alonditebane
Demon Girl
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2013
- Messages
- 76
- Reputation score
- 22
You make several great points here. Visibility for the original authors seems to be the key here and I think we'd all agree that anything that results in greater visibility is a good thing. You also commented on time between fan translation and official, in this case you indicated 2.5-3 yrs. The Slave's Sword incident was just that, an incident as, I believe, the fan translation was completed just as Kagura made their official announcement, which resulted in a few...disagreements (yes, I'm paraphrasing here). And yes, our lovely ulmf is not as well known as it should be. Let's be clear though, no one ever said Kagura couldn't nor shouldn't do what they're doing. As you say, it is their right, as fan translations = unofficial and we, as users, have no way of truly knowing what goes on behind the scenes between the original devs/ authors and official translators.snip
Finally, we have a post from someone within Kagura. Thank you @JackyHF for your post on the translation thread:
What sticks out for me here is the fact that the fan translator is compensated by Kagura (if I read that right) and I think that's great. For me, the key here is the recognition; the acknowledgment for the fan translator's work, especially by an official entity.As someone who actually works for Kagura: no.
What Kagura does here is take existing fan translations, pay the original translators, pretty them up after extensive beta testing, and then sell them. This process is much more profitable than doing every translation from scratch, and allows reaching a much wider audience via services like Steam in a shorter time span, thus raising awareness and attention to the games that would OTHERWISE be only niche products a couple thousand people at best might know about (i.e. those who frequent websites like ULMF or the various share-sites). This also allows Kagura to raise capital for actual new translations by hired translators, and I and other people have suggested good candidates for translation or at least officially buying the translation, for the sake of getting games properly translated that most fan translators would just never touch because it's either outside their area of interest or expertise (i.e. the original language being too complex, or too much text). Would it be nice if every translation sold was completely new? Perhaps. Is it feasible as a long-term business model for a fairly new company? No, most certainly not. Give it a year or two to pick up speed, then it should work out to get formerly-untranslated games translated at a reasonable frequency.
Any others? Thoughts, comments, etc anyone?