Code:Realize ~Wintertide Miracles~: The Localization Hour

I crafted everything last year and then took forever to post it. Like last time for Future Blessings, I’m putting QAQC and Mistranslation findings together. I tallied twice as many errors as Future Blessings’s. Gehhh.

(For new readers: QAQC and Mistranslations are separate issues. QAQC are typos you only need English to find. Mistranslations mean knowing Japanese to figure out, “Wait, that meaning is completely wrong.” And then there’s localization, which for our purposes is making the text sound natural in the target language and rewriting into native context if necessary.)

QUEEN BEE – Baishun (売春)

A song that enchanted me for perhaps a year, with lyrics worth translating.

Lyrics aligned left, right or center (both) depending on singer. Please credit back here if you repost or use for other purposes.

Code:Realize Staff Blog

Otomate runs official blogs for most of their releases, primarily for promotional purposes but occasionally they put in some fun facts. In truth I created this post for one specific discovery from Code:Realize, but incomplete coverage would make me feel guilty so let’s read through and paraphrase ’em all. Spoiler-free!

[Release] The Excellent Death of the Boy Shijimi

• Freeware visual novel for Windows
• Translated & Partially Recoded by zcatcracker (i.e. yours truly)
• Previously released in 2009 by Nightmare Syndrome
• 4-6 hours depending on completion and reading speed
• Trigger Warnings: death, suicide, violence

A classmate killed himself less than two months ago, kicking off an inexplicable chain reaction of suicides that gradually decimates your class, including the teacher. Several days later, the school announces that class of remaining students will be temporarily suspended, kept at home where they might be safer than on campus.

“Then today’s the day to die,”

Pronounces your childhood friend. In school, on a violently rainy day, in a remote village of past days inching along in its modernization.

Game & Patch Download (15.8 MB)

Feel free to report any typos or bugs you find! Above all, thanks for checking out my first visual novel translation project.

Miscellaneous Notes

• To play with the original Japanese text, change your non-Unicode locale to “Japanese (Japan)” and rename the patch anything other than “patch.xp3”; this turns off the translation. Save files are seamless between patched and unpatched states.
• If you want to play in English while keeping the non-Unicode locale to Japanese, name the extra patch “patch2.xp3” to pick up the correct default fonts.
• Sometimes if you close the game and immediately relaunch it, it will throw a warning saying the game’s already running. Go to Task Manager, find “TVP(KIRIKIRI)…”, then End Process. Relaunch.

Pages: 1 2

Psychedelica Theme Song Lyrics

Per request from Reddit, I translated the OP and ED for both Psychedelica games, Black Butterfly (Kokuchou) and Ashen Hawk (Haitaka). They contain references best appreciated after completing one full route in each game. (And if you’ve seen too many Japanese pop media narratives you could probably guess the game from them.)

Current blog layout not able to accommodate fascimile format (i.e. romaji next to translation), so only displaying English translation. If you use, please credit/link back.

Page 1: Black Butterfly OP & ED
Page 2: Ashen Hawk OP & ED

Pages: 1 2

Danganronpa Translation Critique: Prologue

Justified translation nitpicking, yess

Danganronpa TL Critique

Hi, I’m professional translator and shut-in Arunaru. On most days, I’m either playing video games, watching other people play video games, translating video games, or some combination of the three. Recently I played this cool hip new game called Danganronpa in Japanese, and subsequently watched streams of the game in English by one Joseph Anderson. Around the time of Sayaka’s infamous crane story event, and the question therein that the translation rendered impossible to know the answer to, I started to notice something was amiss. Maybe NIS America didn’t put their best effort into the translation of this game that’s comprised mostly of text.

But when I looked around to see if there was much mention of the translation quality anywhere, I didn’t find a whole lot. Some arguments about how specific terms and titles differed from fan translations, such as Ultimate vs Super (Duper) High School (Level), but…

View original post 3,428 more words

CxM Unlimited: A Word From the Voice Cast

Well, I hoped there would be a localization announcement to tie this to, but such is not the case as of AX 2018.

