Terms of Use for the Translation Work Hosted on Phanto.MOE
These are rules that apply to everything I have translated! Please, understand that I work extremely hard on the translations I make, and I would appreciate if you abided by some simple rules regarding them!
Whenever possible, support the official releases.
- These translations are not to be treated as unimpeachable canon, nor as tantamount to official text.
I am a fallible human, and Japanese is not my first language. I try to make translations as accurate as I am able, but please know that I am one guy. - Please do not reupload my translations in full anywhere without asking.
This is everything from posting the entire story in screencaps, to using it as subtitles on a video, to just reuploading it to your own space or wiki. Please ask before using my translations for any reason.
I generally do not mind one-off snippets (examples: screencaps of portions of translations in order to react to them, using lyrics or quotes in your twitter bio or as instagram photo captions), but I always appreciate credit in these cases!
I can be contacted most reliably on Twitter. - Please do not use my translations for "quote bots", quote accounts, or any other kind of automated account or similar. Additionally, please do not use my translations as material for a large language model, such as for the purposes of seeding a character chat bot.
I hope this is self-explanatory. Please don't. I acknowledge that it's basically impossible to prevent any publically-posted text from being scraped, but I would appreciate my work not being directly fed into any LLMs. - Please do not retranslate my work into any other language.
I often have to take some liberties -- usually minor, generally consisting of sentence structure and idiomatic language -- and occasionally have to take my best guess at things that are unclear to me; as such, I am not comfortable with my translations being used as a pivot language or a basis for further translation.
If you would like to translate the materials into a non-English language, please do it from the original language.
Notes on Translation Choices
- My translations are choose-not-to-warn. The scenario text of Paradox Live at various points contains depictions of potentially upsetting subjects, such as mental illness, terminal illness, misgendering, suicide, gun violence, police brutality, and child abuse. I think that most of these depictions are relatively tame, but they still may be upsetting. I do not provide itemized warnings on my translations. By reading my translations, you are accepting the risk of reading something that you may find upsetting.
- The assumed audience is fluent English speakers with at least a degree of familiarity with Japanese culture and media. With this in mind:
- My translations contain slang, colloquial (American, because I am American) English, and other myriad localization choices that sometimes stray from the 100% literal words being spoken in order to better communicate the effect.
- Certain forms of address (Iori calling Yohei "Danna", Zen calling Iori "Waka", the Akan Yatsura kids calling Iori "Aniki", Chungsung's use of "bocchama", and most honorifics) are left as-is rather than adapted under the assumption that, if they are in deep enough to be reading translations for a Japanese-only drama track franchise, the audience is at least passingly familiar with the connotations thereof.
- Any time that a pun or joke has been localized rather than directly translated, I try to include a footnote denoting this. I'm very funny and you should appreciate the work I put into translating lame jokes.
- The cat that appears in a lot of The Cat's Whiskers content, Kurobuchi Maou DX (called "Kuro" by everyone but Ryu) is translated as Black-Spotted Demon King DX (called "Spot" by everyone but Ryu). This is mostly because I think this is funny.
- Anne is written as nonbinary and using they/them pronouns, and the handful of early references to them "actually being a man" are not excluded, but are nudged slightly to parse better with the current depiction of the character (mostly, this just means instances of reference to them being a man have been changed to the phrasing "not a girl").
- Canon has been changing their tune about how they are depicted and written since the early days of the franchises; exchanges about them being a man have been excised from the stageplay version of Pride; official Japanese-facing English text (e.g. the SWANK ad copy) uses neutral pronouns; and as of 2023, wholly-Japanese text has been removing reference to them being a man from e.g. their profile. My translations changes are extremely minimal and help to align the character with the way they are being handled at present.
- In instances where Satsuki is speaking under the impression they are a girl, he and anyone playing along with him will use she/her pronouns for them.
- I use he/him pronouns for Aoi under the assumption that he is a trans man. Even if he turns out to be explicitly nonbinary, his gender is not at present a matter of public knowledge (or even, it seems, a matter of knowledge throughout VISTY), and therefore his public-facing identity is -- for all intents and purposes -- binary male. I will revise this stance later if necessary.
- Sometimes there are things that are unclear, that happen offscreen, or that are stated and later retconned. I try to make note of places where this happen.