Chapter 8 is now completely proofread.
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In addition to repetitious and/or mundane NPC dialogue, another common occurrence in JRPG scripts that invites a little liberal "punching up" when translating into English is characters that are defined by the
way they speak above anything else.
A while ago in the thread, I posted this:
One thing Japanese does have that English doesn't which helps enliven short little RPG lines quite a lot is dialects and modes of speech that are easy to represent in written form. Without actually adding any whole extra words, it's easy to see if a character is a kooky old man, an air-headed teenage girl, a swashbuckling pirate, a "friend of Dorothy", a hardened boss, a polite servant, and more. In Japanese, it's all a matter of tweaking a few syllables.
I don't want to say who, but in Xanadu I and II, there are two characters in your party who stand out mostly because of their modes of speech. One sounds like a tightwad middle-manager, while the other sounds like a samurai straight out of a period-drama. The latter one is particularly concerning, but in both cases, you can't help but lose something when you translate their lines straight to English because the same modes don't quite exist there.
Here's a not-perfectly-analogous example of the kind of problem this can give rise to:
Remember that scene in Die Hard where John McClain finds Hans Gruber (RIP Alan Rickman) on the roof, and Hans starts speaking in clean American-accented English? I know Japanese people who have seen this movie countless times, and none of them were aware of the accent switch. Whoever translated Die Hard to Japanese must have just given up trying to work that in, because it's completely unrepresented. I've seen it once with Japanese subtitles, and they just let the scene play out as you'd expect it would if Hans weren't German to begin with.
There are things vaguely akin to that in Japanese scripts. Sometimes a character will say something like "It's cold outside"...not a particularly exciting line, but because it's in archaic samurai-ish talk, it's still kind of interesting. It gives the character some color. In the right situation, it mixes things up nicely in the overall scene and maybe adds a little depth.
If I really didn't want to go with "It's cold outside", there are two ways I could deal with that in translation. One is to use ye olde English and say "Mine ears doth freeze" or whatever. The other is to toss the original line out the window and write something completely different that tells the audience about the character in another way. For example, I could have them mention something that's important to them. The easy way out of that is to make a joke, which can be done to various degrees...Working Designs might have the samurai-ish character insist on taking a break to do some P90X.
I don't really like either of those options, though. Ye olde English is corny and distracting in most cases, and this Xanadu case, I believe, would be one of them. As for completely rewriting the line, even without any jokes...I just don't want to assume that much. It's not my script, and these are not my characters. To tell you more about them, I would have to
invent things about them, and it doesn't seem right to twist them into different people just to spice things up a little.
It's kind of like how I feel about adding jokes where there were none before: on the rare occasion that I get an idea that's so subtle, so safe, and so good that you couldn't be sure it wasn't in the original game, well, I just might slip that into the script. I think that before I do my next play-test, I also ought to isolate both of those character's lines (again, especially the latter one) and see if I can't do a little minor stylizing or other punching-up in places. I really don't want them to be boring. But whatever I do, I want to keep it minimal. The result is that, more often then not, you're going to get the plain "It's cold outside" and that's it. I hope that's OK.
I know that "pro" translation outfits lean toward taking more liberties, and if I ever wanted to be "pro" myself, I'd probably need to get good at doing that. I once watched Kiki's Delivery Service with Japanese audio and English subtitles that were actually closed-captions of the English dub. It really surprised me how often the English dub added entirely new lines
when nobody was speaking at all in the Japanese original, especially for Kiki's black cat.
