visual novels & translations
ยท 2-minute read
the other day i gave a short presentation about visual novels & translations at tokyo indies so i thought i'd share it here in case it's helpful!
it's a google slides presentation which i've added some supplementary text to (in the yellow highlights) since some stuff i said isn't actually on the slides - i think most of the info is included though.
a summary of the most important things i'd like people to take away below:
- keep translation in mind from the beginning (like if you have a lot of text in images or are using an engine that doesn't have translation systems baked in this can be a pain)
- translate for the platform (audience can differ a lot)
- translate for the genre (again, audience can differ a lot)
- in the end it's your game though so translate to whatever you want lol... i can only give advice
do a little bit of research into what languages that games similar to the one you're making/have made are translated into & use that as a starting point!
(as an extra note though for english-language devs, probably a lot of you might have first encountered visual novels through one translated from japanese to english (though maybe this will no longer be the case in a few years, with so many english original vns now!). i think that can make a lot of people think that they should definitely translate their own vn into japanese.
if this is something you absolutely want to do i think you should go for it! but i mention in the slide also that japanese speakers already actually have a loooot of visual novels to play, & these are generally visual novels made by japanese speakers for the japanese audience. if you don't have a lot of budget, before just going 'i'm making a visual novel ๐ visual novels come from japan ๐ i should translate my game to japanese!', you might want to consider whether your visual novel really fits what the audience wants.
this isn't me trying to convince you not to translate to japanese - i'm just saying that just because you're making a visual novel doesn't mean you have to default to adding a japanese translation.)