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.

Previously on Neechin, I’ve covered a few topics on project management, but mostly from the perspective of managing them from the cold management perspective. But you can’t forget that we’re dealing with people, and most importantly, it’s the people that will make or break a project, no amount of paying attention to processes, schedules, and other management tools will make up for when people fail.

It’s a question with many sides to it: who is capable of being a translator, how do you know if you are capable, if you wanted to get into it, how do you start. Well? Are there any answers?

Rating systems are tricky to design, but in designing them you learn all sorts of things about what you’re rating… So, let’s take a deeper look, at how we can talk about how “good” a translation is, waving our hands, being vague, and generally not getting anywhere.

Literal translations are bad. Liberal translations are bad. Fidelity is good. Fluidity is good. Anything is better than nothing. Nothing is better than crap. Just about everyone has their own conception of what’s “acceptable and proper” for a translated work. But let’s just step back for a moment, and figure out where the major positions are coming from, and then try to figure out where we want to stand, when.