Siglus Hacking

[Bizkitdoh]

I am not saying that this makes the translation incomprehensible–I am saying that it makes the translation less

Fair enough.

[Takafumi]

If there’s such controversy and division over this, could there be a ‘switch’ to change it? I don’t know much about hacking into the engine, so this may not work in the slightest; but maybe all it would take is a Kanade name variable in each instance of Kanade’s text. Whether that variable is equal to ‘Tenshi’ or ‘Angel’ would be decided by a switch in ‘Options’ or a number in a ‘settings.txt’ in the patch, which the user can change if they want her name to be one or the other (0 = Tenshi, 1= Angel).

We can’t recompile any of the coding right now, so we can’t repoint things. It’d be easy to setup a reference point, but nothing beyond that.

There is frequent dialogue throughout the demo that only makes sense if we specifically assume that, by “Angel,” they mean a servant of God. From Angel saying “I’m no angel,” to the logic that God must exist because His angel exists… It’s all over the place. The term is indubitably being used as a descriptor, and to say otherwise is simply incorrect.

Only at times of confusion and exposition.

That’s why you TL it as angel in instances it’s referring to that and not Tenshi, just as a person reading in in Japanese would do, and in the cases when it does refer to her the reader knows what it means in context because of using a TL note.

This is standard with subbing and fan tl-ing. At least it was. I don’t know if these fancy modern translators changed that at all, but I’ll go with what I know.

It shouldn’t be- It baffles me that we even have this conversation coming up again. Also that’d be really silly imo.

I told you. Lots of people like to have it translated.

It’s basically the equivalent of wanting to keep a character’s nickname or title as “Neko” when you could just simply translate it as “Cat”.

If it’s a name or a title, I’d keep it as Neko. That’s what the K guys did.

I feel that important rule of thumb to keep in mind about translation is that if you have to use footnotes in the translated dialogue in order for your average native English speaker to understand that Tenshi = Angel, then that’s a sign that it’s better to just translate the nickname as “Angel” instead of keeping it as “Tenshi”.

I disagree. There are too many instances where a translation would ruin either the flow or the symbolism of a sentence.
Maybe from an official standpoint that rule of thumb would be true, but this isn’t an official translation.

I don’t think you understand. They don’t call her Tenshi because she looks like an angel. They gave her the name “Tenshi”, just as a parent would give a child the name “Yuri”. Hinata and Yuri were discussing what to call her, and Hinata said (basically): “Why don’t we call her Tenshi, because she is like a helper of god”.

I think this is a terrible argument, and it’s why I didn’t agree with Biz on Skype.

The reason no one translates the name “Yuri” as is Lilly is because that’s an actual Japanese name while “tenshi” is just a word in Japanese instead of an actual name.

Tenshi is treated as a name though. Even if we used Angel, it’d be singular, with a capital letter. When aiming down her scope, Yuri wouldn’t say “an Angel.” She’d just say “Angel.”
They are not saying she is an Angel, they are saying she is Angel. That Angel is her name. The only one who really treats it differently is Otonashi.

“Why don’t we call her Tenshi (TL note: Tenshi means Angel), because she’s like God’s helper.”

Proceed to call her Tenshi, her title.

Proceed to translate the word tenshi when it is used as a word and not in reference to the girl, Tenshi.

For the first instance, where the screen zooms in on her, and Yuri says “Tenshi.” It’d be Tenshi with a small “Angel” above it. After that, all instances of Tenshi would be kept as Tenshi, unless it is saying she is an Angel, or should look like an Angel, or in reference to her position of power. As I said before, there is a distinction between descriptor and moniker.

Please correct me if Im wrong, but aren’t most Japanese names just a word/words in Japanese?

Eh, names have meanings, but they aren’t just words.

Sekai Project left it as Yumemi because that is her name, and added a TL note that explained the relevant translation of her name.

At request of the original creators too, right?

My reasoning for it to remain Tenshi is that I find it adds character to Kanade when seen in English, (ie. Calling Yumemi in planetarian Yumemi), it provides a better understanding to the reader that there is a difference when referring to her or when referring to God’s helpers- Which as we both know there is a distinction there, and that when reading the work itself and hearing a character shout ‘Tenshi!’ when referring to the girl, and reading ‘angel’ it would look silly and take away from immersion.

