The Interview

Who are the people you work with? Are they all from mirrormoon? Do you get along well with everyone?
First of all, none (AFAIK) of us have any affiliation with mirrormoon whatsoever. I’ve started the project out of a thread on their forums, but that’s about it. The people that have been active recently, to my knowledge: – sushimonster (image editing) – rampage202 (image editing) – mewarmo990 (translation) – aquamarine39 (image editing/translation) (TL can be anonymous, so I only know about the people that made some noise in the forums or elsewhere) There’s been some minor friction regarding some of the conventions (generally, I try, with limited success, to stop discussions once they get too far into “splitting the hairs” territory), but no real issues so far. The fact that I’m the only person doing the final TLC/editing helps, and it looks like it will stay that way.

How would you describe a typical day’s worth of work?
My typical (TL) day is only a few hours long (even less so lately!), and I’d say it’s usually fairly tedious work – most of the scenes don’t have that much happening in them. That in mind, I try to make sure I do something every day, even if it’s just translating a few dozen lines or transcribing a few images. Knowing myself, that’s the only way I can stay on track….

How often do you have to communicate with the others?
It’s quite rare that we communicate with each other directly (once a month? maybe less). Usually, there’s no one else reguarly working on TL/TLC, and I don’t do any image editing myself. Whenever I do devote a few days/weeks to image-related business, most of it happens through SVN comments (which I half-heartedly tried to discourage at some point), sometimes the forum, sometimes the internal mailing list, maybe once every other day or so. Don’t we think we had (or needed, really) any realtime “discussion” so far. That might have to change with the next upcoming release, though…

Why do you translate?
Because seeing a good, but incomplete work out there bothers me? Something along those lines. I’ve translated a few interesting doujinshi posted on /jp/ for the same reason, simply because there was (interesting) work to be done and I knew that no one else (probably) would have stepped up anytime soon.

Have you suffered burn-out before? (stopped translating for long periods of time). What caused the burn-out?
Not really, not with TL… Honestly, I don’t think I have the free time to reach the rates that could burn me out 🙂 But then, this is the first (and last) time I’m translating something of this magnitude. Come to think of it, it was pretty damn irresponsible of me to pick it up in the first place.

Anything else of note you think would be interesting for the fans to know.
Hm. I’m sure someone will ask me again, so yeah, it’s coming. Yes, we’re working on it (never really stopped, and not planning to stop, either), yes, the TL quality sucks royally, for the most part – that’s why “TLC” is so slow. No, we don’t usually post regular progress updates – if you want them, it’s all out in the open – on the wiki, Entrans and in SVN. Still, much thanks for all the support, guys.

What is the future of mirrormoon after Ataraxia? Mahoyo?
No clue. Ask mirrormoon 🙂 So yeah. A little more writing than I thought, but hope that helps 🙂

Thank you very much for the interview! My best wishes for your project and the rest of your team.