There are some things you might want to include in your post about Higurashi:

• There's an even older translation than the one from the Sonozaki Twins, done by a group named the Hinamizawa Club in 2006 — when the anime was airing. The translation was undertaken in tandem with the fansub for the anime; the goal was to translate the arcs that had yet to be adapted (i.e. Minagoroshi and Matsuribayashi), but the group eventually decided to translate everything else as well. Sadly, as with the Sonozaki Twins' translation, it was abruptly canned, leaving us with a partial translation of the aforementioned arcs (up to day 6 respectively) and one of Onikakushi up to day 5. Surprisingly, the translation (at least for the last two arcs) can still be found on Mediafire, despite most links in the old Animesuki thread being dead. Needless to say, you need the doujin version of Matsuribayashi (or Kai) to use the patch;
• You recommend 07th-Mod for those interested in the new MG release, but I'd advise against that. It doesn't just add new sprites/BGs; it occasionally changes lines from the original script and even the storyline (e.g. Himatsubushi's epilogue) to align with the console version; it also removes about half of the OG's backgrounds to match the number of backgrounds in the console version. If all you want is the BGM and sound effects, patching them back in is trivial.

That is interesting. I had seen a Hinamizawa Club translation listed somewhere for one of those later arcs, might have been on VNDB a long time ago, but didn't have enough information on it. Practically speaking it doesn't matter since it brings us no closer to having a legitimate full translation, but it is an interesting piece of history. I do need to revise and more extensively archive some things on that page; I threw the current form of it together while busy with work and certain that my translation would not progress.

I've never touched 07th-mod and have only done test runs of the new MG release itself, but the only reason I mentioned it was for its music and SFX restoration options. I've always been told that a bunch of its changes were optional, but if it really does that much without permission then that is pretty nasty. Still, I don't consider the story worth experiencing without the original Question Arcs music; this is a bit of purism but I think the memories you form with the audio of a novel game on your first read are irreplaceable.
Now, of course, all of the music and sounds in the new MG release are loose OGG files that anyone can replace: if you know of a straight audio replacement patch that I can link to, I'll gladly do so. As scattered and lazy as I am now, I never really was willing to devote any time to that release, and tossing out a patch that I would not have tested/supported sufficiently wouldn't have been good of me to do. I at least can stand by the old MG release because it was what I experienced firsthand.

>>2
From the looks of it, the Sonozaki Twins seem to have been briefly involved with this translation and began working on their own when it was cancelled. Yeah, it's just an interesting tidbit of history, but it's still amusing to have something other than Onikakushi fan-translations.

>straight audio replacement patch

Sadly I couldn't find anything like that on the internet; however, as MangaGamer restored all the original BGM and SFX for the new release of the question arcs — despite rolling back those changes in 2019 —, it's not necessary as long as you get ahold of a version of the game(s) dating back to before 2019. The BGM in Kai is mostly the same as the original (it even restores two BGMs that were replaced in the old release), but the SFX was completely replaced, and not even 07th-mod restores it. I had to rip the SFX straight from the doujin version and then encode it into ogg; I did not restore all of it since the MG release uses less sound effects.

I remember when I was using the Sonozaki translation as a reference, the Tips were credited to have been translated by a variety of people from /jp/ if I recall correctly. Likely were translated way back then as a supplement to the anime.

The ideal solution still would be to backport a complete translation to the original NScripter version, but neither one is even remotely up to par. It really needs to be done, but I couldn't put my name to a project like that. If someone could do a new plaintext translation I could handle the script, but that translation would have to be up to par, too. It's a shame to end up more or less powerless and have to turn my back to it.

I didn't know being french made me so lucky as a higu fan, those english releases sound really... Weird to say the least! Do you know how well Le Sanglot Des Cigales' translation is compared to the MangaGamer releases ? It was done a very long time ago and by Pierre Bancov alone so I'd assume it would be less good than a whole company localizing something but who knows... At least we've had all the minigames and stuff (no Music Room/Staff Room is really missing on something)

And how is Higurashi Rei's MangaGamer translation ? That one is "new" and didn't release long ago so maybe it's gotten better than the rest ? I think the only thing we had for a long while for Rei was a sloppy fantranslation

>>5
Bancov's translation is good as far as the evidence and happy readers have pointed to. He was a scholar in both French and Japanese, and he went to great lengths even to license the proper music for his release. It's one of the great cases of a passion project, and a novel game handled with care and class.

>I'd assume it would be less good than a whole company localizing something

Corporate localizations are almost always inferior. They're usually made by just a few people whose styles clash, those people are always underpaid and bitter, and technical issues coupled with lack of passion abound. What you see me say about MangaGamer's crap potentially can apply to any officially localized novel game, it's just that Higurashi is a perfect storm of "hard to license and was in the wrong place at the wrong time". There are instances where you'd want the official translation over the fan translation, as with Muv-Luv whose fan translation was done by very talented hackers who didn't know Japanese, but generally only a fan will do a work right; and you don't get paid to be a fan. What you get paid to do is whore out your talent to whatever shovelware the company puts on your plate. Unless you work for Crunchyroll, then you get paid to butcher and censor the greatest shows to come along in a decade.

>>5

>how is Higurashi Rei's MangaGamer translation ?

It's passable I guess. It's the same song and dance of the new release as a whole: the English is polished but that doesn't necessarily mean the translation is better. That said, considering the alternative is a machine translation... the bar is set rather low. Just be aware of the usual censorship common to commercial releases (though I must say I'm surprised the Touhou references weren't censored in Hirukowashi) and that the original SE — as usual with MangaGamer — has been completely replaced.