#005 Operation Aveh

Hey, so we're back. Took a bit longer this time to do a bit more than usual. I try to do about ten pages of game script (again, from the Xenogears: Thousand Daggers Japanese copy) a week pending my schedule and the depth of story content. In this case, the section of translation for Operation Aveh was generally very light on substantive story since the story segments were heavy on gameplay and there wasn't really too much profound exposition or theological and philosophical subtext that would warrant researching and a deep dive into the logic of translation. So I gave it another week and did another ten pages to get to the end of the segment, but still not much of great interest to report. I've uploaded the new WIP script that covers from where we last left off just prior to starting the mission to rescue Margie all the way up to the return to Nisan.

That said, in this entry, since there was very little substantive exposition to discuss here, this will be a decidedly short post. My translation of this section of the text are mostly all revisions to make the English sound much more natural as there was a good amount of clunk to the original English translation. I'm looking at you, "sorry-dorry." Anyways go ahead, download, read it, and let me know if there's anything of concern with the way I've chosen to translate.

P.S. WHO THE HELL SAYS "SORRY-DORRY?!"

Also just a side note, but for consistency reasons, I'm keeping the original English quirk for Chu-chu using the "chu" sounds. Yeah, it's annoying but Chu-Chu is an annoying character either way and it's actually in line with the original Japanese translation. In the Japanese, the し, す, and そ sounds (shi, su, and so respectively) are occasionally changed to チュ on certain occasions like ending a sentence with です, desu, so it becomes でチュ, dechu, as a cutesy way of speaking. It's annoying and stupid but consistent and in-line with the character and script. Also I do think it helps keep some of the anime campiness which has its own charm. Kind of impossible to take this character seriously either way...but man, do I wish this character didn't exist.

That's pretty much it for this entry, but expect some pretty huge updates coming next time since the story picks up from here with lots of delicious exposition meat (mmmm...meat...) in Nisan and all of the awesome sequences following. Later rubes.

-Nino