CROSS†CHANNEL: A tangle of troubled translations
Note: This article contains no narrative spoilers for CROSS†CHANNEL, but covers some of the core themes of the story, so do be advised if that matters to you.
Last month, I reread Tanaka Romeo's infamous ditty CROSS†CHANNEL. No doubt any peruser of this blog is well aware of this VN, knowing it either directly as an enduring classic featuring Romeo at his most eccentric, or——more likely if you're an English-only reader——for its notoriety as an insurmountable translation hurdle. Three attempts have been made to slay the beast, one 'official', but still it stands defiant, spurning all efforts to tame the idiosyncratic voice, the brooding meditations on the nature of neurodiversity and human connection, and the absurd abundance of entirely, entirely too many sex jokes.
I adore C†C. Few things get me going like a first-person character study firing on all cylinders——and Romeo's approach with Taichi exudes so much personality, so much wit, and cuts so close to home that you can't help but come away shook. You understand Taichi. You loathe his guts. You roll your eyes at the fanservice. You realize it couldn't be any other way. It's a marvel of a work, not so much for the plot itself (which is more than serviceable, but likely unsurprising for a modern audience) but the sheer craft.
But my goal today isn't to wax poetic about a VN I like. (Who'd've thunk a porn medium would spawn so many intellectual masturbators?) No, it's to gawk at the translations.
It isn't uncommon for popular works to have multiple English translations, especially when the original was a fan project which garnered enough popularity for it to get brought over commercially to the west. But the unique thing about C†C's translations is that they're all bad, in weirdly fascinating ways.
One concept I've been toying with is doing in-depth TL reviews of popular VNs and games. It's in vogue for nefarious actors to cherry-pick a line or two from a TL and toss it like a grenade onto social media, where it explodes into a whole big stink about 'censorship' and 'twisting the original intent'. Which sucks, if you ask me. A few spotty word choices do not a bad translation make, and a more measured approach, analyzing holistically what lens the translators took to the work and why, is both healthier and more educational for everyone.
In general, I think many VN fans familiar with C†C also possess a vague awareness that the existing TLs are bad, but don't have any inkling as to why. So I figured I might as well dive into how these translations attack some of the core aspects of the story.
Disclaimer: No slight is intended towards any of the people who worked on these projects. Translating a whole VN, especially one as complex and daunting as C†C, is an ordeal in itself, and simply finishing and having something worth releasing is something worth celebrating.
Table of Contents
The Contenders
Excluding the current one that's underway, three translations exist for C†C:
Amaterasu Translations (2009)
A fan TL headed by translator Ixrec, a.k.a. Eric Hitchcock (now retired).
For his time, Ixrec was a remarkable translator thanks to his raw output volume, heading translations of Muv-Luv, Rewrite and other extensive visual novels——an insane surfeit of uncompensated work. But, perhaps consequentially, much of this output suffers from what I would label J->E-itis: symptoms of bruteforcing each sentence by looking up each word in a Japanese-to-English dictionary and taking a stab at what the author meant. For more straightforward works of fiction, this technique can work. But the obvious issues are twofold.
For one, J->E dictionaries generally suck ass. Many of the nuances and associations a word might hold for a Japanese reader are lost, paved over by the insistence that it's just some semi-equivalent English word.
The second is that Romeo's writing relies heavily on deliberately using a word in the 'wrong' spot. Without the comprehension that X word is an 'odd' choice in the first place, recreating that effect in English is nigh impossible——it's something only practical once versed in the fundamentals of how Japanese literature (or internet posts, in Romeo's case) forms prose. A word-by-word TL is missing the forest for the trees.
This is exacerbated by a number of harebrained errors throughout the text: many, many missed references and idioms, accidental inversions of what characters are saying, and other mistakes typical of a novice translator.
Still, I feel a strong affinity for this TL; it was how I first experienced C†C some 16 years ago. And, as we'll see, this is arguably the best one available.
