HataVNI
varishangout.com
I don't handle any localizations for languages you can read so you cannot judge whether I ruin things or just do my "job": Namely helping to bring the work to a new audience. I translate games from English to German - or some doujin-Games from Japanese to German - which are not published yet. I understand several of your points, but the way you are going on about it is not going to change anything. If anything it makes people want to spite you even more and expose you to their echobubbles on twitter. It is the same as baiting on imageboards. You can only keep the damage low if you don't interact with them at all.
I personally think that the English localization approaches are sometimes misguided and go overboard, hence I signed up here. German localization approaches differ much from the English ones and they maintain more of the "original's" feel than English does. I have gotten into fights with some of the top-localizers before too over for example saying that you should use Japanese dictionaries over English ones among other discussions, so it is not like I don't understand your frustrations facing a group of insurmountable contrarians. I'm not saying I'm one of you - as I don't agree with your methods - but not all localization critique is entirely without merit. It is important how you express it though, because people tend to use their fight or flight mechanism when something doesn't fit their world view.
I have done QC for a VN company in the past though (not anymore) and I know that people there were definitely passionate about working on these projects (Eroge) and didn't become localizers out of hate for the medium or the fans. They are fans themselves who had passion and saw the opportunity to make that passion their job. Sometimes there are legal issues with particular platforms like Steam which is why things have to be "censored" in order to appease the people in charge since after all you want the project to be published either way. No one will forgive a company that has to outright cancel a game they promised to release because it ran into some roadblocks, after all. It's complicated and unfortunate circumstances are behind why some content-cuts and rewrites have to happen, but they are surely (not always) done to willfully "own the fans". I don't deny there may be rogues though who extract joy from doing it, but there is no visible trend. Some localizers have a different kind of humor that doesn't always connect with the audience - or they're is a generational difference involved.
Maybe there is some worthwhile discussion possible after neglecting all of the hate in this forum.
Also don't take too seriously that I said that this forum is irrelevant. All forums are irrelevant in Discord era :(
I personally think that the English localization approaches are sometimes misguided and go overboard, hence I signed up here. German localization approaches differ much from the English ones and they maintain more of the "original's" feel than English does. I have gotten into fights with some of the top-localizers before too over for example saying that you should use Japanese dictionaries over English ones among other discussions, so it is not like I don't understand your frustrations facing a group of insurmountable contrarians. I'm not saying I'm one of you - as I don't agree with your methods - but not all localization critique is entirely without merit. It is important how you express it though, because people tend to use their fight or flight mechanism when something doesn't fit their world view.
I have done QC for a VN company in the past though (not anymore) and I know that people there were definitely passionate about working on these projects (Eroge) and didn't become localizers out of hate for the medium or the fans. They are fans themselves who had passion and saw the opportunity to make that passion their job. Sometimes there are legal issues with particular platforms like Steam which is why things have to be "censored" in order to appease the people in charge since after all you want the project to be published either way. No one will forgive a company that has to outright cancel a game they promised to release because it ran into some roadblocks, after all. It's complicated and unfortunate circumstances are behind why some content-cuts and rewrites have to happen, but they are surely (not always) done to willfully "own the fans". I don't deny there may be rogues though who extract joy from doing it, but there is no visible trend. Some localizers have a different kind of humor that doesn't always connect with the audience - or they're is a generational difference involved.
Maybe there is some worthwhile discussion possible after neglecting all of the hate in this forum.
Also don't take too seriously that I said that this forum is irrelevant. All forums are irrelevant in Discord era :(