taskforce wrote:
No offense Wildbill, but this isn't a good idea for Japanese Dialog. Lists are one thing but dialog is another thing entirely. Japanese is a VERY complex language and doesn't translate well to English when all you have is a dictionary by your side (with little understanding of the language). I've seen many Many MANY attempts by people who think they'll be good enough to get the job done with a dictionary. Trust me, they never ever are. The translations are not only always inaccurate but most of the time not even remotely on target. As I say, lists are one thing. They're straight forward. Conversation is on a whole different level. I promise it will not work out well. And you'll just need to find a translator to check it (and then retranslate it due to many inaccuracies anyway)
Please do not think I'm being mean to you, just please trust me that I know what I'm talking about on this. If the game gets delayed. So be it, best to be delayed and right than hurried and not just because we got impatient. if you'd like some specifics on what I'm talking about, I'd be happy to talk about it in private.
I agree with all of your reasoning completely, but sometimes we take necessary means to advance a work on a timely basis. I will never become bilingual or fluent. I must look up almost everything, and I still don't understand Japanese syntax very well or tenses at all. I must use about a half-dozen hard and soft copy means to tackle a group of strings in a scene. In that amount of time (six to ten hours or longer) I could easily polish the whole dialogue in a medium-sized town, so it is not an efficient use of my time, nor does it take advantage of my major strengths, but as I said...
NJStar has a feature now that pops up multiple Kanji usages right on top of the text file and sometimes even breaks it into Kana. If you can cross-reference to other Kanji with Furigana in something related such as a manual or strategy guide, you can sometimes nail the subjects and other nouns in a sentence precisely.
Next, it becomes a matter of working out verbs and finally tenses. Yes, and I paste words, phrases, and even whole strings into Jim Breen and also Babelfish. Babelfish is frequently gibberish, but surprisingly, it occasionally nails a whole string fairly exactly.
I also have several big hard book Japanese dictionaries, but I rarely use them any more.
Then I read a segment of a FAQ that describes the scene I'm writing. That can fill in a lot of holes in major plot elements.
That leaves playing through that section in the actual game. If the music is dramatic, scary, humorous, light-hearted, dark, forbidding, conveys danger, etc., you have the tone. If the game scenery reveals death, destruction, a rescue attempt, attainment of a goal, trouble brewing, a seminal event, happy interludes with butterflies dancing through the tulips, stormy weather with monster silhouettes flashing on dank castle walls, or whatever, you can now put everything together and the total story element becomes obvious.
But it's A LOT OF TIME CONSUMING WORK without a good raw translation to start from.