Translation

Translation is the act of making a given work accessible in a language other than the one it was originally created in. In the context of visual novels, this means localizing text (dialogue, images, and menus) and possibly recorded voices.

Machine translation

Machine translation (sometimes shortened to MTL) is when a program takes one written language and converts it (often literally, poorly, or both) into another language. This is considered a bad way to handle translation for entertainment since automatic translation tends to omit puns, euphemisms, and other literary nuances from the original language and/or culture. It can, however, be useful for translating manuals and documentation. Popular machine translation services are DeepL and Google Translate.

Challenges

The challenges of translating a visual novel are similar to those of translating other types of video games:

• The VN might have been written in one language and contain references to things that speakers of that language are familiar with but speakers of the target language maybe aren't familiar with. For example, if a distance is measured in feet, translations into some languages might need to convert it to metres or to another unit that the readers would understand, or if it refers to "an area as big as Texas", people in some other countries might not know how big Texas is, so a referent they know about might be needed. This could also refer to things like references to some TV show or other "common knowledge" thing that just isn't really international enough for the target audience of the translation to know.
• Sometimes a thing that's ambiguous in one language might need to be kept ambiguous in another language. Examples:
  • Some languages makes it hard to talk about people without mentioning their genders, so a VN saying "you're so smart!" in English referring to the player could try to translate it into Spanish as "¡Qué listo eres" if the player is male and "¡Qué lista eres" if the player is female, but in order to refer to work for both genders it might have to say "¡Qué inteligente eres!". But if it ends up using a lot of words that are normally kinda rare in text originally written in the target language, it can end up feeling rather obvious that it's a translation, which is usually not desirable either.
  • Different languages have different ways to distinguish between formal and informal language, for example some languages use different words for "you" depending on the relationship between the speaker and listener. Also, some languages distinguish between talking to one person or to a group of people.
  • Pronoun systems in general can vary. Some distinguish singular and plural, others don't; some distinguish gender on one or more pronouns, others don't; some distinguish between a "we" that includes the audience and others don't.
• Puns can be quite challenging to translate, especially if they refer to the visuals on screen, since images might be harder to replace than text.
• Some visual novels might use poetry, where the way the text not only needs to convey the same message but it has to do so while using a poetic style. Different languages might have different criteria for what poetry should be like (for example, English poetry usually rhymes).
• Space constraints: text might have to fit inside the size of a textbox or speech bubble, which might force some compromises if the text would normally take up more space in the target language than in the source language. Some text boxes might be resizable or support scrollbars, making this less of an issue.
• Some visual novels might involve topics that are hard to translate text about if you're not very familiar with the topic yourself. For example, a VN about a tailor might mention different ways of sewing things and different items of clothing, which don't necessarily make the plot hard to follow without knowing them, but translating them properly requires having some knowledge of the topic or a way to get that knowledge. If a group of people is working together on translating the VN, they might keep a document or other way to keep track of the topic information they collect.
• If a group of people are working together on translating a VN into the same language, they might need to coordinate things so that they can keep different parts consistent with each other, and they might need to proofread each other's part of the work.