I wanted to provide a brief update.
After doing a total line by line retranslation of Dragon Quest II, I've gone back to my version of Dragon Quest I and realized that I actually left a ton of the script basically the US localization with thees and thous removed, more fluid phrasing, removals of obvious Americanisms like Nestor & Howard as well as adding in censored stuff.
I decided that this wasn't good enough. Since I was so pleased with my line by line retranslation of DQII, I thought my version of I should absolutely match it, especially since that's what people will typically play first.
The first step was getting the script extracted and insert-ready through abw's fantastic abcde software. That's been done and I'm well underway rewriting pretty much every piece of text from this game. My original version was limited by the length of individual lines so I'm overjoyed to have cast off that restriction.
Part of my rethinking has involved moving away from the vestiges of our original localization. Two examples: Dragonlord is now Dragon King. All the talk about the "Dragonlord's minions" has been replaced with the original idea of monster attacks.
I've thought particularly long and hard about Red Slime / She Slime which in Japanese is Slime Besu. To the Japanese audience, Besu sounds very close to Mesu which is a word indicating a female beast. After weeks of deliberation, I decided to take the female animal form Slimess (IE Lioness) and gently tweak it in the same way Horii tweaked Mesu. That gives us Slime Bess. I like this because it achieves the same affect of the Japanese--much more than the contemporary "She Slime". Slime Bess sounds both unique and distinctly female.
I can't say exactly when I'll have this done, but sometime within the next couple weeks I assume.