This is my argument. It’s nothing to do with the meaning or the creation of the nickname. Tenshi is her name from the perspective of the SSS. Changing the name of a character in localization, without permission, is in my opinion, disrespectful to the character and creator. It is the same character no matter what language they are expressed through, and we don’t change that.

But there isn’t a difference–they are literally calling her God’s helper.

We’re not going literal, we’re going smart.

[dowolf]

but you are being literal.

that’s the whole point–you’re being pigheadedly literal.

…whatever. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

[Bizkitdoh]

At request of the original creators too, right?

Yes. Key said they were very happy with their work.

[ghagler]

We can’t recompile any of the coding right now, so we can’t repoint things. It’d be easy to setup a reference point, but nothing beyond that.

Oh. Then how are you changing the writing? It is something where the code refers to “file xyz” to retrieve the text for that scene, and you’re just replacing “file xyz”'s Japanese script with the translated English script?

[Takafumi]

but you are being literal.

No, we aren’t, in terms of translation. We are not translating things literally, we are taking creative freedom in translation practices. This is a small translation of a trial, and serves as a way for the community to experiment and mess around and see if we will have a potential translation presence in future. This isn’t a collaboration that forces people to stay true to translations. They can make their work more fitting to the AB universe and more in line with what the original writers intended, if that is their style. Whether that means we have to mess with sentence structure, or move away from a perfect translation, is irrelevant, as long as it is fitting.

Oh. Then how are you changing the writing? It is something where the code refers to “file xyz” to retrieve the text for that scene, and you’re just replacing “file xyz”'s Japanese script with the translated English script?

Pretty much.

There is a big .pck that contains the meat of the game. When you open it up, you get all of the scenes. Each scene is split into a .txt file (the dialogue/choices/names) and a .ss file (which contains all of the coding, so things like sprite display, or scene changes.)
We can decompile and read the entirety of the .txt files, but the .ss files unfortunately haven’t been researched to the point where you can mess around with them, and we may never reach that stage.

If you look at the engine that was used before Siglus, the RealLive engine, you’ll see that their latter games had a similar structure, however several people had spent years working on it, and we even got an official toolset from Visual Arts.

If you look at some of the examples on seen files, you’ll see that the .txt has a bunch of text lines that start with numbers like <0000> or <0001>. The partner file then tells the game when to put line <0000>'s text in the dialogue box.

[ghagler]

There is a big .pck that contains the meat of the game. When you open it up, you get all of the scenes. Each scene is split into a .txt file (the dialogue/choices/names) and a .ss file (which contains all of the coding, so things like sprite display, or scene changes.)
We can decompile and read the entirety of the .txt files, but the .ss files unfortunately haven’t been researched to the point where you can mess around with them, and we may never reach that stage.

If you look at the engine that was used before Siglus, [the RealLive engine][1], you’ll see that their latter games had a similar structure, however several people had spent years working on it, and we even got an official toolset from Visual Arts.

If you look at some of the examples on seen files, you’ll see that the .txt has a bunch of text lines that start with numbers like <0000> or <0001>. The partner file then tells the game when to put line <0000>'s text in the dialogue box.

Oh! I had assumed y’all needed to do re-programming. That’s actually pretty simple, haha. Guess once you crack the .pck, you just need to translate.

Well, that makes a switch impossible. You’d have to make two different patches, then, or a helper program. A pity: compromising would’ve been nice.

[Takafumi]

Well, that makes a switch impossible. You’d have to make two different patches, then, or a helper program. A pity: compromising would’ve been nice.

Hmm… I’m not too sure, since my methods involve hours of trial and error, but I can imagine their being a method to make that work. Place a couple lines at the top of a .txt that say “Tenshi” and “Angel.” Then in the .ss file say “if this button is pressed, refer to option 0001. If not, 0002.” Then just slap that command over every name check for her.

Two different patches would be easier though. Just ctrl+f in notepad and replace all Tenshis with Angel.

[ghagler]

Hmm… I’m not too sure, since my methods involve hours of trial and error, but I can imagine their being a method to make that work. Place a couple lines at the top of a .txt that say “Tenshi” and “Angel.” Then in the .ss file say “if this button is pressed, refer to option 0001. If not, 0002.” Then just slap that command over every name check for her.

Two different patches would be easier though. Just ctrl+f in notepad and replace all Tenshis with Angel.

Ah. I assumed we didn’t have access to the .ss files, from what you said earlier. So we do have access, but we don’t know all the commands? Is that what you meant?

