Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Also

It's been brought to my attention that the paypal donation button I have on the donation page didn't actually work and/or just brought people to the main paypal website. I think I've corrected it, so if anyone wanted or wants to donate to LQT for the translations and work done as so far, it should be set up properly now.

I've already started work on other projects, but I'm not going to post about them here or now, so let me use this space to go into a bit of detail on the Mamankyoushitsu translation. Some anons were wondering how it was done and the way it was translated.

For the record, I did not create the patch for Mamankyoushitsu, HaraPara, or even the patch of April Fool's HaraKano. All credit for that goes to Bonzaimonkey. He created the game patch and extracted the game scripts, which I was able to then translate and put into the game. Without his (her?) effort, none of this would be possible, and my translation would be limited to a google document of all the dialogue, which is not nearly as easy to read. for those that have asked, unfortunately he has informed me he is currently busy with other tasks and unavailable to help with other translation projects.

Regarding the quality of my translation, as many have noticed, it does vary greatly from one route to another. This is because all the routes were translated at different times, and depending on when I did the translation, I had different ideas about how I did and didn't want the translation to read (for example, in some routes I took the easy way out and just marked the sound effects that Swaneye likes to include as -SFX-. Later, I felt this was being to cheap, so I romanized the actual translations of the sound affects, hence the -jyu! jyu! jyu! jyu!- and other noises that Swaneye seems to think sex sounds like. I quickly decided that was too silly, so I just fell back to translating all the sound effects as what they were the sound affect of, which could give people an idea of what was going on and let their imagination do the rest, thus all the -Thrust! Thrust! Thrust!- of the later completed routes).I could go back and revise all of it, yet I do not feel the effort is necessary for this title when there is other work to be done that may be more interesting.

As for the accuracy and correctness of the translation its self, I did my best to keep it true to the content. By and large, the english script is exactly as it goes in the japanese script. I took the meanings the writing was meant to convey in Japanese and tried to envision them how we (or at least, how I) would say them in english, in real life. Rest assured, I am a native english speaker, so I do know how us Westerner's tend to speak. America wise, at least. If certain lines stand out as especially awkward or weird sounding, it is most likely less me being creative with the translation and more me being direct in the translation (for example, Saera's prose during the final sex scene between her and Kei on their wedding day. Yeah. I didn't make that up). As for all the spelling mistakes and occasional Japanese lines appearing with the text, Mamankyoushitsu has been a very long project, and some of the time, I just wanted the scene I was translating to end, so I cared less about spelling and more about getting it done and uploaded. What's worse, the entire translation was done using notepad, and since the script files include a lot of programming language for the kirikiri engine, I don't think I could just spell check through them without spellchecker highlighting every line of code as a mistake in spelling. What's worse, for the longest time the translation of Maman, HaraPara, HaraKano, and everything else was done on an old Intel thinkpad that not only is missing five keys, yet also likes to freeze at inopportune times. All the more reason for me to be less concerned on accuracy and more concerned about completing each patch before the hard drive failed. Loe quality is not only low in quality, yet also in funding. My apologies if this makes the patches especially hard to read. Especially for any english majors out there; my writing style is definitely more based on how people speak than on proper grammar, so it might be a bit hard to read (I hope, hope, hope, no reader follows prescriptionist grammar. They'll have a hard time).

For whether or not there will be an interface patch, I have completed a brief, low quality translation of some of the main menus, but they're not particularly necessary to have in order to play the game properly and may not be implemented anytime soon, as the patcher is busy as I said. Meanwhile, if you'd like to change the options, though the actual files are to tedious to bother editing directly in game, this image is a guide on which does what for Mamankyoushitsu:

http://imgur.com/5PNRb5W

Just be aware than once you complete a heroine's route, you unlock her character model viewer in the extras section. Once you 100% complete the game, you unlock the wallpaper creation mode for the character models, which can be fun to mess around with and also do not need an explanation. Experiment!

Thus said, I thank you all again for reading the LQT translation of Mamankyoushitsu/Harapara/small section of Harakano. Feel free to use the comment section of this post (or tweet LQT) with what parts you did or didn't like about the novel, the translation, the characters, etc. It's nice to see people appreciate the work. And critique it.

Thank you all,

Loe Quality

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the quick options page translation I extracted the sysimg1.xp3 and edited the images along with the ingame side menu (the main menu is still jap) so I could read em and repacked up em and it worked lol someone are little funny looking but readable it feels like I made my own loequality contribution but I don't plan on sharing it since I did a fairly bad job. Check it out

    Config
    http://imgur.com/bZ3BhiI

    Ingame Sidebar Menu
    http://imgur.com/8UsQWOc

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  2. http://puu.sh/8RnFK.png help I got this error after the choice where the MC is asked what kind of woman he prefers, mc

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    1. Another person seemed to have a similar problem. The game might be having trouble accessing the file it needs when that scene plays; I apologize, yet I can only recommend re-installing. Make sure youre-installdirectly onto your harddrive (not a usb stick, memory card, or external), and make sure your computer is not running too many programs when it's installing and/or loading the game, as this can cause some weird problems to occur.

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    2. Indeed, I had the game installed on my external USB HDD like many other VNs. I reinstalled the game on the internal HDD and it works! Thanks!
      Kinda strange it would me a problem.. I install almost all my games and VNs on external usb drive and didn't have any problems before ;/
      By the way, where I should report typos?

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    3. My recommendation would just be to keep a .txt or .doc file where you keep track of all of them as you play through the game routes. Once you finish them, upload the doc to google docs or copy and paste it as a pastebin or something similar, so I can have a record of all of them condensed in one place, rather than so many tweets/blog comments

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