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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.