Yeah, that might be able to be done fairly quickly, too. I don’t know what the insides of the .ss files look like, but we could write a quick program to go through each .ss file and stick in the appropriate code in the appropriate place. Same with .txt. We’d just need to parse the text for the right keywords signalling an “Angel” name check. Better than two patches, too, since the user would just need to click a button (well, assuming we can access the GUI. Might be easier to have the .ss. refer to a value in some other .txt file, if we can: like a custom ‘settings.txt’ file with the patch).

Also, that was a neat guide you posted. I didn’t see anything about .ss files, so I don’t know how one would go about editing them. Is there a specific program needed?

[ghagler]

Actually, ignore the .ss question. I’ll just use my good friend Google

[Kaze]

Sigh…this argument has been done do death even before this thread exploded. No agreement will be reached. But I’m pretty annoyed that everyone seemingly ignored how important @Pepe’s comment is.

Japanese is super ambiguous by its very nature. Unless you asked the creators, it’s pretty much impossible to know for sure (and let’s be honest. These creators also wrote something called Angle Beats. I’m not sure how trustworthy their thoughts on English are) whether they are referring to her as “an angel,” “the angel,” or “Tenshi,” because in Japanese, it gets written in exactly the same way. Different characters could even be using it differently; Otonashi is the best example. He doesn’t know which 3 he should really refer to her as, but the Japanese is written exactly the same way as everyone else’s. It’s impossible to know 100% which way he is really implying every time. He could be changing his thoughts back and forth between “an angel” and “Tenshi,” and the reader wouldn’t know because Japanese is super ambigious.

You have to look at context to guess what they mean…but then you’re assuming the person is speaking perfectly in context. It’s possible the character is just not taking context in consideration; surely you have experienced a person say something tangential in a conversation? Well in Japanese, it’s near impossible to tell the difference with certainty; you can only guess using logic. It’s possible for the character to purposely imply one thing while intending something else. The further homonym of Tenshi as a name or as an angel is constantly used to purposely be ambiguous.

For example, I translated the password “No God, Buddha, or Angels” but this is followed up by saying “but Tenshi does exist here.” (well, okay technically the line was “aside from Buddha, the other 2 exist here” but the implication remains) Maybe the password should be translated as “No God, Buddha, or Tenshi”? Except it’s ambiguous like that on purpose so really either translation is “wrong” in the sense that the Japanese is purposely read both ways to make a joke.

So translating it as Angel is better after all to keep the ambiguity! Uhh not really. Even if it got translated as Angel, we’d still have to distinguish between things like an angel or the angel or Angel. Japanese doesn’t have “a” or “the” or capitalization. There’s no way to distinguish between those at all in writing. Case by case basis and context is the only way to distinguish them but no matter what you do as a translator, you are taking away from intentional ambiguity that the Japanese language offers so naturally.

[ghagler]

On second thought, MSWord didn’t open any .ss file very well. What program did you use? (I assumed it was a Scheme .ss file; is it a different encoding?)

[Takafumi]

Ah. I assumed we didn’t have access to the .ss files, from what you said earlier. So we do have access, but we don’t know all the commands? Is that what you meant?

There are some posts about it above.
Basically, we can get the .ss files, but IIRC they need to be decompiled, which we can’t do yet.

Siglus Hacking

Have you tried doing anything with the scripts tanuki? I’ve been trying to decompile them, but I’m stuck in a few places. I don’t know what all the listed tables do in the scripts, and I’m also not sure what the two different function table lists in the scene.pck are for. I saw the second one get called with a 0x30 call (calls with 0x7e000000 or 0x7f000000 bits set are external?), but no idea on the first one. I’m also having trouble keeping the stack accurate, so I haven’t been able to decompil…

Siglus Hacking

It’s only a prelim, like I said, haven’t even gotten more than that script decompiled yet. I could remove like all the pushes and set all the args in the calls etc directly, that would cut a lot of the size down. But anyway, the compiled script obviously does many commands for a single original script line, there’s not that much you can do about that without heavy script pre-processing to combine every command properly. I’m not sure how RLDev does things though, but it also has all its functions…

I don’t know what the insides of the .ss files look like

Kelebek posted an example from the first day of the VN.

but we could write a quick program to go through each .ss file and stick in the appropriate code in the appropriate place.

