Translating a rom

[McCrutch67]

I was going to copy all the text from the intro to the game (Inuyasha Naraku no Wana Mayoi no Mori no Shoutaijou) into a file before translating but I'm excited because I got Myouga's name to change. The 大 is missing from the beginning of the message because I needed to borrow some space for his name since in japanese it was only two characters. So anyway, here's the first couple lines of it and a couple guesses.

冥加
大変ですぞ、犬夜叉さま！
This is awful, Inuyasha! (EDIT:I put "This is awful!")

犬夜叉
この声は....冥加じじい！
That voice is....Myouga! (EDIT: I put "That voice...Myouga!"(no room for more))

弥勒
どうなされたのです、そんなにあわてて
What's wrong, why are you here

I'm only sure of the second one and even that there might be a better way to phrase it. I guessed dounasareta was like doushita since both have "dou" and a form of 'to do'. The first one I just translated taihen as awful and "This is" sounded better than my first "It's/That's awful." How are my translations and how awesome would it be if I finished this and had a finished "english version" for my friends to play. :-)

EDIT: I realized I need to make things as small as possible so if you have any ideas for making really short translations please help

[PaulTB]

EDIT: I realized I need to make things as small as possible so if you have any ideas for making really short translations please help
IIRC it is technically possible, although very tricky, to increase the amount of space for text in the rom.

What is somewhat easier - and has been done by at least some rom translators - is to introduce a 1-and-a-half characters system for the English.

For example "The" would normally be three characters (and take up 3 x double byte(?)). Under the 1-and-a-half system it is 'T' and half a 'h' followed by half a 'h' and 'e'.

I don't know the technical bits but it could be worth looking into.

[McCrutch67]

I thought of things like that too but the problem is that I would have to make the graphics first of all and I don't know how good it would come out since I can barely view them in the first place(multiple rom hacking programs give me different views but nothing clear like with snes games so far). Also there's so much to make and I'd be making them all the time as I translate. You got the technical stuff correct but I'm not so sure. I might try to make name graphics to use as I can borrow space from the sentence for the name.

Ex.
(冥加 - 4 bytes per kanji = 8 bytes in japanese) + sentence (x bytes)
->
(Myouga - 2 bytes per character = 12 bytes in english) + sentence(x-4 bytes)

the four bytes were taken from the name leaving less room in the sentence. Those four bytes could be recovered if I make graphics for all the names and then his name is back to two characters "Myo" +"uga". I would have to make a "Myo" and "uga" character though and again I'm not sure how easily I could do that.

[PaulTB]

I would have to make a "Myo" and "uga" character though and again I'm not sure how easily I could do that.
Is there nothing 'beg, borrow or steal'-able from other people's previous work?

Japanese tends to be shorter than the English equivalent - translating is hard enough as it is without having to translate into _short_ English text. :relief: