611
>If you actually don't suck, you can probably remove all honorifics and not a single person will notice.
You know what to do -> >>19518726

>>19523618
Referring to yourself in the third person is still a thing in English even if it's rarer. Just keep it the same.

>>19523627
Referring to yourself in the third person in English is something done exclusively by psychopaths.

>>19523639
Same goes for Japan.

>>19523610
>Using an extremely common translation for a phrase is not making up character traits, by the way.
This is only the case if you know for a fact that your intended audience knows that they are reading the stock translation of an Japanese phrase and know that they're supposed to ignore the actual words being used. Which, for "itadakimasu" might be a decent bet because it's level zero Japanese but this argument goes for just about anything.

The literal translation "big sister" as pointed out in >>19523611 is perfectly "correct" given a sufficiently weeb audience since they know what "onee-chan" means in context but at that point you're better off not translating it at all.

>>19523643
Yes, I'm sure that's what the author's intent was when he had that 8 year old girl using her own name as a first-person pronoun. He was trying to show that she's psychotic.

>>19523643
Little children = Psychopaths.
Good to know.

>>19523653
Stop posting please. You're out of touch.

>>19523665
>Stop posting please.
Oh, we're giving each other advice now? Find your nearest tall building and jump off it.

>>19523670
Don't forget to post this conversation on twitter so the other deranged translators can pat your back for saying that calling a stranger big sister is not awkward. Now you can say that calling classmates Ms. [Name] is a good translation.

>>19523656
>>19523665
Young characters occasionally refer to themselves in English though. If Elmo from Sesame Street does it, then that means the convention is mainstream enough.

How would you do "X no koto" instances where A and X are in conversation but A is describing X.

「美香はいつも優しいし」 for example.

Just learn Japanese. It's the only way to escape this mess and set yourself free.

>>19523683
Your highly developed weeb brain has managed to successfully find it not weird to find terms like onee-chan into English sentences, surely you can chalk it up to Japanese custom and move on with your life.

>>19523618
Depends on the context, if she does it because she's crazy you can keep it, as it also works in English. If she does it to be cute you can write the dialogue itself to be more cutesy.
>>19523621
There's not a single honorific in the official translations of Ozamu Dazai works ( the one's I've read at least) and they read fine. What's more, almost any foreign book, Japanese or otherwise, has a prologue by the translator where they always talk about how translating is basically rewriting, and they are right. If you don't like it learn the source language and all the cultural background, otherwise the most you can hope for is a localization.
Literal translations are retarded unless you are using them to learn the language, and that's not what most VNs are trying to do, they are not for you to practice your Japanese and show others how you know kana, 10 kanji and 50 words.

>>19523699
>Your highly developed weeb brain has managed to successfully find it not weird to find terms like onee-chan into English sentences,
Yes, of course, because it's a common thing in Japanese and in Japanese culture. However, you want to remove Japanese culture. You want the script to read like it was originally written in English. Do you really want something like that, something which a child in the west would never ever say in the script? I'm just pointing out your hypocrisy.

>>19523618
Since it is not the normal way in Japan, it should remain to show that she isn't normal.

No need to waste time making up something that might not be globally recognized as childish anyway. And saying "It only needs to work for Americans" is pretty short sighted.

>>19523714
Sure, let me look at a rewrite of some dude's book, which has nothing to do with this TL. Completely different themes, likely no relevance of honorifics on the plot and no meta honorifics conversations in the book. A great post, I must say. Translate the dialogue I posted. If you can read it, that is.

>>19523689
That particular one would be "You're as kind as always", or, if there were more people in the conversation, possibly "You''re as kind as always, Haruka".

Alternatively, if you're a NekoNyan translator, "You are literally the bitchingist fucker in the world, Mommy!"

>>19523716
Not the guy you're talking to but,
>You want to remove Japanese culture

If author had Japanese culture in the intent then you already have it muddled. If you are a translator/localizer I would ask you to reconsider since I wouldn't trust your circle if I found out you were in it.

Having to deal with autists like this is why learning Japanese still isn't outweighed by translators.

>>19523684
Every time I see a Japanese character above the age of twelve refer to herself by her first name I have to consciously remind myself that she's not necessarily retarded.

>>19523734
Obviously a paragraph in which people literally discuss honorifics can't be translated without butchery. But neither can a paragraph where people discuss, say, taking apart the kanji that make up someone's name. Anything that homes in on an quirk of the language is untranslatable without pouring infinity TL notes into it.

