6 months
Alexeir here, leader of this little project, Shinzou Translations, that is now 6 months old!
How do you like the new webpage? I love it! A friend of mine helped me to create this slowly over the past two three months. At the beginning, just like with the TL group, I only had an idea. But, he’s a professional at this, helped me get that small idea into this full page, which will be the hub for all Shinzou Translations from now on, we will improve it constantly to have cooler stuff for y'all. The blogger page will be there as a backup.
Now let's start, six months have passed, so I can look back and laugh at my ambitious self... Did you know that I was planning on translating the 40+ hours NUKITASHI as my first project? Yup, I even had a working build (Slight NSFW):
And I translated the first introduction movie, you can see it (NSFW)here
I translated the first nine episodes of the common route, and then.... Shiravune announced the official release. I stopped, because as a FanTL group, you should always support the official releases.
Thinking about it now, that probably saved the future of this group, the project is inmense, full of difficult to translate jokes and puns, and a lot of +18 content... That project would have probably taken all my passion away. And, as you can see on those screenshots, at the time the quality was bad... As it was my first translation I was extremely scared of removing even a single word from the original script making everything very stiff and probably worse than MTL, overexplaining everything with weird TL notes, as I tried to understand a obscure japanese reference for the 20th time. And to top it off, the engine used by Qruppo is... not good, have you heard about an engine closing without any errors if you go over a randomly decided character limit on the text box? Yeah... I understand why they decided to port to Artemis (I don't understand how it uses 16gb of RAM, but, hey it works... I guess.)
I also had some chapter names (They had a limit on length because of the engine...) and some notes for special things for the novel, I really tried to make sure to understand everything and took the project as seriously as I could at the time (NSFW):
Maybe in the future I can talk a little more about Nukitashi, it has some really cool stuff on the inside (deleted scenes and stuff that changed on the development based on certain notes on the scripts). But anyways, after all of this, I realized how hard it was to translate a visual novel. So, after being sad for a couple of days, I got the courage to start again, at a smaller scale this time, some notes of what I thought at the time:
This time I asked the person behind Shatou Sombrero, Tokoroten-sensei, for approval to translate his novels, he gave his permission and that’s how everything started...
And here we are, 6 months later and 9 completed projects in English and Spanish later (and an official Spanish translation on steam!), the quality for my translations have improved a lot (I think), a couple of my friends are helping me with QA/Proofreading which has helped a lot to fix those lines that might feel unnatural, typos and all in between, some others have helped me with images and even hacking for some Spanish projects.
Using this space to blow a little bit of steam, I’ve seen some comments saying that my translations are bad or shoddy or some other stuff... I understand, some people expect a certain quality that I might not have yet. And if you feel like this, I would appreciate it if you could let me know which part you feel I could improve, typos or anything in between. I’m very open to criticism and I really want to get better... At the end of the day, I am going directly to the creators and asking them for permission, which puts a little bit more of responsibility on my side to make sure that the translation is good and I'm not giving the original product a bad name. When I see those comments, I start to doubt myself... Should I continue doing this? Wouldn’t this affect the original creators and the perception of their novels?
But, I can also see some people that really liked the novels and found something special in them. Besides, I really enjoy doing this. I want to get better and share these wonderful stories with the world. So, if you want to help with this project, let me know about any and all errors you find. Or you could join me and QA/Edit, if you have time, of course.
Talking a little bit about the present and the future of the group. This month I'll be taking a look at all of my works and making sure that all of them have the quality I expect going forward, as well as making certain reengineering changes (like a patch for Kosaka-san, rather than sharing an .exe), so, I might not release anything in a while. However, I'm in talks with a new circle for some new translations! It's a difficult project in terms of setting and based on the way we want to translate this product, it might be the hardest translation I've done so far as well. I have a Proof of Concept. If anyone wants to take a look at it and let me know what they think about it, it would be very helpful, if you want to find me you can check the contact page!... In any case, I'll share more details about it after validating some things with the circle and get their proper approval.
As for the future, I'll say this. On top of the constant releases of free circles, I will translate a big novel for English audiences next year as I am doing for the Spanish audiences right now, a 20-30 hour novel, but as I am terrified of lawyers. It's probably going to be a shadowdrop, and as this will be a really big project, I'll make sure to have an editor for that one (even if I have to pay for the help of one!!). Visual novels really helped me when I was in a dark place in my life, and I really want to pay it back, that's all.
To finish this already long post, I want to thank everyone that has helped me so far for all of these releases and anyone who has read any of the novels I’ve released and will release in the future. I would really love for you to support the original creators: follow them on Twitter, download their novels or, if you can, support them monetarily. Anything that would allow them to continue creating would be amazing. These circles have given me an opportunity to share their novels around the world and I am really grateful to them. As for me, I’ll stay here and continue translating these amazing stories.
Alexeir