From Baba's start of 2017 blog comes the news that Key are bringing their Steam games into different languages! In particular, CLANNAD and planetarian are going to be translated into Chinese, with planetarian also receiving a German translation! This is great news because it means that Key are finally branching
Ugh… I don’t know how I even managed to make this mistake, but Baba-shachou was talking about Hong-Kong and not Taiwan. Sorry :komue:
I was hitted to hard by the news of Key plans to go to Germany and ignore Russia :komue:
As I’m one of the german Key fans on this side, this is really great news for me. It also means that I might be able to get some friends of mine into Key who aren’t too proficient in english yet might like Key’s stories.
Oh man, same here! This is awesome news!
The more languages available the better.
Interesting news! China was kind of a no-brainer, but German? Wow! Let’s hope our other German forumers can tell us how it ends up 
(actually, considering the people VA work with, I’m less surprised that they chose German…)
Thanks Sabersnake~
Well, I know of a guy who started translating Rewrite by himself into spanish. He knows nothing of hacking and was just translating the script, so I highly doubt he achieves anything… But the hype’s there!
No doubt the world will benefit from having Key games translated, but on the other hand, the writing of the english games is usually easy to read so I’ve used Rewrite to teach english to a friend of mine who had real struggles learning english. Took him time and he ended up using Deardrops instead of Rewrite ( 
) but he did learn.
As BakaYume Fansub we’re translating Planetarian to Turkish, but couldn’t integrate our script due to RLDev being not compatible with RealliveMAX. All the scripts are translated, as well as the images, but now in testing phase.
Where could we contact with Key about this I wonder. Would they reply us via Facebook?
Your best bet is contacting Baba or Kudo on Twitter in Japanese, but there is no guarantee theyll respond. What do you need from them anyway?
We’d want our translation to be used in the Steam version as an official Turkish translation, that’s why, since it’s the perfect edition, and Turkish players/readers could buy it on Steam and more people’d support Key and experience planetarian in Turkish.
Also, visual novels aren’t that popular in our country, so we want to introduce them to our people. Steam is one of the best platforms for that. You know what a huddle obtaining a visual novel from Japanese sources, getting them working on a non-Japanese PC and lastly, installing the language patch for a person who doesn’t know all this in the beginning, right?
But in Steam, there is no locale settings barriers or anything. People just buy the game, download it and play it so easily.
If you can meet Baba in person at one of the events and chat with him there, I imagine he would be pretty receptive. At the very least you could make your pitch that way.
This is actually pretty cool! In a sense it really goes and helps the company to be more expandable and reachable to different countries further. It’s kinda nice in a way in my personal eyes. Again, it helps the company because if they’re going to multi-languages then they’re pretty much going around and make it available for more people around.
I’m just amazed we have so many people here eager to TL Key’s games into non-English langauges, yet we could never find anyone interested in translating 1st beat into English ^^;
I’m obviously really happy for all the non-english speaking Key fans, but to be honest I’m a little concerned that Key is going in too hard and fast with these translations. They’ve had success with the steam release of Clannad and it’s spinoff but people recognise that brand, it’s an iconic anime that many people remember. Since then we’ve had announcement after announcement of new localisations being developed.
They have a lot of eggs in this basket, if the sales don’t keep up with all the versions of Little Busters and Rewrite it could put them off localising.
All the versions of Little Busters! and Rewrite?
So far, only English localisation of LB! has been confirmed and a work on Eng-loc of Rewrite+ announced.
As far as CLANNAD goes, they’ve probably took an already existing TL and edited it. Considering, that they know exactly how many copies they’ve sold on Steam, I doubt that they are being rash here. You should look at it as an investment into future. They are step by step appealing to international fans. They are winning points.
While, say, it would cost quite a lot to make a TL from the scratch, you can save quite a lot if there is at least somewhat decent fan-tl available on the net. Saves time and money.
When I said “Little Busters and Rewrite” I basically meant “any VN that isn’t Clannad.” I dunno which ones they’ll choose, but I’m doubtful they’ll have big audiences. It is of course an investment, but investments should never be hasty because that’s how they become disasters.
I don’t know. I’m not saying this is all going to fail I’m just saying I’m surprised by how quickly they’re diving into this when they’ve only JUST stepped their toe into the western market. I didn’t know the TL’s were based on fan translations though!
Not all the TLs and there is nothing strange with Chinese version. Its one of the most used languages in the world with an extremely large potential consumer-market.
And as for German version of Planetarian… if you lurk around the web you can find 1000 and 1 TL of Planetarian into %input_language_name_here%. I know of at least 3 different RU-Translations of it, for example.
Being a short story, it would be extremely low-cos to implement additional languages on it… especially if they go fan-tl-editing route.
You can easily buy a complete fan-tl for much more money than you will have to pay for hiring an official translator + editor (localisers team).
Though, you have to understand that all that I say is my understanding of a situation. I may be wrong on some points.
I understand what you’re saying and you make good points. I was assuming originally that these TLs are developed from scratch. I just think that LB and Rewrite in particular are a gamble to translate all at once, especially if there might be multiple translations being made at the same time. These are LONG VN’s, even if it’ll cost less to buy fan TLs and build it from there, if they don’t sell it would be a big loss and possibly scare them away from localisation.
Yeah, that can.
Then, again, I don’t think they believe in a whooping success… and thats why they’ve chosen to add locals for already released titles.
Planetarian goes as a forwarder, with 2 new languages. Chinese, which encompassess a large auditory, and then German which appeasses to Western fans.
And then there is a big CLANNAD which only gets a Chinese for now.
