Thanks for providing that. I get an odd enjoyment from reading direct translation comparisons.
Great job. There were just a couple lines that gave me pause:
"In that country, everyone is troubled greater by a monster of many heads known as Orochi." [When I first read this, I thought that perhaps you were going to give all the people of Jipang a similarly strange way of speaking, but that didn't turn out to be the case.]
"Brave X! You are one of incredible strength!" [While that's not incorrect, it'd read more naturally as "Brave X!" Your strength is incredible!"]
"I’ve heard about you. You’re those country bumpkins, aren’t you? Teehee" [Missing punctuation at the end of the "Teehee".]
"You should head south search in the center of four mountains. Meow!" [I assume there's a missing "and" in there.]
"It is also said that due to the king's orders, the hero Simon was banished through the travel door on the right." [In all other instances, you capitalized "travel door".]
One thing that really stood out to me was how surprisingly accurate the original English translation was, especially for an NES game of that era. They even managed to sneak a couple direct references to death past Nintendo of America's censors. I wonder if the translation accuracy had anything to do with how long it took for DQ3 to come out in the US, giving them plenty of time to get it right.
That said, your translation is still a definite improvement. I look forward to your work on DQ4, as I've been holding off on playing that one until a better translation comes out.
I really appreciate you reading this (and it sounds like you read a lot of it if not all of it.)
I agree with everything you pointed out as far as typos. I'll check with nejimakipiyo but I think we will agree with your suggested rephrasing of the incredible strength line as well.
I probably should have have said so more clearly but this wasn't the final draft. Here is what this was. nejimakipiyo (and Masafumi Sato when requested) provided a very straightforward literal translation. I took one pass through rephrasing all the lines in a way that I hoped would sound more natural and engaging. Nejimakipiyo then took one more pass through my revisions to make sure I didn't miss the nuance of the Japanese as well as provide some additional phrasing input.
After we finished, I did a quick sweep through only the first few pages because I was concerned that some of the ways we handled certain things evolved in the course of the writing. They did a bit, so I made some fixes. In the process of taking another sweep through the first few pages, I found errors that both of us missed and additional opportunities for better phrasings. Unfortunately I haven't done that second sweep through the entire document. So me making it viewable as it was was more of a "look at our progress!" kind of thing than "here's a perfect finished script". Hell, if I played DQ1 or DQ2 yet again now I would still probably find more phrasing or grammar that I think could be improved--so nothing is ever perfect. As far as this document, as I now work on inserting it into the game, I'm almost definitely going to make more improvements. Then when I play test the game, further improvements. So hopefully this will be at a high level of quality by the end.
As far as your surprise at how accurate the original translation was, I agree! I think I even said so above in this thread. They did a very good job with delivering a translation that was both accurate and natural sounding. When I first started these projects, my initial goal for the DQ1 and DQ2 script was to simply make it sound stylistically similar to DQ3 and DQ4. So that almost begs the question, "why all this effort?" Perhaps you noticed already but especially in some of the lengthier speeches or narrative text, there were some significant translation mistakes. Usually they would be quite sensible errors, like a Japanese expression translated in a straightforward way that really missed the meaning. There was definitely a tendency for the original translators to be overly literal at times. So while this translation adheres a little less to the actual Japanese sentence structure, I think we did catch a lot of the errors of what the original localization did and I don't think we committed hardly any of our own translation mistakes. As far as censorship, there wasn't as much of it as I expected compared to the first two games but there were certainly examples. The Assalam puff puff event is the most significant example, but there were numerous examples of prayers being altered or references to god or heaven being changed. "Powers above" as one of their replacements for "god" always made me chuckle.
Anyway, thank you again for the feedback. I'm happy to knock out those issues now lest they don't get noticed at later stages of the process.
*EDIT
All the issues you pointed out have been corrected.