If the story becomes an unrecognizable shit festival without honorifics, of course you should leave them in. This doesn't automatically mean that every translation of every story should have honorifics in it.

>>19523731
To be honest, if most of your audience is American, it's hard to blame companies to ignore other English speaking countries. I'd imagine that most non-Americans would just shrug and leave it alone if there was a few small references only Americans got here or there rather than complain outright. That's probably the case for MG and JAST, but that's mostly based on personal assumption.

>>19523741
Yeah, God forbid I do what 90% of the readers want instead of slapping my translator ego which commands me to make every moege into an american reality show. People like Japanese culture. That's why they're reading stuff from Japan instead of western shit.

>>19523757
I still like translations who go "My name is X, and you spell it with the kanji for Y and Z". Obviously a true localizer could just ditch the spelling part because all westerners can spell to X. But keeping it shows not only what the original text said, it brings some Japanese culture into it.

>>19523618
alright good talk guys

next challenge: gunma prefecture has become the butt of some joke about the sticks

do you:
1. leave in gunma prefecture and assume your reader knows his japanese geography
2. remove gunma prefecture and replace it with a generic reference to the countryside
3. remove gunma prefecture and replace it with a reference to, like, alabama or some shit

>>19523800
Anything other than 1 is wrong and you should be pulled back and shot. It's not the translators job to make sure you get the joke.

>>19523800
1.
It's the same if some American would say Alabama to someone who doesn't know what Alabama is; tell him what Alabama is or expect him to know what Alabama is.

>>19523800
I leave gunma as a secret reference to a great hentai artist. The normies will never know!

>>19523800
Leave it in. It's not like it's hard to find a map in the modern age or just figure it out based on context.

>>19523618

Ditch it in most cases. It's highly annoying to read.

>>19523852
You shouldn't be basing your translations off of what you personally find annoying.

>>19523800
If there's any specific aspect of Gunma that's relevant then 1, if it's a throwaway joke then 2.

>>19523800
1 and make a tl note.
>>19523818
>It's not the translators job to make sure you get the joke.
Are you retarded? It is when the text relies on you knowing something about the culture you can't be expected to know if you don't speak the language. At least make a tl note, that's what even official novel translations do for shit like the Art of War (I know that's Chinese but same difference)
I know TL notes got memed out of existence with keikaku and are only used by memesubs now, but they are a legitimate good tool, and I assume it's how most of the people here know what honorifics mean in the first place. They are good for things that are impossible to translate without massive rewrites, as long as you don't have them every other line like in the middle 00's.

>>19523904
You don't put a TL for something as mundane as a geographical location.

>>19523904
You wouldn't put a TL note for Alabama if a book was situated in the US and the release was for yuropoor audience.

>>19523618
>what about female characters who use their own name as a first-person pronoun
Rather than that, consider the sort of opposite. The girl says her name usually, but in this case she's saying something that in English would be phrased using "I", "me", or "myself" even though she doesn't need to use any pronoun in Japanese. Do you use her name, slip into using "I", use third person like "herself", or something else?

>>19522980
>"itadakimasu" is one of those words that can be translated differently based on context.
>you can also translate it as "Bon appétit" and it would fit no problem.
What kind of madman would translate something from one foreign language to another?

>>19523946
You might know them by the name "The Cartel".

>>19523913
Anyone can find it on a map but the stereotype being invoked is slightly harder to look up. They had this joke in Yorimoi and it was somewhat identifiable in context but I'm sure some people missed it.

>>19523926
The US is pretty great and everyone should know about all fifty states, but if there was some sort of reference in a German work based on the local stereotypes surrounding, like, the Swabian are of Germany or something I'd hope someone would put in some sort of note (or a translation providing more information than was in the original) instead of sending me to the internet just to catch an offhand joke.

>>19523926
>>19523913
You wouldn't use TL notes for America or England in a book in English because you can expect people that can read English to be familiar with those places. I'm a spic and I've seen TL notes for those places in books in Spanish. Same logic with some place in Asia, you can't expect the mayority of English speakers to be familiar with asian geography.

>>19520810
>you should keep as little japanese as possible in your translation.
Fuck you and fuck anyone that replaces "twintails" with "pigtails".

>>19523946
Bon appetit is a common enough expression in English to be in the dictionary, it doesn't really count as other language.

