A New Beginning
Welcome to the newly-revamped sekai.insani.org. Over the course of several months of 2006, we wrote an in-depth production journal, filled with tutorials and advice for up-and-coming novel game translation teams. We are not planning on writing any further entries in this journal; we merely present it “as it was” for the benefit of history.
This journal is organized into 4 series, which are detailed below.
Series
Debriefs
There were only two articles in this category, comprising a comprehensive postmortem of one of our projects: Visions from the Other Side.
Letters to a Young Translator
These letters, written to an anonymous translator called “X”, are written in the style of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, except with not even a fraction of Rilke’s literary mastery. They do contain some sound advice about the translation and production process, and also provide valuable historical insight on how insani.org ran its production process when it was at its peak. As I note in the About section, I can’t reread these letters without some amount of amusement now. If you read them yourself, you will see why.
So You Want to Be a Hacker?
To this very day, there has never been a tutorial on the reverse-engineering of novel game engines and scripting formats that has been as elegant or as comprehensive as Ed’s tutorial series on this matter. This is the most valuable series of sekai.insani.org, and it served as a critical resource for many who were starting up projects of their own.
Translations
While I have mainly translated from Japanese into English, I am a native speaker of Korean and I learned French in middle school and high school. I fell in love with French language short stories – Yves Theriault, Hugo de Haan, and Albert Camus are some of my favorite writers for instance. Camus in particular is my favorite author of all time, and his mastery of the French language is simply stunning. In any case, for a short time I posted translations of relatively obscure pieces of French-language fiction.