George Henry Shaft (2013)
An oddball of a fan TL that dropped onto the internet one day like a mishandled egg.
Amongst the splatter of requirements needed to even install the thing——which needs Amaterasu's TL to begin with, along with your own installation of Python——one finds GHS's 300 page analysis of the story, titled "On Cross Channel". And this is only the beginning of the rabbit hole.
There isn't much I have to say about the analysis in itself; I've only ever skimmed it. But the incoherent ramblings about feminism, the incessant arithmomania (to the point of enumerating every 'shikata ga nai'), the unbridled insistence that this 2003 eroge simply must be a potent Christian allegory——they all paint a picture of a person drowning in their proclivities, rather than truly interfacing with the work. Everything here is GHS, and very little of it Romeo. If you ask me at least.
On paper, in terms of robotic, functional accuracy, this translation does provide an upgrade over Ixrec's crack at things. Certain mistakes are fixed, and an awareness is present of the motivation behind Romeo's sentences. However, the archaic voice GHS chose to write in is so strangled I think the majority of people will find it nigh impenetrable. The casual thoughts of horny teenagers are rendered into the stiff registers of Victorian nobles. Every joke is neutered before it can so much as dare amuse the audience.
C†C's prose is unconventional, but not purple. Especially not in the grandiose way this TL makes it out to be.
And though some mistakes are fixed, there's still the general veneer of a translator who doesn't quite get it. When it comes to the core themes of the VN——the distance between people, how trauma affects us all——the invented 'read-between-the-lines' nonsense only serves to derail the point of the story. C†C is simple, and hard to translate because of it. More is less, in this regard.
GHS also has the distinguishing factor of having left personal commentary on over 80% of the lines of the VN in the script files, an invaluable insight into the one-of-a-kind brain he so valiantly possesses.
If there's a bit of Taichi in every otaku, there might just be a little bit of GHS in all of us pretentious VN bloggers.
Humbling thought.
MoeNovel (2018)
The official TL. And, surprisingly, the dishonorable mention.
For one thing, the console version of the script (as seen in the PS2, PSP and Xbox editions) is used as a base, so we're on the wrong track already. C†C's console release isn't your typical half-hearted sexcision[1] to scrape by the censors. No, this is a scorched-earth affair, purging all direct sexual references and a good smattering of the indirect ones while at it.
This has the unfortunate side effect of reframing the whole story as not an exploration of a deeply unsettled, problematic protagonist, but as a merely misunderstood one, joking within respectable boundaries; the 'good' kind of pervert. He 'accidentally' winds up in indecent situations, rather than being their architect. I don't blame the director here——it's a futile endeavor trying to bring such a fundamentally sexual work to home consoles, and the revised script shows a lot of spirit if nothing else. But for a release targeted at Steam, this isn't what C†C needs. If explicit scenes were a hot-button issue, then they could've been dealt with individually, instead of centering an entirely new translation effort on an edition with the critical thematic core spayed.
But I digress. It doesn't matter, because the translation sucks anyway.
We'll see below the inconsistent approach per scene, sometimes per line, where scripts have clearly passed through different hands. A localization effort has been attempted——decisions were made——to spruce up the text into a semblance of a shape in English, but many of its choices are constructed on rotten roots; outright mistaken lines and misreads of jokes run rampant, and anything the editor doesn't understand is left hanging in the text, an exercise in baffling the potential reader.
I don't mean to be presumptuous, but this has all the hallmarks of splitting the task among many editors, each working off a shoddy TL job. The result is a translation so directionless it miraculously winds up inferior to the other two. Ixrec and GHS at least made translations for themselves; this translation is for nobody, and costs you money for the privilege.
Yes, I paid for this, how can you tell?
Bout 1: Prologue
Let's dive right in. The VN starts rather pedestrian: with a distant memory. I'll provide literal translations as we go.
