Do you approve of translations of eroges you like?

[Asceai]

Just wanting to get an idea of what people thought about translations, commercial or fan. Given an eroge that you have played and enjoyed, what do you think of it being translated into, say, English?

I believe fan translation projects ruin potential for a title to be licensed locally. Thus dooming my favorites to poor quality releases.

[drmchsr0]

Only if the translator's name is either Ryuusoul, TakaJun, ASTCD2 or Makoto.

Otherwise, no. Mostly because I don't know anything. :3c

[Ojamajo_LimePie]

Why wouldn't I want to see other people enjoying the games I love?

[NTX]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I believe fan translation projects ruin potential for a title to be licensed locally. Thus dooming my favorites to poor quality releases.

He said "commercial or fan."

My answer's a big yes please, given that the spelling and grammar is good. Reading poor English gives me a headache and ruins the experience.

I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want it to be translated though.

Originally Posted by Derp

I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want it to be translated though.

Reason: You don't want others to play the eroge you enjoy. Some people find that many self-proclaimed and outspoken fans can result in a less enjoyable community that liked that eroge. Secret is out, this is elitism. But elitism isn't necessarily bad.

[appztetra]

I can't see the point of rejecting on translations whether it's commercial or fan, given the fact that there are editors, the chance of a well translated game is unexpectedly high.

Originally Posted by NTX

He said "commercial or fan."

My answer's a big yes please, given that the spelling and grammar is good. Reading poor English gives me a headache and ruins the experience.

Okay, conditionally then, commercial = yes; fan = usually no.

[Cosign]

Poll should've been: "Should fan-translations which are poorly translated or have terrible English in them, exist?"

That really is what I'd consider, the real question that everyone could be divided on.

For me the answer is yes, they should exist. Even the bad ones. Because if you ever frequent /jp/. Every few posts down, you would get the guy who says: 'Just give them to me! I'll take them. I'll take anything.'. Lord knows there are some out there who are craving to play more of these things - it's a rare medium you know.
I cut my tooth doing incredibly rigid machine-like translations. It was bad, but I had to start somewhere, everyone had to. Right now, we need more fan translators. Not less.
And seriously, Hating on other translators is simply not on. To what end? For what purpose? Did they kill your mother? JUST WHY???

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Okay, conditionally then, commercial = yes; fan = usually no.

Commercial doesn't guarantee quality translations and fan doesn't guarantee poor quality translation. We have seen great quality fan translations and horrible commercial translations. I think being a commercial or fan translation has very little bearing on the quality.

Personally, I'm all for translations, fan or commercial. The only thing I don't like is seeing a game I love butchered by a poor translation, especially when a good game gets a bad reputation because some bad translator ruined it.

All in all though, I want as many people as possible to enjoy VNs and I'm glad there are people dedicated enough to make it happen.

No, because I want to keep my feelings of self-entitlement in the English speaking world.

Originally Posted by Cosign

For me the answer is yes, they should exist. Even the bad ones. Because if you ever frequent /jp/. Every few posts down, you would get the guy who says: 'Just give them to me! I'll take them. I'll take anything.'. Lord knows there are some out there who are craving to play more of these things - it's a rare medium you know.
I cut my tooth doing incredibly rigid machine-like translations. It was bad, but I had to start somewhere, everyone had to. Right now, we need more fan translators. Not less.
And seriously, Hating on other translators is simply not on. To what end? For what purpose? Did they kill your mother? JUST WHY???

I agree with this. I know some translations can be painfully bad, and not just in terms of accuracy; there can be little to no proofreading, bad editing, or in the case of fan translations, a lot of general idiocy that can affect the final product (like those obnoxious credit pages in manga scans; not the subtle, unobtrusive ones, the ones that make you want to drop the entire series). Still, it's not like we have a choice. If the eroge translation scene were like fansubbing where it's almost guaranteed that any show you want to watch in the coming season will get translated, I could understand arguing against bad translations. Right now, the entire eroge translation community can be found on one or two sites, and there's a limit to how much one person can do. Besides, I'm pretty sure every good translator was a bad translator once.

As for the actual question, there's no reason for me to not want to see eroge get translated, but it's hard for me to comment because I'm limited to what gets translated in the first place. I can't think of a good reason to not want to see your favourite game translated, though, and I don't think eroge becoming mainstream is much of a problem. Besides, that's inevitable with anything popular. I'm sure Touhou and Type-Moon were obscure in English-speaking communities at some point in time...

Overall, I'm a supporter of any form of localization. I'm generally willing to pay for professionally translated games. If the original game company can't/won't translate their content, then I will sometimes import the original once a translation is done, or purchase a thematically similar game originally written in English. (Example: I bought Summer Session and The Flower Shop since there's no fully translated Tokimemo game for sale.)

According to the Translation Library, there were thirteen visual novels that were officially translated in 2009. I bought six of them, since I didn't have any interest in the other seven.

The same site states that 23 visual novels were fan translated in 2009. I bought two of them, since I didn't have any interest in many of them. (Unfortunately, I can't currently fit the cost of importing Sekien no Inganock, Sharin no Kuni, or Cross Channel into my budget...)

I'm interested in media forms such as VNs and romance games regardless of whether they were originally written in English, or whether some company or fan translated them. And I'm quite aware that Sturgeon's Law ("ninety percent of anything is crud") makes this frustrating -- since only a few VNs are translated or written every year, only a small number of them will be worth talking about.

I do approve of translations whether they be good bad or in between.

As far as judging a "good" or "accurate" a translation is, well I really can't. The only thing I can really go on is how well the English is written and whether or not the text is telling a coherent story. If the English is reasonably well written and coherent, that's good enough for me. Heck, even if it isn't that's fine, just so I can somehow piece together the story.