Anonymous asked:
How time-consuming is the proofread phase? I imagined proofreading 30% of a short visual novel would only take a couple of hours at most, but this phase seems to drag on for weeks like the other phases. How does that work?
You would think that, but it's proved not to be a good idea. Underestimating the amount of time to do editing and proofreading was one of the key reasons why my first version of Taimanin Murasaki was so poor: I got impatient and tried to rush things, and I somehow ended up introducing plenty of mistakes as a result.
Over time, I've been putting more and more concentration into proofreading, because it's my last chance to catch errors and inconsistencies before the full release. You would think it would be as simple as playing the game, but you actually have to read every line a bit more slowly, and with heavy concentration. You're looking for typos (and spelling inconsistencies); potential lines skipped by the engine; sentences which avoidably don't flow well; phrasing which could be easily misinterpreted; and things which made sense when looking purely at the script, but turn out to be wrong (voice acting that changes the interpretation of a pause, avoidable inconsistencies between the details as written and their depictions in the CGs, plurals or singular nouns that should be the other way around, etc.). I say "avoidable" because sometimes the CGs are just wrong (which happens a spectacular amount in this particular game), or you need to keep something that sounds awkward in order to preserve a nuance, or to make sense of a later line that explicitly references it.
All of that sounds complicated, but it really just means that I have to pay close attention in case I miss anything (or worse, introduce anything). I did the whole of TA3 in about 3 weeks—which, these days, is how long I would spend on a sixth of a game its length. I have a horrible feeling that my rapid proofreading probably did some damage to TA3 in places, and I'm going to need to re-edit it at some point to compensate. For that matter, if my chronological mod of TY2 hadn't required me to proofread twice, I would have completely missed a line in which I had Kuroi refer to Rinko as "Rinko-nee". That wasn't in the script, but it survived three whole phases of scrutiny because I was so used to reading it that my brain just glossed over it. I want to avoid missing things this obvious, and time is the unfortunate sacrifice for that.
It baffles me how you can get yourself to put so much effort into the quality of this, while not receiving a dime. Companies pay translators a living wage for the work you do.
ReplyDeleteI have even seen a few amateur translators, who have patreons and they don’t deliver nearly the same quality that you do, but they still get paid a fair amount. The only catch with you is that it takes so long �� The beforementioned amateur translators dont deliver high quality translations but they manage to release around 2-3 games a year instead of 1 every 2 years.
Not saying you should stub down to their level, but no one can expect this extremely high quality from you when you are doing it for free.
I don’t like being this slow. In this case, I think it was 90% avoidable: I got a later start than I wanted, and a lot of bullshit came up over the course of it. But also, I think I just haven’t worked hard enough this time. That’s why I didn’t take time off over Christmas, and there won’t be a break between this and Chronos. It frankly should not have taken me as long to do this game as it has, and I want to jump right into the next one to compensate. I’m hoping to get back to a faster speed, because I used to be able to deliver things at a decent rate, rather than make everybody wait ages for a fairly mediocre game.
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