Finished AoC 2017 Day 17:
It's a fun problem because there are two ways to implement part A, a naive way and a clever way, but once you get to part B, while the part A's clever way does take you to a solution - the way to get to the real solution for B is to start from part A's naive way.
Noticed someone talking aloud to themselves in public almost as much as I do in private and I had to hold myself back from saluting them.
I haven't been job hunting in a while, but the localization companies usually advertise jobs on social media and you can always pepper their recruiting emails to put yourself on their radar even if a particular job you're looking for isn't posted.
Localization's in a tough spot overall because of all the AI stuff, but it's not just translators that they need. Enthusiasm for the medium, familiarity with the content + competency in the source language takes you a long way.
In that case, any experience you can show - even if it's unofficial - would help. Localization companies usually send you tests if you make it past the first hurdle, whether it be translation, editing, lettering, etc.
Almost every job in Japan that isn't teaching English requires at least an N2 — at least from what I've seen — and for most jobs here it's a plus if not a must when you'll be working alongside someone overseas. I'm pretty sure it opens up editing-related jobs for JP manga, etc.
Congrats again! ...and honestly, you have to self-study to get beyond a certain point - formal Ed falls short.
I've got mine (N1) framed below my diploma. (In some situations, it was worth more than my degree.)
Me: "Haha what a fun and silly little game Pokopia is I'm having such fun"
My aide rushes in: "EVERYONE WANTS TO FUCK BULBASAUR"
Me: "Huh?"
My aide, sweating bullets: "BULBASAUR HAS A GYARU SPEECH PATTERN IN THE JAPANESE VERSION AND VENUSAUR GOES ARA ARA SO EVERYONE WANTS FUCK THEM."
Me: "Huh."
Daily #1976 - Mood
A photo of a grey, square Gameboy cart of Metroid II in someone's hand
A photo of an active Epilogue Operator in front of a computer screen with the Epilogue Playback software open reading the official Gameboy Cartridge of Metroid II
Finally found a cart of Metroid II that was in really good shape. I'm really happy to finally add this to the collection
Did you ever play any of the Lemmings games? My brother and I loved them. I honestly didn't know there were so many of them. This is The Lemmings Chronicles aka Lemmings 3 released for DOS and AmigaOS. in 1994 #retrogaming #retrogame #ClassicPCGame
Final Fantasy III is actually really funny because 95% of the original JP dialog between the onions is like, "Bruh, whoa. Did you see that, bruh?" "Dude! Like totally."
This is why I avoid framing translation as a net loss process. It devalues our work and I just don't believe it has to be the case. A superficial loss in grammatical mechanics can be more than offset with gains made through naturalistic, yet authentic writing. You just need sufficient writing chops.
THAT'S the part I spend a huge amount of my time working on for stuff like RPGs in particular where there's going to be talking and players need to be able to keep a big cast straight. I don't have pronouns to work with, but I do have dictionaries and thesauruses to lay down rhetorical blueprints.
In game loc, the question of how to handle Japanese pronouns is always answered with characterization. Especially with games not set in Japan, I don't want or need to hold onto pronouns. I just need to determine what info they convey and then reconstruct it through a character's diction and cadence.
Barring external factors, translation is a job concerned with information conveyance. The lack of identical *mechanics* in your target language does NOT indicate an innate inability to convey the underlying information and its implications, especially when it's rich with imported words and grammar.
Apropos of "nothing," the refrain of "English lacks our pronouns, therefore any loc is compromised" is such a cliched one monolingual Japanese creators trot out when they're disconnected from the process. And as a translator who Gets It, like, it's just not usually a huge creative hurdle day-to-day?
I really like the Japanese language and the way it works, and I am often dissatisfied if I have to rely on someone else's translation because I don't have access to the source, but it's also not some like mystical magical thing. It's just another language — which can do some things easily, some not.
もふもふバニーガール！
Example:
Because Japanese is very phonetic in its dialogue, character voice direction is very easy to manipulate on paper.
Similarly misspelling words all over the place to simulate accents in English has fallen heavily out of favor in modern writing and would get you essentially excommunicated.
Tip for niri users: I've noticed that the audio will often skip if you have a video playing (at least in firefox) in an off screen window.
You can solve this problem by ensuring the video isn't in the active tab (just make a new empty tab if needed and swap to it).
Because of both space and time constraints, a translator has to pick and choose what to drop and what to (attempt to) replicate.
(Obviously, AI is terrible at this task, because it relies on huge context windows (at least in a theoretical sense) and *consistent* decisions.)
I tend to push back heavily against *Japanese Language Supremacy* based takes these days, but the truth is Japanese encodes information differently than English (overall), so a lot of effort has to go into more roundabout ways of conveying what's missing from a simple pass.
bsky.app/profile/xyth...
Finished Metroid Prime 4 on Hard.
Ow. My hands hurt.
So far (01-13) AoC 2017 has been pretty fun.
I think I may have over-complicated 08b, but haven't really hit any walls. I really recommend going back and poking at some of the previous years of Advent of Code. (Especially if you did 2024 - there were many callbacks - things will feel familiar.)
のぞみとみぞれ
リズと青い鳥ののぞみさんとみぞれさん。
