Last thing I want this to be is an 'alternative interpretation' of original work, if translation isn't faithful to original text then it pretty much failed in the original purpose.Atleast in my opinion I believe it did. the story flows well from start to finish and the general plot seems to tie in with each review. Plus reading through the little extra's menu stuff which has gone through MTL seems similar to what's in the hand translated version. If you didn't' capture the original feel you made a damn good alternate version.
However, at the end of a day Luna's translation involves putting text through 3 Machine translators, (DeepL, Sugoi Offline and ChatGPT) seeing what each outputs, deciding which produced best result and making manual tweaks for any minor errors machine's output produced. Sometimes I may alter the sentence to make it better fit the situation or how I assume character might speak (Noir - Sadistically playful, Leia and her bodyguard - With some noble air to them, Rico - boastful, yet reasonably smart and secretly caring despite still occasionally acting like a child) These unfortunately are mostly educated guesses and in Leia's case a bit of a personal whim. Do note that even when I do this I always try to preserve what character is saying even if whose whims are added (or trying to say through MTLs fog)
In absolutely worst case scenarios I might try to make up something that fits the situation if none of machines is making any sense (It was at its worst when I only used DeepL (for like 2 and a half translations), and nowadays it occurs much less frequently now that I added Sugoi and more recently ChatGPT into the mix) For Example, there is a bit of gagspeak in this game and i'm sure I haven't rendered all of it exactly right. (Closest I got fully right might be Black Cage Defeat event)
Ultimately I don't know Japanese, so best I can do is try to minimize MTL nonsense while trying to stick to what original is saying and deducing from context clues how they might be saying it (formally, naively, overconfidently etc.) And when it comes to 'localizing' things I mostly try to play it conservatively. Let's just say for the most part this approach is far from perfect, even if it's capable of making rather convincingg looking results.
One regret I have from making an early decision in the editing process, is omitting japanese honorifics. Had I known/realized how rather heavily game uses them I probably would've kept them (I tend to omit them unless game is rather obviously set in Japan). At this point restoring them would be a very tedious volume of work now that so much is done.
A fair number of time has gone into this edit and I tried my damndest to stay as faithful to the original text with these rather crude methods, while trying to keep it as readable as possible (and hopefully not dull to read) But until someone that knows japanese natively reads through one of my translations, no one can confidently say that it is translated well, not even me.
