Translation notes etc here. Not going to explain minor things, but anything major that I'm going to just outright change for cultural reasons, sensical reasons, or anything like that bears further explanation will be noted here.

Carry-over from ML
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While all the other characters use more Western conventions for their names (given name then surname), Chitose's is given in the opposite order, normal for Japanese. I'm just going to preserve that. *shrug*

Sticking with not using honorifics cause we be big boys. Not that it matters much since Tact goes out of his way to not use them almost all the time.

Only real exceptions are Creta, who I use and don't relatively contextually since Tact does unusually call her by her title and Chitose. Before you get all pissy about either, go back and watch some Star Trek and remember that they refer to each other as Mr. Laforge/Mr. Spock/Whatever all the time.

As far as Shiva goes, I'm fairly sure that I had some mental model in mind back in ML for addressing her as either Your Majesty or Your Highness, but damned if I remember what it was anymore. There'll probably be a little inconsistency between the two in that department.

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Battle quotes, as always, tend to be more... creative shall we say... because they have a hardset number of lines for each as well as a much shorter line length. Complain about accuracy of them at your own peril, especially if things are very obviously truncated or elongated for length.

Also of note is that the majority of the general use battle lines have remained the same since GA1 where there was a shorter line length limit as well as my own translation style and preferences being different. I don't consider that important enough to go back and retranslate all of them, but I am aware that there are some stylistic inconsistencies and line truncating done because of past limits that would not be needed in EL.

Eternal Lovers saw some changes in the official romanization of names which became the de-facto standards afterwards.
The Elsior became the Elle Ciel (which requires pretty majorly mispronouncing what's written) and somehow became AND .

Amusingly, the Elsior remained marked as Elsior in Eternal Lovers itself.

I'm going with what -I- want in these cases, which is to be consistent and to do as little image editing as possible. The Elsior is staying the Elsior, and Cera is staying Cera. Got a problem? Take it up with your mom.

Selectively editing down lines that basically fill up the entire allotted text box in the original since Japanese is a much more compact language and getting the same thing across in 3x41 characters space can be impossible sometimes. I've always been doing this, but it's particularly bad at the start of EL when almost every single line of Tact's recap is entirely too long so I felt like noting it. THAT'S ALL.

It usually doesn't come up all that often anyway and since I was freely able to transparently add lines for Tact in GA/ML, it mattered even less.

"Pain, pain, fly away" is a pretty common little cantrip in Japanese for when kids get hurt (akin to kissing a booboo to make it better), but Milfie misremembers it and applies it to nightmares.

Cultural thing without a good English equivilent that matches the conversation, changing a few lines to make it less obtuse.

Random idiom that doesn't translate well in Vanilla's battle quotes.
Literally: They say that the ground hardens after the rain, but a flood is very troublesome.

Means adversity builds character or that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and that what the couple is going through is more than just rain. Just breaking the idiom down to a more direct meaning and whathaveyou.

More of a carryover from past games, but still removing a lot of the needless ship modifiers that Japanese uses. Mostly mentioning it because they refer to the ship in 1-2 as exclusively 小型船 (small-size ship) which is even unwieldier and sillier than the normal ship vs fighter ship vs warship etc that comes up the other 90% of the time.

黒砂糖 means literally Black Sugar, but is usually translated as brown sugar because it's made with a relatively similar process and Japan isn't big on brown sugar. Given context and successive lines, brown sugar would be wholly inaccurate, so even though black sugar is pretty much a non-existent term in the west nor has any equivilent, there's no good choice but to leave it.

赤砂糖 means literally Red Sugar, which is Japan's equivilent of brown sugar, and... uh... is brown sugar. Which doesn't help when other characters remark on how red it is.

SUGAR IS DAMN COMPLICATED.

Assumably "Machine Gun Biochemical" is supposed to be a reference to "Biohazard Gun Survivor," ie Resident Evil.

I just removed the stammering in hiragana with Chitose's diary.

READING JAPANESE LETTERS IS HARD.

HILARIOUS JOKE.

When comparing Wein and Rickey, Creta says that Rickey's "another stomach" which is a reference to a sort of girly saying (that has come up dozens of times before) that sweets/dessert go to a different stomach than other food (ie, you can eat all you want because they don't count or you can even have dessert after you're full). It comes up a lot in the game already, but they don't usually turn a phrase such that requires changing both it and the lines around it to deal with it.

