Anonymous asked:

apparently hardcoreuniverse and hgame cinemas are selling videos of translated scenes for a variety of games including seigi no henshin, some empress games, etc. they dont make patches, just video walkthroughs with subtitles at the top. they have previews in their discord i think. how do u feel about this. im guessing theres multiple ulterior motives

Well, first of all, you definitely shouldn't be charging for translations. That's pretty scummy activity, especially considering that the work isn't even yours. It's like selling a bootleg DVD for profit.

Secondly, that is the stupidest possible way to translate a VN, especially because it means that your audience can't have any control over it. They can't play it by themselves, they can't read at their own pace, they can't go back and listen to a spoken line again, they can't change the audio or text box settings to their liking... There's no reason why you should want to watch a video of a scene, other than as a preview when deciding whether to play the game or not.

Also, I don't know how many games they may have done, but these days you have to watch out for the signs of edited machine translations. The major sign would be people producing too much too quickly, which indicates that they've done a minimal amount of work. If they happen to be one of those groups that put out at least one game every two months, then the odds are extremely high that you're dealing with a garbage translation that's just been cleaned up to look authentic. I know that some say machine translation is at a point where it can almost replace real translation, but trust me, it's not. It's better and more convincing than ever, but if you spend any amount of time testing out DeepL, you will see it make stuff up out of nowhere. It can get sentences completely wrong in every way, but still produce convincing outputs.

In fact, I just looked up this "hgamecinema", and one of the results was an RPGX video. The preview alone tells me that it's either machine translation or ESL (or both). Within just twenty seconds I can see the AI misunderstanding sentences. It's decent enough if you just want to go through the scene, but you definitely shouldn't be charging money for it.