Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

Lol, sorry filler, I misundertood your comments

Well, let me get back to my initial intention
Since you're a huge Lunar fan, I thought it would be good to give you another option of a cool game for you to play.

I vaguely remember feeling a bit snubbed by that part of the remake but I don't think it stopped me from playing and enjoying both 1 and 2 on the PSX. However, the second one had some of the longest and most tedious boss battles I have ever played. I was not really happy with that aspect of the game by the ending of 2. I distinctly remember that I was playing Fear Effect 2 at the time which was a more enjoyable experience in the long run.

Lalakoboldslayer: I appreciate it. The gameplay does look pretty cool for that one. I may take a closer look at it.

I'm going to put this out there:

In Aretha II I've run into one of those characters with a speech peculiarity. They say "pi" at the end of every sentence. Barring certain scenarios like a robot that "bleeps" when it speaks or something, I don't normally like to try to include this in the translation. For now I'm just translating the lines normally except where the character only says "pi" which I'm translating as -chirp- for now (they are an anthropomorphic bird btw). If people with experience have input on this feel free to comment.

EDIT: They do refer to themselves as "we" however which I'm keeping in for now.

We've released patches for two games in which cats originally spoke meow at the end of every translated string. I also saw it recently in Luminous Arc-II, both written and spoken in voice as well. With the cats, it seemed to get really old in a hurry. In one game, we left it that way a few times for effect. In Mystic Ark, we dropped it just about altogether because virtually everyone was a durned cat in Chapter 1, and meow got annoying in a hurry!

Once we start putting Aretha-II together, we'll see how it holds up in the strings. We had robot warriors in Feda that bleeped, also in Lennus-II. I believe we tempered the mechanical sound effects in both of those stories, and that is likely what everyone will prefer in Aretha-II, not to overdo it, but keep a little bit to make it quaint, (mechanically folksy) just the way Bongo' likes it, right, ol' bean? (Remember? Ain't that quaint!?)

Thanks Wildbill. That both validates my viewpoint and helps to clarify how you guys have dealt with such things in the past.

Current progress, about 40% complete on first draft of script translation.

Personally, if I do a game with cats, nya will go at the end of every sentence. But, it WILL be nya not meaw. Just how it'll go for me (yes, Wildbill MAY kill me over it, don't care. I want it that way.) Good thing for everyone, so far no catgirls.

Just for refenence, Nya is the Japanese sound for a cat not meow.

Did you ever watch any of Digicharat? There are a few different incarnations of it, but the anime series Digi Charat Nyo is one of my favorites. The main character is a cat themes alien and she says "Nyo" at the end of every sentence or maybe instead of "desu". It's really cute anyway.

Here they are singing a festival song that features "nyo" prominently. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_XTVLY9Lps

Faraday always argued for a British spelling/translation of Meow. I don't recall the exact letters he used, but when I spoke it phonetically, it sounded like a feline with laryngitis!

Great job Filler for what you have done on this game and Slayers, how did you come to be fluent in Japanese?

Lol, it's by your declaration only am I fluent. I'm going to try to remain completely modest while hopefully not causing DD to lose all confidence in my translation ability here. Really my Japanese is pretty atrocious. However, I took Japanese for over 2 years in college and studied there for about 2 months. I have a good friend living in Tokyo right now and I visit periodically. However, it's really the almost 9 years of translation experience that I have that lets me do this. The computer helps a lot and while I don't machine translate, the combination of software and online dictionaries makes vocab and even some tricky grammar a lot easier. Combine that with quite a number of scripts under my belt and I'm starting to get good at this. I used to have to ask for a lot of help, but experience teaches you a lot and I can handle the bulk on my own now. However in normal speaking situations, or even translating other kinds of text, it's a different story. If you don't use it you loose it, and conversely if you DO use it you get better. I'm a video game translation specialist at this point not really a translator.

Oh BTW: Progress on Aretha II script around 57%.