Here's an excerpt from the old man:
Well, being one of the
, I assumed we'd want a Greek-sounding name. I'm not sure since I don't know Greek, but something that starts with 'V' sounds more Greeky to me than something that starts with 'B'.
Overbuilding it and subtracting is better than building a little and adding it piece by piece because we still have no idea how much we can actually fit in a line yet and more content has more potential, does it not?
Right. I'll be working like that then. What's a pain in the behind though is that there're many repeats of the exact same sentence, only one has a break in the middle and the other doesn't. Other times the exact same sentence has a different amount of ellipsis, then we come to those with the exact same sentence with no change whatsoever. If I could get a sort of list as to who says what, I might be able to modify it to fit more into character, if you want.
As an example, each playable character has their own way of saying 'Still trying to run?' and 'You won't escape!'. In Japanese, it was mostly copy pasting of the same words with slight changes to the endings for varying amounts of politeness/roughness. And an extra 'ze' for Marisa's. In the translation, I drastically changed it; Mokou's for example becomes a taunt of sorts (Go on, try and run. My flames will roast you alive), while Satori's I changed to (You're still thinking of running. You cannot escape my eye).
It's a drastic change from the original Japanese, but I thought it was for the better. Did you want me to stick with actual direct translations or am I allowed to take liberties like that? It might clash with the character interpretation in the dialogue translations if/when Deranged finishes them, but... I know I'm asking a lot of questions, but this is the first time I've actually translated something with other people. ^^"
琉輪影舞 <--- One of Youmu's passive sword skill buffs. Particularly, the one that causes instant death. I'm kind of guessing this is in chinese as it doesn't really make sense in japanese, and a chinese friend called it "Flowing reincarnation shadow dance." Or "Ariba", for short. I personally have no clue what to translate this as, but if you break down the kanji, you get "Gem", "Ring", "Shadow", and "Dance".
Uh... Maybe try 'Dance of Reincarnating Shadows'?
Consensus says that translations should be literal (map_trans.csv). I have a few exceptions and notes though:
Notes:
- House of Eternity should stay as Eientei due to it being clunky in English (and also too wordy in general).
- I need clarification on if Mound of the Nameless is named that or is actually called Nameless Hill.
- Viotopos should be Biotopos, but that's a complicated problem. Also, Rithos to Lithos.
- The most difficult challenge (for me) is dealing with Uchouten/Excessive Glory and Gen Unkai/Mysterious Sea of Clouds.
Anyways, I will be passing this along to Pooshlmer for discussion as well.
For point 2, the Mound of the Nameless is more commonly known as
Muenzuka. The
Nameless Hill is something else entirely. My biggest trouble when translating is that some names are known more widely in the fandom when romanized and less widely when translated. Example: The Netherworld is, as far as I know, usually called the Netherworld instead of its Japanese name, Meikai. However, Eientei is usually left as Eientei instead of being translated into House of Eternity. Chireiden/Palace of the Earth Spirits is a 50/50 chance, but the Former Hell of Blazing Fires is usually in English instead of romanized. That's why I gave up and made two versions for you guys to use at will. xD
A random thought; how hard would it be to make two translation patches, one for translations and one for romaji? The English translation patch for the DS game Tales of Innocence actually had a menu option that lets you choose between romaji and direct translations. As far as I know, it shouldn't be TOO hard; all it needs is a little Find > Replace throughout the documents but... It's just that as a personal thing, I prefer romanized.