Oh yeah, I’d have done it manually, but adding it in with the standard compression steps could be handy.

Better than two patches, too, since the user would just need to click a button (well, assuming we can access the GUI. Might be easier to have the .ss. refer to a value in some other .txt file, if we can: like a custom ‘settings.txt’ file with the patch).

I don’t know how it handles external files.

Also, that was a neat guide you posted. I didn’t see anything about .ss files, so I don’t know how one would go about editing them. Is there a specific program needed?

It’s for RealLive. The .ss files come from the Siglus Engine. The RealLive equivalents are .org and .ke. They do the same things, but the .ss files are more complex, and haven’t been researched.
I doubt you’d find much about Siglus outside of this thread btw.

Japanese is super ambiguous by its very nature.

It’s a shame, but we’ll always lose something in translation, and there’s no getting around that.

[Pepe]

Let’s just call her Angela.

Problem solved /s

[Hirato]

Now, I must apologize that this topic has exploded because apparently I opened up again “the discussion which had already been resolved years ago but it does seem that only few actually happen to know that such discussion exist which the result decided singlehandedly by the majority opinion”

Tbh I am pretty used to call her “tenshi” too, but for translation clarity I’d rather have it translated as “angel”. But again, if majority wants it to be “tenshi”, fine. If majority wants it as “angel”, that’s fine too. Because I’m a weaboo who is already familiar with Japanese words such as “tenshi” or “keikaku”. But if you want to present this to English-speaking world, then, in my humblest opinion, “angel” it is.

If anyone’s getting into Yumemi’s name argument: Aren’t official dubs and subs approved by the original creators? (not gonna say that dub is better than sub, or that official dub or sub is always better than fansub) and I think people prefer to call her Tenshi, is solely because of bad fansubs.
(While we’re at it, Static-Subs/Doki use “Tenshi”, while UTW and Mazui/Elysium use “Angel” - from the information I got)

[Pepe]

I think we should take the audience into account when translating things? Who is gonna read this translation, if it ever comes into fruition? Most likely, people who are already fans of Key or fans of Angel Beats. In that case, wouldn’t they already know what Tenshi means?

In that case, it probably doesn’t even need explanation that Tenshi actually means Angel, right? Unless we’re trying to go for a broader audience, which is the case for anime, it isn’t really much of an issue.

[Takafumi]

But if you want to present this to English-speaking world, then, in my humblest opinion, “angel” it is.

Pffft, we’re TLing the trial. This isn’t going on Steam or anything.

(While we’re at it, Static-Subs/Doki use “Tenshi”

Doki all the way.

[Kaze]

In other naming news, SCREW JOKES REVOLVING AROUND NAME KANJI. At least with normal puns, you can kind of try to translate but with names, you can’t just change their names…I’m just going to translate these lines as whatever

[Aspirety]

Arguing over whether to use the name Angel or Tenshi is not only pointless as it’s completely a matter of preference, it’s also damaging to the productivity of the project. http://www.bikeshed.com/

Anybody with authority over this project has already decided on using the name Tenshi, so I won’t permit any further argument over this trivial matter. If you don’t like it, then go start your own translation project. Any further argument will be flagged as spam, with a strike issued with repeat offences. Are we clear?

Now let’s get back to working on this thing.

[Kaze]

Okay so I’ve reached the part where nicknames come into play. As such, I will be using this list for translations:
クソ坊主
Punk
代理人
Substitute
微妙すぎるイケメン
Uncanny Hunk
ロリコン
Lolicon
メガネ仲間
Glasses Comrade
暗算日本記録保持者
Japanese record holder in mental arithmetic
(I know this will be changed eventually…)
通り魔
Phantom Slasher
記憶ナシ男
Amnesiac
These are the names that were mentioned so far. I don’t know about the others yet. I know at least the math one will be changed, but frankly it looks really annoying to do these lines because every time the nickname gets said, it branches into all the iterations, so regardless if/when anything gets changed, I’m going to leave it to QC to fix these names. HOWEVER for these two names:
音速
Sonic speed
無限
Infinite
(This and the above one are puns on Otonashi’s real name, pretty much impossible to translate that joke)

I believe the original Japanese should be used. I know this is technically almost exactly like the Tenshi argument…but these two names are brought up by Otonashi himself when he was trying to remember his name. Or rather, they are choices you can choose for him actually thinking it is his name. Therefore, I don’t think it makes sense to translate these.