To summarize, we have a perspective character, our sequestered heroine, staring out at the night sky from the bedroom window. Not a mind-blowing sequence by any means, but this stark simplicity is already toying with ideas of identity and dysphoria; a character trapped both physically and by their own past. Let's explore line by line.
最古の記憶は。
日付さえおぼろげな、遠い霞のなか。Am: My oldest memory.
Within far-off mists where even the date was vague.
GHS: These are the recollections / of that which is so far gone.
The date alone vague and indistinct, / laying at the heart of a dim distant haze.
Moe: My oldest memory is so faint and blurry.
A memory so fuzzy, I can barely remember it.
Lit: [The/my] oldest memory.
In a distant fog, where even [the date/dates] were vague.
Immediately, we start with something quite interesting. Romeo's first sentence of the story... isn't one. In Japanese, it's not unusual to end a sentence on a noun (体言止め/taigendome is what it's called) when the verb is implied, but this isn't that either; the first textbox just ends with は, marking the subject, and the reader is expected to progress to see the rest of the sentence. This, I think, defines the writing style pervading the VN——the text is aggressively terse, tugging the reader forward through incomplete thoughts that arrive one after another.
So how then to render this in English? Amaterasu gives the direct approach, and I think this works just about fine. Not having a verb does feel off-kilter in English though. Perhaps giving the reader a sense of incompleteness to tie one line to the next would be better? A little em dash after the first line could work.
We meanwhile see GHS's officiousness on full blast here, and this tendency to double or even triple the sentence length will continue. Alone isn't right for さえ (even) and vague and indistinct are synonyms. The desire to rework it into a real English sentence though is understandable, and a looser translation would no doubt relish in this approach.
MoeNovel tickles me with "A memory so fuzzy, I can barely remember it". But really, if they're going to start with that first line, they could've cut the second as they now have four points (faint, blurry, fuzzy, can barely remember) restating the same idea.
貴族的な気品を抱く、豪華な私室。
そこには天蓋つきの寝台もヨーロッパ製の椅子もあった。Am: A luxurious private room embodying the dignity of nobles.
Therein was a canopied bed and a European chair.
GHS: A grandiose bedroom, / draped in aristocratic grace.
Inside there were a canopied bed / and a chair of European make.
Moe: I was in a luxurious room, filled with an aura of aristocracy.
There was a canopied bed and European chairs.
Lit: An opulent private chamber, possessing an aristocratic [grace/refinement].
Inside, there was a canopied bed and a European-style chair.
Another incomplete sentence, but this time standard taigendome——a rendering with an 'I was in' is appropriate here, I feel. What's noteworthy is the use of 気品 (kihin). 'Elegance' or 'grace' are common translations, but it typically refers to a level of 'class' or 'quality' that exudes from something. Aristocratic here isn't 'oh it was upper class', but that the room felt so refined it made you think it belonged to a nobleman.
Amaterasu somewhat gets it, though the choice of 'dignity' is odd for a room. Same for 'grace' for GHS; that's more for a person, not a room. I like MoeNovel's 'aura' here, though they forgot to mention this was a private chamber. This won't be the only time they conveniently forget random details.
けど床に座るのが一番好きだった。
こんな日は特に。Am: But I preferred to sit on the floor.
Especially on these days.
GHS: But sitting on the floor was always / what I preferred.
especially on days like this.
Moe: But still, I preferred sitting on the floor.
Especially on days like that.
Lit: But I preferred to sit on the floor.
Especially on a [day/night] like today.
All mostly the same, but there's one thing that kills me here, and that's the fact that every translation went for 'day', when it's nighttime. Japanese is happy to say こんな日 (konna hi) for the concept of the current 'day', but in English, we don't typically say 'on a day like today' when it's night out. It's not wrong per se, but it's a common case of translationese.
(Incidentally, being past tense, one feels obligated to point out 'these' or 'today' should probably be swapped for appropriate memory words: 'that night', 'back then')
窓から見える黒の帳は星月夜。
枠に切り取られた散在する瞬きに目を奪われる。Am: I could see the curtain of a black starry night through my window.