>>19521574
Reminder that XSEED actually used this in Senran Kagura. And they also just rewrite shit in general. And this is considered one of the best localisation companies out there.

>>19523994
English is a global language. It has nothing to do with geography. Even though it's likely wrong (https://youtu.be/SSXhS-P58cY?t=47s)), I'll say most amerifats would be able to show where UK is on the map. But I doubt they could show London or Edinburgh. The other way around, most people can show Texas and Commiefornia, but I doubt they know any more states. You know why? Because they don't matter.

>>19524030
Kawaii is in the dictionary.

>>19522980
But the writer didn't say "Through the Dark Lord, Amen". The writer said "itadakimasu". Your job as a translator isn't to rewrite shit because you think you can make it better, your job is to take what was said and translate it into another language. If you don't do that, you're no longer translating.
The argument of it fitting the tone is fucking ridiculous. How does it fit the tone to rewrite what was said into something totally different? Do you think the translator knows the tone better than the original author and is correct in changing the characters to how he thinks it should be? That's both absurd and incredibly egotistical.
As an aside, there is no situation where it is appropriate to use "bon appetit" as a translation for "itadakimasu". If the characters were supposed to be using a hip foreign phrase to express thanks for their meal then they wouldn't be saying "itadakimasu" in the original script in the first place.

>>19522495
Xenoblade 2 wasn't Treehouse, it was Nintendo of Europe. Which is likely why it got away with only massive rewrites and intentional dialogue censorship instead of also putting everyone in burqas.

>>19524063
Touche is also in the dictionary (see what I did there, haha I'm too clever)

I love you all but I really hope some corporate translator actually lurks or posts here so we can just have a bit of quality in our localizations.

>>19524157
They see it, but it's not gonna happen. They don't give a fuck.

>>19524157
See: >>19517840

>>19524181
>>19524178
I hope some corporate hangs out here then so they can fire the translators that dump author's intent.

I'm subbing one series this season, but I've never worried about this stuff. Who cares about how honorifics aren't a familiar concept to westerners or name order conventions technicalities when your entire audience does and actively asks for it? I'm just subbing for 4chan and nobody else, so the general audience complaints don't matter to me.

>>19523761
I wonder why this is so hard for some people to understand. You don't go to Japanese media because you actually hate Japan and want something with all the Japanese elements completely excised. Well, unless you work in localisation.

>>19523353
>You don't say it in English
You don't fucking sit on the floor in front of an extremely short table in the West either. We know it's in Japan. Being thankful for the food before a meal is another part of Japanese culture. You don't need to LITERALLY fabricate an entirely different scenario because she said itadakimasu.

I'll ask it again. If an Italian Catholic goes to fucking Japan, orders some food, and then says itadakimasu, would you translate it to thanks for the food? You could that's perfectly fine. Would you leave it in? That works, it helps convey that this guy is trying to participate in Japanese social cues and whatnot.

Should you translate it as a Catholic prayer? Fuck no. Because it's not even close to what happened.

>>19524212
I get this. I myself only sub for my friends.
But a lot of people sub because they want what they saw or heard reach bigger masses (whether it be properly or not is up to them).

If you enjoy something and see someone getting the wrong idea about said thing because of someone putting his intent over the original writer's, won't you want to do something? Also excusing the fact that most people don't want to learn another language, much less one of the hardest languages to learn.

>>19524212
based honorifics anon

>>19523757
>If the story becomes an unrecognizable shit festival without honorifics, of course you should leave them in.
If the thing you're translating is not a finished product (LN or manga, for example), you'll never know when such a conversation can pop up. Even with finished products, you don't actually read the whole Japanese script right before you start translating. I mean, some people do, but I think it's a very small minority. Most of them have either read it a long time ago, or haven't read it at all. There's no way you remember every single conversation from the VN. So you start translating the script with your anti-honorific mindset and get to something which fucks you. This happens in 99% of anything I've read which didn't have honorifics. There's always at least the one thing there to specifically fuck over anti-honorificfags.

>>19524249
Commie's attempt with Aiura is an example.

>>19524234
I think this a whole other issue with media in general, especially japanese, where you have these "fish out of water" characters that know nothing about japanese culture but speak perfect japanese.
Assuming that what you mean is a character that actually knows about the culture and is participating in it you shouldn't translate it any different than you would for a native, but you should translate it, leaving itadakimasu in the translation is retarded.

