Re: Princess Sacrifice - Eng Translation (WIP)
Maybe I should write a more detailed post or topic on this, but a handful of quick tips I can give now:
1) Machine translations will help 95% of the time. For the remaining 5%, a lot of it could reasonably be guessed by context. To be blunt: these are fan translations of hentai games. No-one will care if you get a few things slightly wrong, so don't be afraid to. In fact, most people won't even notice. Even people who say we read Japanese and so "we'll know if you make mistakes" (actual quote I've been on the receiving end of) probably won't notice, because they're not going to be proofreading your translated script against the Japanese.
2) Rikaichan/Rikaikun are very useful tools, especially when you're dealing with a common situation: characters being inserted to get certain sounds in the text. Rikaichan/Rikaikun (Firefox/Chrome respectively) allow you to mouseover a Japanese word to get a translation. Importantly, if a word can't be translated due to characters being inserted, you can use Rikaichan/Rikaikun to easily roll over the sentence and see when things start to make sense again. That way you'll only lose one or two words, rather than garbled output from a machine translator. Just make sure you pay attention to if Rikaichan/Rikaikun say that the words is a negative or not.
3) Lateral thinking is important. Rather than try to translate literally, try to identify the concepts that are being communicated and then stitch them together into a coherent sentence. Quite often a literal translation isn't going to be very good anyway.
4) Importantly, your source material may have mistakes in it. These might be typos (e.g. words that don't make sense), or things which are actually wrong (which I've encountered in VPM). Don't be afraid to use editorial judgement to correct them.
5) If you know some Japanese words from Anime, try using Google translate and pay attention to the Romaji below the translation. You might spot words there, and it's a good way to improve your Japanese.
6) Katakana can be used to indicate a primitive style of speech in Japanese, but machine translators will just spit out the phonetic Japanese in this case. If you see this, convert to Hiragana before putting into a translator.
7) Focus on English writing skills more than Japanese translation skills. Maybe a contentious point, but writing English is much more important than translating Japanese. It's what people read in the end, after all, and it'll improve your ad libbing if it's needed.
8) Try to use appropriate tools. It'll be no fun translating if you have to wrestle with your tools all the time. If necessary, try to find a programmer to help with this - I really can't stress how important I think this one is.
9) Don't be afraid to ask for help. Worst case is nothing will happen, best case you'll pick up some more techniques.
10) Try to work out characters personalities, and use them. I've noticed a lot of bland H-game characters (e.g. very dull speech), so feel free to add your own interpretation of the characters. It'll make the end produce more interesting.
11) Actually have fun translating. If it stops being fun, stop translating.
Wow... That was far longer than I thought it would be. Oh well, hope it's useful.