The Japanese website put up some small Q&A for the main voice actors to commemorate the end of recording sessions. Read out of curiosity, stayed for Saitou Souma’s metal comments (who voices Mineo), translated for fun. They were all asked the same three questions:

1. Overall impressions now that recording is over.
2. Highlights and favorite scenes from the After Story?
3. Highlights or impressionable scenes from non-After Story content?

Light spoilers from the first game and meta-spoilers for the fandisc (i.e. if you don’t want to know the specific nature of the routes).

Sweet Clown Staff Blog Posts: OS Messages

Sweet Clown doesn’t have an artbook or collected material of any kind, so I sated my thirst on the next best thing: staff blogs rife with the dev stories I wanted. I translated them the way I did with the CxM posts…and the total content was massive.

This is Part 1 of 3: OS Messages. Part 2 and 3 to be posted later on.

Translation follows with Cran and Ras.

---

————————————————————
■ Character Speaking Tone
————————————————————
01: Windows Start-Up
02: Windows Shut Down
03: Program Error
04: System Error
05: Message (Alarm)
06: Message (Notification)
07: Message (Inquiry)
08: General Alarm Tone
09: New Message Notification
10: Empty Recycle Bin
————————————————————

Cran: What’s thisss?

Ras: Today’s blog topic. They take each thing above and stick it to a character going, “How would this person say this?” and write it down. It’s a basic doc they write up before starting on the script.

Cran: How do they make it?

Ras: They show it to the staff and have them capture the character’s personality.

Cran: Oooh.

Ras: The stuff below is some of the old docs, so there’s some stuff different from the final results but don’t mind that.

Cran: Aren’t there any updated ones~?

Ras: Prolly not.

Page 1 covers the main characters, Page 2 the sub-characters. Spoilers for all routes and the endgame of Sweet Clown.

Pages: 1 2

Code:Realize ~Future Blessings~: The Localization Hour

“yay the english C:R fandisc came out! but typos and translation???” What you’ve all been waiting for! Maybe. There were not a ton of issues hawked on the interwebs upon this title’s release, so already one hopeful sign. The good news is I did not have to be so exhaustive as with Collar x Malice. For that reason, QAQC and Mistranslations (and glowing spots of localization!) will be in one post for this title.

For new readers: QAQC and Mistranslations are separate issues. QAQC are typos you only need English to find. Mistranslations mean knowing Japanese to figure out, “Wait, that meaning is completely wrong.” And then there’s localization, which for our purposes is making the text sound natural in the target language and rewriting into native context if necessary.

The short of my assessment is, there were still QAQC and mistranslations, but the least egregious and distracting of Aksys Games’s otome I’ve seen so far. (Disclaimer: I haven’t tested Period:Cube, Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, or 7’scarlet. But I also heard no uproar over them, so I assume they’re not too terrible either.)

Ye of curious disposition, hop on in. No spoilers for the fandisc, slight spoiler for Code:Realize if anyone hasn’t completed at least one route.

Collar x Malice: Spoiler Mistranslations Edition

Last time, I bemoaned the lack of QAQC in Spicy Aksys Shibuya Shenanigans, and explicitly made mistranslations a subset of that discussion. For our purposes, I’m classifying mistranslation as a phrase wrongly translated from Japanese to English that a non-Japanese reader (e.g. an editor) would have little way of noticing. While not as prominent as the woeful QAQC, they were present in Collar x Malice. Some were egregious, some not as blatant but still reflected basic Japanese mistranslation gaffes (e.g. active vs. passive).

Naturally, my collection is not exhaustive, as I can only determine discrepancies for voiced lines. If Hoshino’s thoughts are mistranslated, I can’t tell unless they directly contradict the surrounding context.

After the cut: spoilers are rampant, the post is image-heavy, and WordPress’s gallery carousel is lousy on mobile, so I suggest navigating the screenshots on a tablet or computer.