There’s a questions somewhere here about authenticity. Which is more authentic? A perfectly translated game, or a game that was translated as it would have been translated in 1995 (poorly)?
I don’t think anyone would really prefer it to be translated poorly, but if Linda^3 was translated from PCECD to TG16CD in 1995 you know it would be rough as heck around the edges (potentially by Working Designs). And there’s the counterpoint. The recommended way to play their games is in the Un-Working Designs patches. IDK i’m rambling
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I’ve played a couple of games with the unworked patches, but they only undid the gameplay changes. The translations were the same, at least in the ones I played.
I came to the defence of edited machine translation because I have a horse in the race, having made one myself despite not knowing the language or how to romhack. Mine was a shmup, so much less text than I imagine an Atelier game would have. I started out just wanting to put the menu into English for my own convenience, then once I’d done it I thought I’d carry on. Besides having to figure out what the Japanese text meant (which I generally did by putting it through a few machine translators, comparing the results and the in-game context, and also going over it with a dictionary), I didn’t have the ability to change phrase lengths so I had to figure out what was being said and then find a way to say it in English that would fit in the same number of characters or less. I don’t think the result was brilliant but I also think it wasn’t bad. After release I got some feedback from a Japanese fan of the game which helped me understand a few things I’d missed or gotten wrong and I wound up putting out a couple of further updates.
I don’t know how good this particular translation is, but I think machine translation having been used doesn’t necessarily mean a hack wasn’t done with care and diligence. I think the one I made was at least better than the worst of the 90s.
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Honestly it seems like a fascinating process and as long as its announced up-front, I don’t see an issue. I want to try to do one too, maybe not even for publication, just for me.
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I’m not an expert but it sounds a lot like the compilation vs recompilation efforts that have been having with N64 games, so they can play on PC. Compilation is going line of code by line of code, and recompilation machine brute forces it which you then go back and tweak. And I think the overall feeling of the Majora’s Mask recomp has been positive, and that any changes are non sequential
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This sounds like something special
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IMHO, this is an “it is what it is” type situation. I am grateful either way. When it comes to not-for-profit fan translation of a game that is otherwise not having translations completed or is now more likely to get a better translation, I see no ethical issue. Everyone should know by now that the programming is the hardest part. Someone could now step in and say “donate to my patreon and I will give my hand-translated script to the programmer”.
As for the nuances of different philosophies of translation, read any book by Clyde Mandelin Legends of Localization
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Hilltop has some great youtube videos as well on the difficulties of translation. They also posted a stream recently of one of the artists they use recreating game artwork which was pretty dope to see the process
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This is going at the top of my list to play next!! Waited my whole life for this one!
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That’s pretty cool. I played the PSP version years ago with a translation text file open on my PC and it was doable, but a patch sounds much better.
Apparently this is a release based off of some old code that was previously published to github and was released without communicating with the dev/translator.
There’s a better version in development still apparently, although it’s been quite a while. Probably more pressing is that this one will apparently be unfinishable.
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Aw jeez. Yeah upon closer inspection it’s still not totally there either.
Which is FINE, I can wait longer, I have too much going on to play an RPG on a home console right now.
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yet again the fan translation community has far too much drama.
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I can’t wait to get off work and play this thing. I love it whenever I find some odd indie project from decades ago that has had some sort of following but that I’ve never heard off.
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The Princess Crown fan translation saga continues with a video update from the original translators.
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It looks like they are re-energized to tackle the project again! Here’s to hoping. Nice VS avatar also 
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