Two Years...
Hi all!
Alexeir here, apparently two years have passed ever since I started this little project of mine (Thank you for reminding me twitter!) so I want to do a quick blog for anyone who’s interested, let’s go!
Progress Report?
Sousaku’s editing is now more than half done, we’re actually doing a bit of QA on the common route in order to release the patch as fast as possible after everything is set and done. Right now, the plan is to release it in 2025 and if we continue to progress as we have, we will.
Dekinai’s translation has now reached the final route! This is more of a solo project right now, so the editing won’t take as long as Sousaku but the writing won’t be as flourished as Sousaku. A trade off I guess... As for the release date, 2025 most likely.
Now, it’s important to emphasize that we’re not getting paid for this and it’s a hobby for us, so our plans might change!
Either way, if anyone likes the novel and wants to help you know where to contact us.
Karenai Sekai?
As of today the links for the translation are delisted from the website, I’m sure the patch is somewhere on the internet right now, but I would hope that if you liked our translation and the story overall you support Shiravune with the official release in Steam.
This project was always a bit of a gamble; I knew the other two novels of Sweet and Tea were officially translated and I always found it weird that this specific one wasn’t. Maybe it has to do with one specific scene... Or maybe they didn’t have the resources to translate it back then.
Either way, it’s important to state that the entire reason behind Shinzou Translations is to bring translations to novels without official releases, I’m not here to oppose or fight against official translations and I feel like that would be more of a disservice of what we’re trying to achieve.
How we doing?
Personally, I’m having a lot of fun with this little project of mine. When I think about the cold emails I sent to Japanese doujin groups at the beginning of it, I don’t think I ever expected to get this far!
There are some novels out there that I would love to translate that I never got permission to. Some others got official releases even before I started (which is good!) Even now, I’m in the middle of a pretty bad burnout, (maybe I pushed a bit too hard on Dekinai...) but that’s life.
I don’t want this to be too much of a doompost, so...
The future?
Alright, very simple. Two more years. I think I have enough drive to continue doing this for about two years, at least as actively as we’ve worked. But what does that mean? Well I’ve been thinking about it...
Although I’m in the middle of a burnout, if I plan things correctly, I’m pretty sure I can release one more novel this year (As in like our fiscal(?) year, so by may 2026)
Which means we would release 3 novels. And I want to do something similar for the last year. After that... I don’t know, just like I didn’t know 2 years ago. Probably I’ll focus on much more personal projects and much more slowly if anything. So maybe a release every year or two. I don’t want to leave things undone, I would really hate that, because I’ve seen it so much in this medium. So I’ll think things through after that, but that’s the plan for now.
As for which novels... Uh, I don’t know... If you have a novel you really want to see translated, go into the discord and post it on the suggestions channel!
Any other thoughts?
I don’t know if anyone cares about this, but I’ll type away anyway. Personally, I still think that AI has long ways to go to replace human translators, things like direct communication are much easier because of them. But for long stories like visual novels, I think they’re still missing something and honestly, I feel they’re getting worse... They’re more literal, more robotic as time goes by. But I’m sure some techbro somewhere will tell me that I’m not prompting it correctly, they will tell me that I’m jealous because they’re doing things I couldn’t even think about. But, as my feed on every single platform slowly fills with more and more AI slop I just can’t imagine this is the future I want for me.
I think I understand a bit better why so many tech people end up retiring on a farm completely away from the world... Maybe I’ll do that when I’m old as well.
That’s all I have for now, maybe I’ll write like this more often...