A little update.
I started my second pass of Xanadu 1, and I'm already through the first two chapters.
The first chapter, the prologue, was still very rough. When I did the first pass, this was the very first area that I ever tackled, and since I was just getting my bearings, I wasn't very diligent. In a sense, this second time was my first proper pass of it. I'll definitely want to give it another careful go-through before I say it's done.
The process is, you translate something in the text dump, you get it running in the game, and when you see a line you don't like, you change it...but then what? Do you move on to other lines? Or do you shut the game down, re-insert your latest script, and restart it to see if the updated line is actually better and displaying properly?
During my first pass of Xanadu 1's prologue, when I altered something that wasn't working well, I was usually reloading and checking only once or not at all. For big overhauls, I might have gone through two cycles. However, if you really want to do it right, you need to reload and test every alteration as many times as it takes until you see the line (and the lines around it) running in the game in a fully satisfactory way.
I did that a little more during my first pass of the second chapter, and it definitely made the second pass a lot easier. IIRC, I was doing things the proper way from the fourth chapter onward, so hopefully things will be smooth from there out. The third chapter, I'm expecting to still have problems.
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Thank goodness Xanadu 1 and 2 let you save and load anywhere. It would take an excruciating amount of time to test changes if it didn't. See, if you're doing a fan-translation of a cart game, chances are that the game engine calls text directly from the ROM each time, and that means that you can often get away with using savestates to test changes. Since CD games load blocks of text into a RAM cache, however, you can't really do that. PCE-CD games especially tend to load up huge chunks of game at once to keep loading times down, so you might have go through an entire dungeon again from the start just to test changes to a conversation with a boss.
If and when someone tries to do another translation of a PCE-CD RPG in the future, I expect this to be a big problem. I'd recommend three things to deal with it:
1. Do your initial translation of each line while watching it appear in a recorded playback of the original game so that you make the best judgement calls possible right from the beginning. Look on nicovideo for a playthrough, or record your own with Mednafen.
2. Convince whoever is doing the hacking that you need cheat codes. You'll want to be able to turn off random battles, and also to make yourself so strong that you can wipe out any boss immediately.
3. Record your test-playing. Being able to rewind and rewatch something a few times will help you catch all the things you'll want to tweak.
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Anyway, once I finish the second pass of the third chapter of Xanadu 1, I'm going to hand the translation to elmer to look at. I hope he doesn't think it sucks!
My wife is due with our first baby in mid-June, so I really want this as done as possible before then.
