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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Mmm. I kept wracking my brains for good material for one final end of year post on Neechin, and all my good material is bound up in comike 75, so that still will have to wait until next year. So, instead, I’ll put my head on the chopping block, and take a look at some highlights of the VN translation world in 2008.