My eyes were drawn to the scattered twinkles cut off by the window frame.
GHS: The starry heavens are a dark / curtain visible from the window,
a scattering of twinkles cut off by / the frame that absconds with my sight.
Moe: Beyond the window I saw only the black, starry curtain of night.
I was captivated by the twinkling lights contained in the window frame.
Lit: The black curtain seen from the window was the starry night.
The scattered flickers enclosed within the frame [captivated me/caught my eye].
The first sentence here is an interesting inverted metaphor——we get the curtain, and then we're told that it's actually the night sky. 星月夜 (hoshizukiyo) refers to a night sky lit by the moon and stars, and it's also the Japanese title of the famous van Gogh painting. Considering the next line explicitly 'frames' the view in the window, I wouldn't be surprised if this was deliberate.
目を奪われる is literally 'X stole my eyes away', but it's a common phrase for anything that has you transfixed or captivated, so I would expect a similarly common idiom to go here.
Amaterasu and MoeNovel somewhat miss the point that the curtain is being revealed to be the sky, and GHS swaps the metaphor back to the more conventional order, and none of them land that subtle 'cut-off image' = 'painting' connection. But what can ya do, really?
外界と室内を隔てる窓ガラスに、己の姿が映る。
深窓の令嬢―――
洋風のドレスに身を包む、楚々とした少女。Am: I saw my reflection in the glass separating the outside world from the room's interior.
A privileged young noblewoman---
A graceful girl covered in a Western dress.
GHS: In the glass that segregates the outside / world from the interior of the room, / the reflection of my shape.
A young lady kept secluded from the world---
A maiden with the appearance of grace, / the skin clothed in a Western dress.
Moe: My reflection was trapped in the glass wall between the outside world and my room.
A reflection of a maiden in her bower...
A graceful young girl dressed in a Western style dress...
Lit: In the window pane that divides the outside world from the room interior, my figure was reflected.
A sheltered young lady [lit. A maiden of the deep window] ―
An [elegant/neat] girl, cloaked in a Western-style dress.
Your thoughts on untranslatable puns? 深窓の令嬢 is a stock phrase for a closeted maiden, kept away from public eye. Generally well-to-do, so 'noble daughter' and similar translations are also fine. But naturally Romeo is bringing this up because the phrase literally has window in it. I don't think there's any good English equivalents that have such a nuance, so we might have to give up on that one.
The translations here are all serviceable for accuracy, though I question the use of 'trapped' for MoeNovel, and 'covered' in Amaterasu. 'maiden in her bower', though, is a localization that might be cooking something here.
楚々とした (soso toshita) implies a neat, delicate sort of beauty, appropriate for a young girl. 'Grace' I think is close but maybe not quite right. 'Dainty'?
きみはいったい、だれですか？
Am: Who on Earth are you?
GHS: You... who could you possibly be?
Moe: Who are you?
Lit: Just, who are you?
きみ (kimi) and だれ (dare) being in kana give this a childish, uncertain tone. A reader should place this as being the girl's thoughts, and so a TL needs to make sure that's obvious, which I don't think any of them manage here. "Who are you?", though correct, is conversely overly terse compared to the original.
Frankly, I would even go as far as to put it "I wonder... who even are you?"
Overall, from the prologue we quickly see a divergence: Amaterasu being literal to a fault, but probably the most decent. GHS's ostentation going into overdrive, and MoeNovel hovering in the vague vicinity of acceptable.
Bout 2: Comedy
Next, let's take one of many typical comedy scenes:
Ecchi slapstick; doesn't it make you feel at home? Diving in:
適当に部室で暇を潰して、教室に戻る途中。
人気のない廊下で、処女がうずくまっていた。Am: Now that I'd killed some time in the club room, I was on the way back to my classroom.
There was a virgin stooping down in an unpopular corridor.
