Anonymous asked:

For you, what tends to be the hardest part of translating a VN?

I find that there are certain scenes where, out of nowhere, things just get irritatingly difficult for no good reason. Archaic words; heavy dialect-based slang I'm not familiar with; serious ambiguities; things genuinely just not making sense because there's an error in the prose; simple concepts that are difficult to rephrase in English without rewriting the whole damn sentence; etc.

I think the way it works in some games is that the main writer takes care of most of the scenes, and a secondary writer covers the side characters' scenes. So in one scene, everything will be simple, easy to phrase, unambiguous and fairly quick to do. And then the next scene, I'll have to keep stopping constantly to look up some word, or question which of several ways to interpret an unfinished sentence, or figure out how to turn a massive run-on sentence into something readable. It becomes annoyingly stop-start, and kills my momentum.

Of course, technically, the hardest part would be when I have to convey some kind of double entendre in dialogue. I think I spent a couple of hours on a single one in TY2.