Talk:Clannad:Guidelines
Digits, Interjections, thinking words, shouts/screams and action words
I would like to clarify on some of the translation guidelines.
Firstly, do we substitute Arabic numerals on the original text for half-width digits (e.g. 20) or their English equivalents (Twenty)? If it had not been decided, I would suggest that we stick to digits for convention, clarity and conciseness. For kanji numerals, I'd rather we use English words.
In the translations I have seen, interjections were mostly substituted beautifully, but there were several crude ones, and some of those were translated in other ways for other scenarios.
May I suggest to translators and editors:
あの, ano -> Um
え, e -> Eh (repeated えs would be Eeeeh etc.)
ああ, aa -> Ya / K' / Yea / Aah (depending on context)
あ, a -> Ah
えっと, etto -> Erm / Err
っ, 'sokuon' -> ' (e.g. 「えっ？」 -> "Eh'?" , but only when the situation allows) (refer to the Yorkshire accent part on glottal stops in Wikipedia [1])
For those at the end of sentences:
よ, ね, な, ぞ etc. -> huh / not? / (nothing, for when it is an integral part of the sentence, i.e. sounds awkward without it) / reflected in the sentence as
だろう, だろ -> I wonder / I guess / right? / not? / probably / it is probable
I believe the rest have more obvious equivalents in English, and won't have much trouble integrating.
In the topic of screams, as they usually hold no meaning, might I suggest substituting them word for word (Hepburn romanization with kana spelling) with the ー, chouon substituted for a dash, small vowels as their english equivalent (I have thought of substituting large vowels with caps, but wouldn't it lose some aesthetic quality?) and っ with a 'h' where aesthetic standards allow.
For action words that occupy a single line, may I suggest the format as per in the following example, :もぐもぐ… *mogu mogu, munch munch
I used the above format for action words in sentences like じっと、そこを見た during my translation draft (which was only at its third day as per this project's founding, despite that I started it near the end of December). However, I find it sloppy when nested in sentences, and I guess it also breaks the flow of the script. Please criticize this suggestions mercilessly.Jc100 03:34, 6 February 2007 (PST)
- I agree with most of the conventions used above, albeit with a few minor changes:
- - 'mogu mogu' should just be 'munch, munch'
- - IRJustman and I would like to go with using just words for numbers (e.g., five), unless it comes to maybe 10-yen coins. Not like someone can say "one million yen", right, as opposed to "1,000,000 yen"?
- - screams we'll have to think about, it's kind of hard to romanize say, Sunohara's ひぃぃぃぃぃぃ！！
- - most of the stuff above is freeform, so like you said, will depend on context.
- velocity7 10:09, 6 February 2007 (EST)
- Ditto with velocity7. But I think the interjection translations should be guidelines; translators should retain free rein in using alternatives to naturalise/normalise the speech. Same goes for wild random screaming, this should be translator's call?
- More importantly, characters need to sound consistent throughout the game. Either this should be handled by QC, or translators can route-specialise. Or something; i'm new to this game.
- American English, or British English?
- --Kwok 05:40, 13 February 2007 (PST)
Naming
May I suggest adding a Female Youth name as a translation for 少女, shoujo, as a name title especially for the first Kotomi scene. At that first meeting, Tomoya was not too fond of her, hence the more formal name (albeit more conventional, in my opinion), even though name titles are not actually supposed to reflect relations.Jc100 03:34, 6 February 2007 (PST)
I'm inclined to follow your suggestion too, but will there be space constraints? Also, 'Female Youth' sounds rather detached and unemotional for a guy's thoughts, so would 'Girl' be simpler and sweeter? It's more casual and normalise the scenario that way. Same for shounen; we could call them "Guy".--Kwok 05:29, 13 February 2007 (PST)
A bit of trouble with the main arc. Tomoya often refers to Akio as オッサン. Would that be 'Uncle'?--kwok 01:46, 4 May 2007 (PDT)
Punctuation and General Typography
In the guidelines page, ellipses were written as '...' (3 periods). However, there exists a special character for groups of 3 ellipses, '…'. This character is also used in the game text. Unless it is due to technical restrictions(which I doubt there is), the second ellipse should be used. That is to distinguish the ellipses from the period following, as per The Chicago Manual of Style[2]. Yes, a period is required after ellipses when writing in English. I would not recommend using a program to substitute periods for this character after translating for fear that it might make some unwanted changes in the text.
There are also other things to take note of. The hyphen at your keyboard is only for hyphens. For dashes, use the following
For a limited range, e.g. '07–15' (haven't encountered any), or prefixing a term e.g. 'pre–World War II', use an en dash '–' (XP users: Alt+0150)
For an open range, e.g. 'Saturday—' an em dash '—'(XP users: Alt+0151)
A word that is cut off halfway (say, when some interrupts your conversation) is denoted by a character more commonly seen in Unicode art (well, it sure isn't ASCII, and it's not Shift-JIS)(part of the box drawing character set). It seems like Key used that character as it did not have gaps when placed consequentially. Long lines are usually multiples of this character too. I would recommend using the horizontal bar '―' (U+2013; ampersand, hash, 8213, semicolon), as it also joins with another itself.
As stated in the previous topic, the chouon is used for creative purposes in shouts and yells. The em dash is an excellent substitution for it.
The full width tilde '～' is used in several instances, like ぐっ～～. Seems like Key used it instead of the more politically correct wave symbol '〜' (they probably didn't know of it's existence). Both are in East Asian character sets. I can't find of any non-Asian character that imitates the full width tilde satisfactorily. Maybe we should default to half width tildes?
There is a quotation dash ⁓ (U+2053; ampersand, hash, 8275, semicolon). However, I currently cannot think of any instance it might be required in the script. Jc100 03:05, 13 February 2007 (PST)
- I understand that there is a love for Unicode characters in the script at the moment. However, if you would all please have a look at this website...
- You'll notice that I am currently using Western encoding to encode the script with rlBabel. At the time of this writing, this is currently the only way to compile the script so that it looks and works fine. In other words, if the character is not supported under CP1251 or ISO-8859-1, it is not very likely to work. This includes all Japanese characters.
- That's the reasoning for my use of "..." at the moment. For all other characters, they will have to be replaced or modified in some way in order to match up with this. I haven't had time to go look back in scripts to fix this, so if you have time, please feel free to fix them.
- --velocity7, February 13, 2007, 8:59 AM EST
CP1252 uses the code point 85 for ellipses, which is unassigned in ISO-8859-1. I'm guessing that this was what Haeleth meant by (ISO-8859-1 with extensions). Why not give it a try?
Jc100 12:37, 13 February 2007 (PST)
創立者祭
A couple of possible translations for 創立者祭:[3][4]
- school festival (impossible due to SEEN2510)
- Founder's Day
- School Anniversary
Any comments? --velocity7