>>19524272
It really doesn't matter if there's a "fish out of water" character or not, arguing that things should be changed because "we don't do that in the west" (and by the west they always mean America) is retarded because you're not watching a western show written by westerners about people in the west, and even if it's set in the west the culture of the place of origin will still seep through anyway. No one attempts to remove all the German culture from German media, or the Chinese culture from Chinese media. You don't get Japanese localisations of American movies where John Smith's name is changed to Smith John to make it sound more natural. But for some reason anything about Japanese culture needs to be changed to be more relatable when coming west.

>>19524272
There's no knowing or not knowing about Japanese culture. The characters act and speak as the author makes them. You don't need to guess what she'd say, because she says it.
It's similar to fantasy or western characters who use honorifics, not because they themselves know Japanese culture, but because the author let the culture influence his work in general. If you omit them just because it's distracting that non-Japanese characters use Japanese terms, you run into the exact same problems as if you omitted them from a purely Japanese setting. They are used in the same forms, for the same purpose.

>>19524259
Relevant

>>19524234
I'm sure there'll be people who would argue that the itadakimasu should be completely ignored from the translation. Just pretend that the things which are Japanese exclusive don't exist and translate only the parts that have English analogues.

If it doesn't exist in English, it doesn't exist period.

>>19524326
That just sounds confusing, especially for something like itadakimasu, if you knew nothing about Japanese you would think they missed a line if you hear a character say something and there's no sub.

>>19524326
People that retarded shouldn't exist.

>>19517403
How do you think Gaia kids learned honorifics? People have brains that can learn things.

Alot of you seem to think a translator's job is also to localize. Your only job as a translator should be to;
1) Keep the Idea of the message as identical as possible. (In reciever's language)
2) Maintain acceptable grammar equal to original message.
3) Convey the subtle information behind the Message if possible.
You'd be surprised how much information you can lose by trying to make a charracter sound smarter or even changing their word choices.

>>19522980
Is it really that fun trying so desparately to make yourself feel clever

>>19524030
Then just use itadakimasu more until it becomes as common. It's not any more strange.

>>19522474
>九月
>Amathatober
I don't think I've played a game as off-base between its English and Japanese script than Xenoblade 2. There was almost no point even having the subtitles on to begin with. Now I'm having the same issues with Octopath.

>>19524044
>I just had fun with it
Fuck off

>>19524437
>You'd be surprised how much information you can lose by trying to make a charracter sound smarter or even changing their word choices.
Pic related. One simple change makes Estelle go from being shocked at why her father has brought an unknown boy into the house to instead being a selfish brat who is only concerned about her present.

>>19524490
The worst part is that the doujinshi are translated with the shitty made up names instead of Homura, Hikari etc.

>>19524490
Jesus christ how did they translate THAT into WOOF WOOOF GRR WOOOF WOOF WOOF

>>19524352
I think 4-5 cases out of 10, people will just end up blocking it out even if they heard it, end up treating it as a sort of background noise. It's the only way I can make sense of some TL work where the translator takes a paragraph and condenses it into a single sentence - their viewers just read the subs and block out the noise.

How would you go about translating this scene from the Maya Append in Hatsukoi other than how Trip did it?

>>19524551
There are several conversations regarding those characters that were completely rewritten in the localisation to tone down the subject matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M9xxoAQD5w
The conversations start at 4:19.

>>19524587
>tone down the subject matter
The subject matter wasn't even that bad, some light "flirting" if you can call it that.
Man these people really have no common sense in their design decisions do they.

Reminder that localisation is simply an exercise in marketing to cast a wider audience net by creating artificial opportunities for "translators" to poke their noses where it doesn't belong. It was never about translating in a manner which helps the audience understand another language/culture more than it is just "professional" translators fellating themselves.

>>19524649
Maybe one day they'll realize that there's no wider audience for eroge.

>>19524655
Sekai Project still thinks that every game can be Nekopara. Maybe after Maitetsu's massive failure on Steam they'll wake up a bit.

>>19524565
I can't think of an example but I'm pretty sure Japanese has a few long ass flowery sentences to convey simple ideas, so it could actually be a good translation.

>>19524131
I guess it would make sense to hand it over to a different studio after the fiasco about Xenoblade Chronicles X. Either way, I still don't understand how Nintendo's translation went from decent to NISA-tier meme and censorship exercises. I guess it doesn't help that Nintendo's properties seem to turn more and more into otaku bullshit by the day.

