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

Oh, good grief!! EVERYONE refers to dictionaries in hard copy, soft copy, word processors, and such. Even Faraday (who is part Japanese) referred to source materials, also Akujin. Hell, English is my native language, but when I made part of my living through writing for many years, I consulted reference materials every single day - not to mention conducting exhaustive all-source research of the subject matter at hand, whether it was my masters thesis, a magazine article, a military command history, or a photojournalism spread for an official publication.

Whenever I translate something myself, in addition to open-source tools at my disposal, I also use methodologies I learned at the Armed Forces Air Intelligence Training Center, the Defense Intelligence College, and on the job, to assemble known quantities into a variety of workable matrices - like assembling pieces of a puzzle. Soon, a picture begins to emerge. You fill in missing sections gradually, and voila - through extrapolation - about 98% of the meaning materializes. As you play through the game and observe the sights and sounds - boom! You nail it. If still in doubt, we have another translator check it. Then, everything gets vetted again - over and over - during the exhaustive beta process.

We don't have native speakers coming out of the woodwork to lay the whole exact culture in our laps, but we don't need such an overkill approach to produce a fully credible product. I've worked with many translators in my time, not just here but in a previous life, and I can tell you this. Filler and Ritchie are tops! So, if he's gonna be overly modest, I'll brag on Filler, myself. As for machine translation aids, that's exactly what they are - just aids, but these fellows deliver outstanding translations, and personally, I don't care if someone uses a Ouija board to get the job done!!

57% of Aretha-II... Oooohhh-eeee...!!

Thanks for the vote of confidence WildBill. You are correct, my skills are perfectly sufficient for game translation. And speaking of which...Aretha II is around the 62% mark.

You Lie! You re making me a very happy person! I actually feel like this game will se the light of day! The coders did a great job on the scripting engine, in fact I am considering using some thing similar in my PC coded RPG/whatever game. If that ever happens!

Current progress is...62% I haven't been working on Aretha II because I want to finish up Madou Monogatari since I'm so close. I'm about 86% through the first draft for that and it's a lot smaller than the Aretha II script. It will need a lot of fixing once the first draft is done though. However I was not lying! It really is that far along. I'm probably taking a week off from work pretty soon to work on a lot of various projects and Aretha II will be one of them.

BTW: I did finally get to that point that impressed me in the game. **possible spoiler** It was a spot where a father and daughter have a conversation where the daughter gets all teen angsty and the father apologizes for how she was raised and explains her heritage. ** end spoiler ** It was pretty well done for a game script and I really enjoyed translating it. It will be neat to see these things in context once the text is inserted.

I've raised three with the princess's attitude, myself. Although I won't admit to them how much I've learned from them through the years, they think I'm getting smarter as they grow older, hee-hee... Well, we'll just leave it at that, for now, and hope the princess understands that she didn't come to the king with an instruction manual!

Take some time to relax during your week off, too, Matt. You should play our Feda sometime. A father-daughter scene goes down in Chapter 12 that really wrung me out as I was polishing it (Roiss and Luke Hegkmeyar). I must have re-written it 30 times. I wanted it to come across as gut-wrenching as some of the challenges I have experienced with my own children in real life. To this day I don't know if I succeeded. I would be interested to know if you see any parallels in Aretha-II.

Good to hear progress is being made.
I hope it's not going to be a story problem if Aretha II gets finished before I.
(then again, I think the 3 Game Boy games might've been made first)

Well, that only means that you should get to work on part 1 How far along are you?

FYI: Approaching 69% script completion.

How does this game compare with Slayers by the script you have done so far Filler?

Good question! It's not nearly so full of crazy, goofy stuff as Slayers. It has a more typical, epic RPG storyline. There was this great war that happened in the past, the main characters try to save someone's life, they help this-or-that person, get caught up in a legend or two. Nothing bad, but it doesn't exactly break the mold. RPGs have a lot of extraneous text like pointless townsfolk speak, debugging areas, and shop text. The meat of the story is sometimes a bit thin when you come down to it, and often times involves a lot of quest related stuff like "you need to go here and do X" than really developing the characters or the plot. That said, they tend to have more story than a lot of other types of games, it's just the bulk of the script is fairly pedestrian. Anyway, Slayers is the same way, there are just a lot more WTF moments and a lot more things that make you chuckle or downright go "that isn't RIGHT."