GHS: After suitably passing time in the club room, I'm on my way back to the classroom.
A maiden was crouching in a corridor devoid of human presence.
Moe: I was in the middle of returning to class after killing some time in the clubroom.
I noticed a girl crouched in the empty hallway. Love-making lvl. 0.
Lit: On my way back to the classroom after killing time [doing whatever/lazily] in the clubroom.
A virgin is crouching down in a deserted corridor.
Another perfect example of taigendome in action. Romeo abuses this all the time when setting the scene. It doesn't land in English, so we see each translation reworked the grammar to make it a complete sentence, which is respectable.
GHS misunderstands 適当 (tekitou), rendering it as 'suitably'. It's in fact a more nebulous concept than this, meaning 'half-assed' or 'only the appropriate amount', holding a negative nuance. The other two drop it entirely, which I can respect also.
We see Amaterasu make an amateurish mistake here rendering 人気のない (hitoke no nai) as 'unpopular'; this is the kind of mistake you make when looking up words individually, as it's clearly been confused with 人気 (ninki) meaning popular.[2]
The virgin joke is Taichi in a nutshell. Mentally he nicknames Miki a virgin, or perhaps 'the virgin', which embodies his sexism, shows how familiar the two of them are, and is just kinda funny. GHS drops it (missing the joke), but MoeNovel makes a curious error here worth digging into.
As mentioned, their script isn't based on the original, but instead on the console version, which censors 'virgin' to 'girl with no experience making love' (メイクラブ経験なしの少女). Apparently, this turn of phrase baffled their translator, and this part wound up fascinatingly divorced from the rest of the line. One wonders what their editor thought, stumbling across this line? Some kind of battle shounen pervert power move?
Romeo would never.
「大丈夫ですか、お嬢さん？」
尻に手を伸ばす。
「おっとぉ！」Am: "Are you all right, Ojou-san?"
I extended my hand toward her butt.
"Whoa!"
GHS: "Is everything well, ojou-san?"
I extended my hand towards her behind.
"Woh'tt'ooo!"
Moe: "Are you okay, young lady?"
I tried reaching for her butt.
"Whoa!"
Lit: "Everything alright, young lady?"
I reach for her butt.
"[Not so fast/Oh no you don't!]"
'Ojou-san' is how you refer to a younger lady, and so either approach works, though I do wonder if keeping the honorific actually adds anything in this instance. One could lean into Taichi's roleplay with a 'missy' or somesuch, I suppose.
The second line is very terse; I might even be tempted to also remove the 'I' and localize a little to claw back some voice; something like "My hand goes butt-ward."
おっと！ (Otto!) is an exclamation with a sense of 'woah, hold on'. What you'd say when dodging something... like what happens here. "Woah!" conveys surprise, but doesn't carry the sense she saw it coming. So none of the picks really work (and GHS's is nonsense).
瞬発力を発揮して、少女は立ち上がった。
すり足で距離を取る。
臨戦態勢に移行するのが早い。
しかも跳ね起きると同時に、俺に一撃を加えてきた。Am: The girl displayed her formidability by standing up in an instant.
Then she shuffled away to gain distance from me.
She can switch to a state of military alertness in no time flat.
Plus, in the moment she jumped up, she had sent an attack in my direction.
GHS: In a display of explosive force, the girl stood straight up,
and gained distance with a suri-ashi.
She's quick to transition into combat readiness.
And, simultaneously with her springing up, she inflicted an attack on me.
Moe: The girl leapt to her feet instantly.
She shuffled to keep her distance.
She was quick to prepare for battle.
She even attempted to get a hit on me as she sprung back up.
Lit: Exhibiting [explosive power/spontaneity], the girl leaps to her feet.
She slides back to put space between us.
She's quick to switch to [combat mode/being ready for battle/battle stance].
When she jumped up, she even threw in a strike of her own.
