~Bunbunmaru News~ > Front Page Headlines
Touhou 15 「東方紺珠伝 ～ Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom」 Patch 1.00b released
DTM:
Well, I can assure you that right now, the English patches hosted on the site is of high quality. It took a longer time to get the endings right for TH15 but that is now a non-issue.
shockdude:
--- Quote from: notext on October 29, 2015, 07:03:44 PM ---The idea that a translation can be out of date is fundamentally wrong-headed - a more recent translation isn't "more up to date", it is more recent. If I read a translation of Don Quixote that has been written this century it is not necessarily going to be a better translation than one written in the previous century or before. It could be, and could be written for more modern sensibilities, but people will argue over the quality regardless, and the idea that one supersedes the other is ridiculous. This goes doubly for translations from Japanese, which is a very different language from English and invites a lot of subjective translation. I have no doubt you could put together two fairly different scripts for TH15 and have them both be "correct", at least in the general sense.
Don't get me wrong, I actually think the work that has gone into the autopatcher is extremely valuable, particularly in providing a set of tools to allow non-english translations. You're doing amazing work. But I haven't downloaded it myself because whenever the question of whether the translation has been finished is asked, the question gets blown off as a non-issue. And if responsibility for the quality of the translation has been abdicated by the people working on the patch then the message that sends me is that the translation was produced without any care for the result. An individual fan translator and editor may make mistakes, but if they're willing to put their names to the work and say it's finished then at least you know they tried.
--- End quote ---
Thcrap's philosophy is based on that of modern software development; software is never "complete" (there will always be a better version), and thcrap will never be complete either. The ideal was to have an open-source modding engine in which anyone can make whatever translation they wanted, from different languages to variations of the same language (e.g. literal vs localized translation).
The thing is most modern software will attempt a "stable release," with objective milestones and quality assurance. Thcrap only offers what is technically an "unstable development" release, which is excellent for translation development and testing but not ideal for end-users.
IIRC nmlgc did say that basing thcrap on a wiki was a mistake; if he were to do it again he'd use something like github instead, which offers better tools for this sort of project.
Edit: every time thcrap gets brought up it derails the main thread topic lol.
Drake:
--- Quote from: notext on October 29, 2015, 07:03:44 PM ---It could be, and could be written for more modern sensibilities, but people will argue over the quality regardless, and the idea that one supersedes the other is ridiculous. This goes doubly for translations from Japanese, which is a very different language from English and invites a lot of subjective translation. I have no doubt you could put together two fairly different scripts for TH15 and have them both be "correct", at least in the general sense.
--- End quote ---
While I agree that changing style or having slightly differently worded translations would be a bit silly to put one over others, that picture of the Touhou translation scene is incorrect for the most part. It isn't that important updated translations are just subjectively nicer wordings or something, it's that the old translation was either flat-out wrong, wasn't putting across what it was meant to, or if it was implying something it shouldn't have. There are definitely super-minor grammar nitpicks and battles of literal accuracy vs understandability, but the cases where changing a translation is even needed usually means there was something non-trivial that was wrong, and at that point you can no longer argue that the old version is comparably accurate.
--- Quote ---And if responsibility for the quality of the translation has been abdicated by the people working on the patch then the message that sends me is that the translation was produced without any care for the result. An individual fan translator and editor may make mistakes, but if they're willing to put their names to the work and say it's finished then at least you know they tried.
--- End quote ---
Except the nature of these translations being collaborative means that even if one person can translate something to the best of their ability, doesn't mean said translation is "done" as though it's a claim of perfection. Those who release static patches aren't going to claim their translation can't be improved, it's just what they could do. If it can be improved at that point, it doesn't matter that the patch is done, it's still in need of correction. Often translators can just not have all necessary information or context, which tends to happen a lot with Touhou. You can't blame any one person for that, it's up to the community as a whole to fix things.
This doesn't even have much to do with thpatch specifically. It's just how Touhou's translations have always evolved throughout its history.
The ⑨th Zentillion:
--- Quote from: Drake on October 30, 2015, 03:08:25 AM ---It's just how Touhou's translations have always evolved throughout its history.
--- End quote ---
ex. the liberties taken in 6-8's translations; after those that certain style began to fade from then on, for the most part.
N-Forza:
--- Quote from: The ⑨th Zentillion on October 30, 2015, 05:43:12 AM ---ex. the liberties taken in 6-8's translations; after those that certain style began to fade from then on, for the most part.
--- End quote ---
Thank goodness for that.