Better than nothing.
Anonymous asked:
have you ever considered accepting donations from fans for translations ?
I've never felt right about doing that, so I've always considered it a last resort.
That said, depending on how things turn out, I may or may not have just been saddled with some unexpected debt. So we'll see.
Anonymous asked:
As funny as the idea of the 'porn vn tl community' is-- you are (at least for me) the oldest running tl that I am aware of. Is there anything that comes to mind as 'large happenings' within the community? As translations become more and more cost-effective for companies, we will start to see the end of fan translations. It almost feels sad that this internet (degen) chapter will finally collapse and disappear.
I don't think there even is a community. It was a mostly dead scene when I got there, apart from a small number of people who have since retired or turned professional. The only one I can think of who's still around is Loe Quality Translations, and he almost bleeds more into the general VN translation scene.
The massive increase in localization definitely contributes to a decline in any kind of fan efforts, in the same way that it did with anime fansubs. I've complained ad nauseam about how everything seems to be in danger of getting picked up now. Machine translations are also starting to eat away at it. You may have noticed a few people who have made it their business to produce nonstop MTL patches as if they were real translations. For one of them, I counted twelve releases in a single month, which means there's about a 0% chance that any actual work is being put in.
Both of these things create a "why bother" mentality: Why bother putting the effort in, if there's going to be an official localization that everyone gravitates toward instead? Why bother, if a MTL patch is broadly close enough, and everyone seems content with it? When they're up against forces they simply can't compete with, more and more people will slowly give up, until eventually the scene is dead. That said, it's way worse for anime: you used to get all sorts of choice when it came to fansubs, and now every "group" is just some guy trying to pass off the same subtitles as their own. That's far more of a tragedy than a dead eroge translation scene, because you actually lose something, rather than just get a crappy replacement.
Computer Science College Student asked:
i failed to complete college in my fourth year. i feel like a failure now. what should i do?
Anyone who screws up college that badly has only two options: burger flipper or billionaire tech entrepreneur. If I were you, I'd pick the former. Horde all the "free smiles" until there's scarcity in the market, and then dump them at exorbitant prices. This is a winning strategy employed by some of the greatest investors of our time, very few of whom ended up in prison.
h3ad0rZ asked:
Hello. Thank you for your hard work. Do you think it's possible for you to make a "QC / QA” patch for Kuroinu Redux? Like, a patch to edit mistakes in their garbage translation. If not, treat this as "news from loc companies'' I guess. :D While I don't think theirs was done by MTL, you get pretty much the same experience as one. I assume they feed the lines to translate to their "agencies" completely blindly, so they are done without seeing the game or any context. It's funny how I remember you talking about how hard it can be to tell who's doing what in a h-scene and I see exactly similar mistakes here. (Even though if you see CG, you would know what's going on) It also seems somebody went through typos with auto-correct, got a word and called it a day, so you get a random word that sounds kinda similar to what it supposed to be. Every other line also has some awkward af phrasing, where you kinda need to take a second in your mind to rephrase it, so you can understand what they were going for. It's like you have to translate the translation. :D
I know that somebody made a patch which imported the uncensored CGs from the MangaGamer release, so it's probably technically possible. The question is whether it's worth doing or not. I don't know the extent of the problem, but fixing it might essentially entail retranslating large parts of it. If there's an appetite for that, I would be open to doing it. On the other hand, if the general feeling is that the translation is flawed but good enough, then it really isn't worth the effort when I could be working on a different game.
Anonymous asked:
I like to request a translation for Mashou no Nie 3. Do you think Lilith Soft will ever go back to making classic visual novels? The bare minimum I would like them to do is wrap up the Taimanin Yukikaze story-line.
Not at this rate. The RPGX workload is constant, and it's obvious that they would prioritize their massive cash cow. They've reached the point of trying to have three concurrent gacha games, so I don't think there's any going back unless the market implodes in on itself.
Anonymous asked:
Have you consider using GTP Chat to do/help doing a translation as of recently?
It's given me a lot of pause for thought. Even if I did use it, I don't think it would make things that much easier or faster, because so much of what slows me down relates to phrasing concerns. Also, translating porn with an OpenAI product is pointless, because companies like that are on an endless quest to make their products "safe", and I'm not about to jump through a million hoops to stay current on whatever the current exploitable loophole is.
I'm not sure how quickly the technology will evolve, but we will probably reach the point where modern AI translations make human translation all but redundant—not because they will be perfect, or even great, but because they will be instant, free and "close enough". In the meantime, while there's still a point to me doing this, I've been wondering about employing the technology as a kind of translation checker, along the lines of old grammar checkers. For anyone too young to remember dealing with those, they constantly got things wrong, but would, once in a blue moon, actually help you detect a real grammatical error. To me, that seems like the sensible way to make use of the technology right now. As opposed to doing what some lazy asses do, just copying and pasting out of DeepL and then saying "Hey guys, give me money."
Anonymous asked:
What project has taken you the longest to complete and how long? And the shortest?
The longest was TY2, because all the extra stuff I put in made it almost the size of TA3. The shortest would be one of the IZMs, not only because of their small size, but because I was trying to rush through everything as quickly as possible back then. Now I take as long to proofread a third of a game as I did for the whole of TA3, just in case I overlook something or make an obvious mistake.
Also what would you say your average time taken for a project is?
That depends largely on the size of the project, as well as on how much time gets taken away by real life crap. Sometimes there's a good stretch, and sometimes everything seems to happen to me at once. I've been averaging about a game a year, which I don't think is good enough.
Anonymous asked:
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
No, and I really don't understand people who do. The people who try to serve food to a jpeg of their waifu, for instance. If I ever get to that point, that's when everyone around me will know it's time to put Grandpa in a home.
Anonymous asked:
Does Sanity's End still exist? Am I just not looking the right spots or has that person/group/irc actually gone the way of the dodo?
Nephrinn disappeared a long time ago. I suspect that he just lost momentum, because by the end, he was practically hiding out on the Sanity Ends IRC channel for fear of attracting C&D letters. This was way back in the aftermath of the Rapelay bullshit, so there was genuine, ever-present danger of that. I noticed that he would still occasionally log in to his HongFire account until that site died, but other than that, he went completely radio silent.
Anonymous asked:
Could you translate inyouchuu etsu?
Again, the most I can say is maybe, if the right conditions are in play. Inyouchuu was a series that I was starting to seriously consider, and then out of nowhere, JAST got the license and announced that they had already finished one of the games. There is absolutely no telling whether they're going to do any or all of the others, but it remains a very real possibility. This is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I say that none of the interesting games are safe to do these days.
Anonymous asked:
Hey I'm not sure if this has been requested before but would you consider translating Omae no Kaa-chan, Ii Onna Da yo na. (https://vndb.org/v22448) if someone isn't already working on it that is.
I've been kind of interested in that one for years. But the thing is, pretty much everybody is doing Orcsoft titles these days, and I would be surprised if that one weren't a major contender for getting picked up. I'll put another notch next to it, but realistically, you're more likely to see a company like Fakku release it.
Anonymous asked:
Could you translate the Onna Ninja Azusa vs Orc series please? I know its just a taimanin rip off but i like that the orc kid the MC gives birth to becomes an actual character/villian in the second game unlike in the taimanin series where asagi never actually has any canon kids(as far as i know). Also thanks for everything you do :)
Possibly.