https://www.romhacking.net/community/1634/
TranslatorTom (the guy behind several MegaTen translations such as the Lost Bible games and Majin Tensei) has deleted his youtube channel (which contained several translations of filp phone games that aren't even available for purchase anymore) and abandoned all his other accounts due to allegations of transphobia.
To make the story short, he translated "newhalf" as "tranny" in a goemon romhack recently and a group of people on resetera coordinated to harrass him on his other platforms, despite the hacker changing the term almost right away after initial criticism. I'm assuming his IRL job was put in jeopardy by this event, hence why he had to delete fucking everything from the internet to the point where you can't even find his full list of contributions anymore (what you see on romhacking.net is just a sample basically)
It is a shame, because his work on fan translating games was my favourite and he seemed like a very passionate down to earth guy, as opposed to people who grossly overestimate their contributions just for internet street cred (gemini, who surprise surprise dropped his latest hack as well) or straight up make shit up in their translations (gideon, even redditors caught on to that at this point lol!)
He came off as the most soft spoken and well mannered person online, but even that's not enough in the current era. I did the right thing in retreating to my privately owned server and abandoning online life completely.
My apologies to everyone. I needed some time to mull over this mess.
I want to clarify that whatever scripts I’ve translated don’t reflect who I am, or what I believe. People are calling me a far-right extremist now. Me? These people know nothing about me.
And the word that set off this whole mess? I didn’t even know anybody considered it completely off limits. I thought it was just a silly abbreviation, a slightly taboo word, something only a bit edgy, but well within the realm of a reasonable translation of the original Japanese line.
Yes, the original Japanese line in the game is insensitive, but please don’t think that having translated it in an insensitive way means that I’m somehow a hateful person, because I’m not. It crushed me to see the fallout of this. Anybody who has followed me for any amount of time knows that I wear my heart on my sleeve. I love all people, and every single living thing on this planet.
And I care about the games, too. I started working on fan translations because I care… I just wanted to share these experiences with people.
Seeing how all of this has turned out… It’s really crushed me. If one single word that I didn’t even know was so inexcusable caused this sort of uproar, what other words are off limits without my knowing? To be honest, the very thought terrifies me.
This whole thing has crushed my passion for translating, video games, and even simply writing in general. I can’t continue with it.
p.s.
vids are archived i hope. internet is freaking fragile.
Also imho his most notable translations are Echo Night 2 and Ihatovo Monogatari, though Majin Tensei 1-2 and first Romancing SaGa also good.
Re: TranslatorTom chased off the internet
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 5:21 pm
by CENSORED
I haven't played Echo Nights 2 yet. The other game I haven't even heard of before. Anyway no nothing has been archived, maybe someday he might return to the internet and reupload them, I didn't care much for them but I painstakingly archive everything I come across nowadays (namely the twilight syndrome translations most recently) because I expect things to keep disappearing as the internet becomes more and more closed off. I have an archive of drakengard and nier translations you simply can't find online anymore because everyone deleted everything
Re: TranslatorTom chased off the internet
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 5:40 pm
by Iwazaru
I can open yet another partition on our site to have back copies of stuff like that btw. Or just on forum, lol
Iwazaru wrote: ↑Tue Feb 11, 2020 5:40 pm
I can open yet another partition on our site to have back copies of stuff like that btw. Or just on forum, lol
What's the point? I have discord autists aiming for my head already. If I post anything that might get the site taken down for any reason, it will be taken down. I might post some of that stuff on the forum though. I was planning to make a thread about the GHM stuff I archived regardless later tonight. (I'm spending time with the missus right now lol.)
Re: TranslatorTom chased off the internet
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 6:00 pm
by Iwazaru
Well me personally wanted to put some old shit that is deleted from internet on our site so dont need to go into webarchiveorg for it. Though its basically two sites that died, and would remove if original authors would demand (which i doubt. anyway its just a possible idea, for now. We need to advance our GHM site first. Also, Captain Jack needs to establish his blog :D )
Forum threads is okay compromise option, i guess. Like with ghm music thread, all those are not hosted on our site (and even not uploaded by exactly us, lol)
edit:
Those two dead sites that i wanted to mirror. It's not kings field one (which i gave up currently as its available again in webarchiveorg, it wasnt previously). One of them is biography/guide on one musician, was pretty handy. Second one is about arcade games and game magazines, also it's information, information, no copyrighted content there (except right of original site's author, ofc. but i mean, no ROMs or soundtracks.).
Re: TranslatorTom chased off the internet
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 7:17 pm
by kinezumi
This is bullshit. Tom is one of the kindest (and most polite) people I've ever encountered online.
To see HG101 assist in driving the drama towards him is beyond pathetic, it's like it's no longer about videogames and their preservation and more about trying to win that sweet street cred and Patreon money from people who don't even care about this kind of stuff unless it pushes their agenda.
One wrong word with these 白左 and you'll never hear the end of it, no matter how many miles you let them take.