I saw this brought up before but how would you distinguish 肩車 (kataguruma) and 負んぶ (onbu) in English?

>>19524802
kataguruma is sitting on the shoulders while onbu is piggy back.
Image search, two different positions.

>>19524822
Searching piggy back shows people sitting on the shoulders.

>>19524883
that's just bad google. piggy back is sitting across the back supported by the other persons arms.

>>19524802
Just use "piggyback" and "to ride on someone's shoulder" even if it's long, kataguruma is already used in English for the Judo throw and it's the first thing that came to mind when I read the word, although I suspect that people that don't do martial arts might have never even heard the word even if they are hardcore weaboos.

>>19524822
>>19524900
This. What's there to be confused about?

>>19524587
>Homura to Pyra
>Byakko to Dromarch
So they just made up a name with no basis on the original? What the fuck? I watch foreign films subbed into English, and usually they don't change the names. I guess this is a game and not a film, but still.

>>19525151
Welcome to Nintendo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA6A-ySMHYI

>>19525151
But Pyra retains the same meaning :^] god I hate the localisation so much. They couldn't even be bothered to control-F a separate script with the original names intact for use with the dual audio.

>>19523883

I have the best taste out of anyone I know, so I'll trust my opinion on it over anyone else's.

>>19523618
You leave it

>>19523618
Speaking of XSEED.

>>19525151
Because while only massive hyper-weebs will be reading translated eroge and want everything to be as uniquely Japanese as possible, NINTENDO is aiming for a mainstream audience who identifies better with generic fantasy names than anyone whose name ends in -ko.

>>19525868
Those are dubfags though.

>>19524551
The script was sexist and in the west we can't handle that. So it was dumbed down so it would just be funny for girls.

>>19525734
>Renne speaking in third person is a common way for children to speak in Japanese
>Renne originally was written in third person when we received the text. On top of sounding literal, it had the unfortunate effect of making Renne seem childish and simplistic
>only eleven years old

Hmmm. Heaven forbid an eleven year old child, using a Japanese speaking pattern commonly associated with children, come across as childish in English.

>>19525993
But she's supposed to sound smart beyond her years!
Although the localised script didn't really give such an impression in the first place.

If the anon who said pic related is still here, kindly answer how exactly you disagree with this >>19524307

>>19525993
In English it's more than childish, it's practically infantile.

>>19526008
Maybe it is in Japanese too. Have you been a Japanese long enough to tell us there is a difference?

you have a western fantasy novel set in some vaguely east-mix kitchen sink festival and you have to translate it into japanese

this includes massive "generic fantasy" countries including a country that's basically fantasy japan

how much butchery of the original work would it be for a translator to add honorifics instead of having everyone just yobisute each other all the time

>>19526014
>Maybe it is in Japanese too.
Maybe in Japanese it's a form of address used exclusively by demon kings. Who knows what sublime mysteries the Japanese might be hiding?

>Have you been a Japanese long enough to tell us there is a difference?
Nobody in this thread is Japanese.

>>19526031
>demon kings
Archfiends*

>>19525165
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52toV56212Y

>>19525176
>control-F a separate script
the best part is if they used REFERENCES they wouldn't even need to ctrl+f to make name changes
it won't help all the script rewrites they did though. if you know what they're speaking you'll still see inconsistencies everywhere. the best course of action is giving people the original text, but they didn't do this for some reason since the game DOES support multiple languages for text (the original had chinese text options)

>>19526098
>but they didn't do this for some reason
If they had any interest in making an accurate translation they wouldn't have delivered what they did in the first place.

>>19526007

I'll do my best, although I'm not sure if I can articulate it well. When Japanese writers craft dialogue, they don't typically consider how that dialogue will be interpreted outside the context of Japanese culture. They write dialogue that's natural and intuitive for their home audience. But unfortunately, the audience of J-E translations will never fully appreciate that context, and so the translator must mediate between those two cultures.

This is a matter of taste, but I think a reader shouldn't be overtly reminded he's reading a translated work unless the subject matter is explicitly foreign (like a conversation about honorifics that don't have English equivalents) and can't be conveyed in any other way. Keeping exotic and unfamiliar elements works well in an explicitly Japanese setting, where the reader is conscious he's essentially a tourist experiencing a foreign culture. But in a more familiar setting (for example, a manga set in Victorian England), a more culturally accurate translation should be made to ensure the audience's immersion isn't broken.