Oh, Romeo. A more perfect example of his style there never was. 瞬発力を発揮 (shunpatsuryoku wo hakki) is an odd way to describe the action of somebody reacting quickly to something; almost sports commentator in nature. Which is why it's funny. He's switching to another register for basic slapstick comedy.
瞬発力 is the ability to respond instantaneously, or maybe even explosively. 'Explosive force' is interesting, but 'reflexes' would be just as good. In any case, 'formidability' is wrong, and I don't know where Amaterasu pulled that from. GHS somewhat captures it. And MoeNovel drops the idea.
'suri-ashi' is left untranslated in GHS because he believes this is a reference to the Judo move. It isn't; the Judo move is named after the word for sliding your feet across the ground.
臨戦態勢 (rinsentaisei) is generally used for nations or combat units to mean they're on standby for combat/outright war. The TLs almost catch it, but maybe a more explicit yet colloquial, "Before I know it, she's already assumed battle stations." would be good.
「……なかなかやるな」
「せんぱいこそ」
片手で受け止めた、顔面を狙って放たれた雑巾を、静かに床に落とす。Am: "......you're not half-bad."
"Neither is Sempai."
With one hand I stopped the mop she'd thrown at my face, letting it fall silently to the floor.
GHS: "...nice one there, very nice."
"Same to you, Senpai."
The rag that she threw towards my face fell from the one hand I had caught it with to the floor, in silence.
Moe: "Not bad."
"You too."
I caught the dust cloth that was aimed for my face and tossed it onto the floor.
Lit: "...Not bad.
"Likewise, Senpai."
The dust cloth she had lobbed towards my face, which I caught with one hand, drops quietly to the floor.
Amaterasu seems to not know what a dust cloth is.
One thing about that third line, which isn't well captured in that literal TL there, is the rhythm that makes the joke work. There's a little pause after the を particle there which needs to be recreated for the flow to make sense. If I retool it like this, it might come across:
"My free hand loosens its grip on the dust cloth she'd lobbed at my face. It floats gently to the floor."
Bout 3: Philosophy
Let's also see how the different translations approach a more brooding sequence. This is where the various translations truly struggle to convey the point of the text.
In this particular scene, Taichi, left to his own devices, starts to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where you were the only person left. This ties into one of Romeo's core theses——how being a part of the 'flock' (群, gun) changes a person's behavior compared to being 'individual' (個, ko).
Confused? I wouldn't blame you. This passage isn't really something that can be analyzed line-by-line; it's an entire philosophical essay in miniature, delivered piecemeal via Taichi's thoughts. To summarize the argument:
- If you were the only person in the entire world, then the concept of crime and the majority of sins wouldn't exist. This gets Taichi thinking this might be the ideal world.
- This causes him to wonder about what kind of psychological makeup a person would need to be an 'individual', and discard the 'flock'.
- He brings up the concept of 'desires' (欲望, yokubou), which exist on a different level than the need (欲求, yokkyuu) to drink water.
- Other desires include professional success, the pursuit of knowledge, creativity and subjugation.
- Taichi points out how these desires only function because other people exist to compare against. Without 'others', they lose their meaning, regressing to 'needs'.
- And in that kind of world, the nature of a person would fundamentally alter, as they no longer have these negative pressures that previously defined their personality. When part of a society, there was a push that drove you to action due to lacking success/knowledge/creativity/being 'weak', but outside of that framework, this push no longer applies.
In order to land this diatribe, a translator needs to not just understand the core argument, but to have a clear handle on their desired terminology, settling on a translation that makes the distinctions clear in English. The term choices themselves don't matter, but at the very least, they have to be chosen. Without a crystal-clear vocabulary separating desires vs. needs, individuals vs. the flock, the entire piece derails into nonsense.
In this sense, one could argue GHS has the best translation here. He understands the premise of the passage, and his navel-gazing finally serves some purpose when pitted against Romeo's very own umbilical obsession. But his register is about as smooth as a cat's tongue, and similarly inarticulate. Meanwhile, the other two are clearly translated line-by-line and suffer greatly as a consequence.
