editorials Category

Halifax trip 2, the juicy bits

Last time, I briefly sketched out the major geographic highlights of the trip to Canada. This time I’m going to try to report a bit on the industry gossip that I heard on the way. The bits of gossip comes from multiple people from different companies. Sometimes the comments are about my friends’ own companies, sometimes it’s someone they know in another company. I’m not going to say who’s saying what about whom.

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Information, contracts, deals, cultures, and bid'ness

My boss doesn’t tell me everything going on, does yours?

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The quagmire that is game licensing

Welcome to the dark side. Watch your head, because it’ll hurt. Bad.

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Fan group decides licensing is too slow, releases things... oh boy

Just when I was thinking I needed to finish writing an article I had half-finished on the “value” of a fan-translated script, a crazy bomb drops out of seemingly nowhere.

So VN translation group Amaterasu decided yesterday that they had enough of waiting for Mangagamer and various Japanese game companies to come to a negotiation, and decided to just release their patches yesterday.

This isn’t going to be pretty.

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Modern VN translation economics are broken

They’re broken, and heading in a direction of continued brokenness. This has been something that has been nagging at me for years, and as the years have gone by I find the industry moving in the direction that most worried me.

What’s broken you ask? In a word, sustainability. The industry is facing pressures from all sides that make it downright unattractive to run a proper business. On top of that, it’s embarking on a strategy that’s at best slippery slope in order to stay afloat.

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Narcissu Afterwards - Translation at work

The biggest changes to the revised narcissu script is actually invisible. Instead, I merged in most of the comments that Haeleth and I had both written in while we were working on the scripts.

These notes and conversations with each other within the script wound up being 99.9% of the communication that went on between us, and I believe that releasing them would let the curious, and the aspiring game translator to see some of what was going on behind the scenes.

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Narcissu 2 Afterwards - Translation Style

An article almost 3 years in the making, a piece on the somewhat unconventional style of translation that I had adopted for the Narcissu 2 English project.

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Narcissu 2 Afterwards - Project timeline

It took about 1050 days to go from the start to finish for the Narcissu 2 project. But just what were those days used for?

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The importance of passion and people

There are three things needed for the success of a VN translation, the obvious one is skill, but the other, equally important ones are often put far behind skill: passion, and good people.

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Book review: The Translator's Invisibility

Lawrence Venuti’s “The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation” is a tough book, a dense book, that challenges the notion that the best translations are transparent, where the translator is invisible. It does make a good case for why the alternatives should be considered. If you can find it in your library, give it a shot.

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