>>19526218
But the discussions about honorifics can and will be present in non-Japanese settings, so long as the original work had honorifics in them. How do you deal with this (consider >>19524249)?

We've reached page 10, so here's a new thread.
>>19526298
>>19526298

>>19526302
Fuck off.

>>19526275

My preference would be to keep the conversation as natural-sounding as possible ("Sir? No need to be so polite. We're friends, aren't we?" rather than "Blah blah, please call me Firstname".) If you really have to use Japanese, slap on a translator's note to explain what's going on. I agree with the poster up-thread who said they get a bad rap in modern translations, and I'd rather have one brief interruption than unintuitive dialogue throughout the whole work.

>>19526324
So a fantasy school should have classmates calling each other Sir? You'd like to have a work which only features honorifics in the scenes where it would be impossible to translate around them without rewriting the scene, while removing them in all the others? Where is the consistency in that?

>>19526324
>slap on a translator's note to explain what's going on
This needs to happen more often. One thing I enjoyed about Tsujidou-san no Jun'ai Road was the translator providing a references list to read through. Some of the references were things most people would know, others were things only Japanese people would know, yet others were things even Japanese people might not be aware of without some research. I think it worked much better than trying to rewrite a bunch of references or possibly even entire conversations.

>>19526333

>So a fantasy school should have classmates calling each other Sir?
No. In a classroom setting, something like using surnames to show formality would be preferable, since it's an accepted convention in English (albeit less common in modern American-English). Or simply more polite speech. It was just an example.

> You'd like to have a work which only features honorifics in the scenes where it would be impossible to translate around them without rewriting the scene, while removing them in all the others?
If an unavoidable scene featuring honorifics arises, I wouldn't have a problem with it. No translation can be perfect.
>Where is the consistency in that?
Obviously, it would be a break in consistency. But I don't think it's any worse than leaving honorifics untranslated. That's just a different kind of inconsistency.

>>19526373
Ah yes, the classic 4kids/NISA way of switching up family/given name as they please. And somehow being consistent in your localization is actually being inconsistent. I know not to take you seriously, but could you tell me what to do about Onii-chan and Senpai in such works?
Satisfy my curiosity, please.

>>19526402
>I know not to take you seriously
the irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife

>>19526402

> I know not to take you seriously
Why would you? I'm not presenting myself as an authority. I'm stating my preferences in the context of the survey as a VN consumer.
>Onii-chan
Depends on the setting and context, of course. What would sound good in your hypothetical fantasy school setting might sound off elsewhere. Assuming it's modern and set somewhere other than in Japan (as I'm pro-honorifics in Japanese settings), it would be up to the relationship between speakers. I'm not crazy about "big brother" and its variants, since those can come off as stilted or old-fashioned. Perhaps use a cutesy version of onii-chan's name, or use his plain first name and play up her affection as much as possible within the bounds of the rest of the translation.
>Senpai
Trickier. I would say more deferential speech would suffice in most cases. In your fantasy school, presumably it would be made clear "senpai" was an upperclassman by context in the story without explicitly addressing it. In any setting where there's a professional title that's roughly equivalent (like a policeman addressing a senior detective), use that.

>And somehow being consistent in your localization is actually being inconsistent
Yes, leaving some words untranslated is inconsistent.

>>19526402
Why are you capitalizing the first letters in those words? They are not names.

>>19526218
>This is a matter of taste, but I think a reader shouldn't be overtly reminded he's reading a translated work
Which is to say that you want to remove the Japanese from the Japanese work as much as possible. How is it not obvious that taking such an approach to any piece of foreign media would result in a dull homogenisation of what people are exposed to? It doesn't matter where the work is set, it's a basic expectation that if you're looking at media from another culture it's not going to be the same as something produced by your own culture.

>>19526821
Not him, but while constantly reminding people that they're reading a Japanese work by Japanese people in Japan is a defensible choice it's just obviously not without it's costs.

"Immersion" is a thing even outside the context of self-insertion. Take some joke that translates into a TL-note laden, stilted mess. In the original context, it contributes to a silly, lighthearted atmosphere shared by both the characters and the reader. This is the feeling that the author wanted to convey. If you take the evil "liberal" approach and substitute another joke, yes, of course, the original is lost and arguably you're not even translating anymore. But something is also lost when the reader is yanked out of a fast-paced laugh-a-minute comedy mood to be given an emergency crash-course in Japanese cultural literacy. You lose something either way.