Apr 04 2014

WIP Update – 03 Apr 14

I did a little writing on Sunny Day. Not a whole lot, mind you, but enough to justify this post. I also worked on putting together a spreadsheet to keep the character dialects consistent. I did something similar for Jasper and the Scotians when I was writing KoG.

Some of you may recall in the PS era how we started to see a lot of dialects show up in the localization of Square games. Some people absolutely hated it, but I wasn’t one of them. In Japanese it’s common to utilize various regional dialects as a sort of short-hand for character types (or less often, to invert expectations). This isn’t limited to stories based in Japan, as certain dialects will be used for analogous character types in fantasy worlds as well. It really wasn’t until the PS era that you started to see localization step up to reflect that more in translation. As I said, some people hated it.

Another influence was Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. Understanding the moles was often a challenge, but it certainly made them distinct. In the KoG series, I afford the reader a translation guide and more recently I provided interlinear translation in the prologue of Tico3, so I’m at least conscious of the difficulty it can pose to some readers. Shoot, as far as Sunny Day goes, an early joke is the main character he likes one of crew best because she doesn’t have an accent, so I’m self-aware enough to lampshade it. That won’t save me from those who absolutely hate dialect in stories, but I’m willing to sacrifice those readers if I have to. You can’t please everyone, after all.

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