Summarizing the errors in rapid-fire, the only line GHS gets entirely wrong is this:
- 'The negative emotions that try to swell out of themselves stop being a minus point.' -> This is actually referring to the negative emotions caused by the four desires mentioned above. So 'try to swell out of themselves' makes no sense - it should be negative emotions that 'drive them forward' or similar.
Amaterasu, meanwhile, is riddled with critical errors that make it nonsensical:
- Idealistic -> should be 'ideal'.
- 'Or is a suitable mental construct what's needed?' -> 'What is the suitable mental composition needed?'
- 'consent of others' -> 'approval' of others.
- 'How many people are there in a world with only themselves, and who therefore are true intellectuals?' -> 'In a world with only themselves, how many people would strive to be an intellectual?'
- 'Who are they to overcome?' -> 'Who would they conquer?'. These four lines are meant to echo the four desires listed above.
MoeNovel has it even worse, despite the overall voice being the best:
- 'What an outrageous world.' -> 'What a lawless world.'
- Idealistic -> should be 'ideal' (again).
- 'A society without divisions.' -> Nonsensical. Should be 'to cast aside the herd/flock'.
- 'What what kind of know-how?' -> Nonsensical. 'What kind of psychological makeup'?
- 'These desires were held by others' -> 'These desires are held toward others'
- 'Desire is rooted in the acquisition of people who recognize the value of what you have.' -> 'Desire is rooted in acquiring things that many people recognize the value of'
- 'It's like a form of currency.' -> 'A concrete example would be currency.'
Overall, my score for this passage comes out about even. GHS's is certainly the most accurate, but one need only ask, "Did he seriously just serve up 'intrapsychical structure' for the word for mental makeup?" and the question of which TL to read becomes a real head-scratcher indeed.
Not that it should. Clearly the answer is none of them.
Closing thoughts
There was a point to this exercise, is what I'm telling myself as I type these final words. Yes. A typical review might conclude by propping up one TL over the others, underscoring the recommendation with glowing and/or mild praise and pedantry before going on its merry way. But the three highlighted comparisons illustrate a sordid situation: none of these translations are particularly acceptable. And this isn't a matter of cherrypicked comparison——every script I sifted through across all three attempts was riddled with errors and missteps. I can't in good conscience suggest any of them as a reasonable means to experience this story.
But you already knew that. And that isn't why I wrote this article in the first place.
What we see from C†C's translations three is a work mistreated in English not out of distaste, or censorship, or a lack of care (MoeNovel excepting), but for precisely the opposite: Love. Even through a drowsy haze of misunderstanding and weak comprehension, Romeo's work clearly struck a chord deep in the hearts of these translators and editors. When I look at Ixrec and GHS's efforts, I see people enraptured by something sitting at the very soul of this VN; people doing their utmost to spread the good word, stumbling on the way.
And such tribulations have not been without fruit. After all, I'm only here today talking about the VN thanks to Ixrec, and the sterling reputation the VN still garners among English communities, many of whom have yet to read it, might be a testament to that infectious passion. You still hear people talking about C†C as 'the VN that's meant to be insanely good, but the translations all suck', and while it's far from the only VN in that position, it's the one the community is willing to extend out an olive branch for, and that's downright fascinating if you ask me.
At its core, CROSS†CHANNEL is a VN about miscommunication and misunderstanding; how we present to others, and how we grow as human beings thanks to those around us. When I look at the state of these translations, the irony is not lost on me.
One day, C†C will have a——if not good, then——better translation[3], and the thought on my mind is that when that day comes, will these three be cast aside and forgotten? The answer is an almost definite yes. This might be part of why I wanted to, at least for the length of one blog article, give them their flowers and credit where it's due.
Thanks for the TL, Ixrec. And GHS too, you crazy man you.
As for you, MoeNovel, I'm still mad about the 10 bucks.
Taichi: "Well then, see you next week."