Rewriting a few lines from the scene Angels overhearing Lushati and Tact talk about Wein to deal with the fact that subjects in Japanese are very often implied instead of explicitly stated. It's a misunderstanding that's impossible in English due to the different grammar rules.

Just kind of ignoring all the overwhelming Japaneseness of the boxed lunch operation. Additionally, omiyage means gift or souvenir, but playing up the military side of it more because it just sounds really corny/awful in general.

ベーゼ = baiser = French for kiss.

I... don't even want to deal with this.

Re: Whale songs.
Rewriting conversation slightly to account for people not knowing what English words mean.

Re: Chinese food
I have no idea how Transbaal has the concept of China, nor do I particularly care.

Re: Candies
I'm just changing all of this crap. The important part is that they're different kind of candies, not what exact weird Japanese candies they are. They're just listing things.

Re: Sprained legs
Actually, Tact calls himself a traffic accident. ...Not exactly a common term for an out of shape person in the English vernacular.

Re: CQB Countermeasures
Noah actually says "a way to control probability (variables)", but since probability and luck are tied together much more heavily in English than Japanese, that would seem inappropriately indicative of Milfie's abilities, which isn't the conversation's intention, thus changing it.

"Golden Chip" (in English) is what the Japanese call ceylon tea.

THE MORE YOU KNOW.

Goddamned tea.

I'm... just changing "flavored squid" because I cannot imagine a most distasteful candy if I tried. They'd basically fruit roll ups, only... made out of dried squid.

SPACE SQUID.

God damn it, Mint.

Also, full disclosure, I have no idea what half these crazy-ass gimmick candies Mint goes on about are. Google helps most of the time, but it's still like trying to describe faux-space pop rocks in two words. Translating that's easy, but applying the right context... well... feel free to point me in the right direction if I screwed something up too badly and assumed she meant faux-space astro pops when she actually meant faux-space chupa chups. None of it is important or relevant past that line anyway, but *shrug*

Goddamn this game and expanding my sugar-based vocabulary.

Chitose thinks she heard futamata (two-timer/cheater) and Forte actually said tamatama (accidentally).

Not directly translateable. Rewriting conversation a bit.

願掛け is a Shinto thing that's a little hard to seamlessly translate since the West doesn't have any kind of similar tradition. What Milfie's talking about is that you make a wish and then give something up that's important/pleasurable to you until it comes true, often things like fasting in some way, or not shaving, or whatever. It varies from region to region and more frequently just pops up with stuff like offering up daruma dolls for good luck at the start of the year then buying a new one. Or most famously, painting in one eye on a daruma, then the other when your wish comes true to show your gratitude.

So, yeah. This scene is not going to survive well.

I am choosing to ignore Tact's use of the phrase "Mint Energy" in English because it makes me want to slap him.

Just for full disclosure, Gern uses super archaic Japanese. It's not corny samurai speak (~de gozaru) but full on alternate conjugations and alternate pronouns from like... the 1100s. There's an argument to be made for thees and thous and such, but... meh.

It really kind of grinds at me to leave "melon bread" in as it is because I'm fairly sure that even people who think they know what it is believe that it has something to do with melons besides the appearance, but they do go ahead and describe the entire damn thing... and it has a CG too for that matter. A CG showing the opposite of what happens in the scene but... uh... ANYWAY I'm just going to tweak a few of Tact's lines to be a little more expository and explain what the damn stuff is instead of them sharing the nostalgic love of weird Japanese food.

Forte's route has some persistent weirdness. It's like a search/replace gone wrong, changing every elongated vowel sound to smaller forms (ie あ to ぁ), which the other routes generally only do for very long screams and similar. It's most pronounced because about half the ああs are changed to あぁs, and ええs to えぇs. I ran a quick search through every route, and the small hiragana versions are ONLY in Forte's route. It doesn't really mean anything, but it's a completely nonsensical difference.

Just felt like noting that.

Re: Ice cream
Tact says the way he prefers to eat ice cream is out of monakas, which are sort of like sandwich wafers (same as a cone) wrapped around ice cream. There's no good English equivilent to those things so I'm just changing it.

There is one line in Forte's route where a voice file is missing where there should be one. This is Broccoli's error, not mine, and adding in the command to play it messes up the byte code which putzes up the assembler and yada yada, short version is that it can't be fixed.

You can consider it a special puzzle to try to find which line it is.

Castellas are more like spongecakes than shortcakes. I am aware of the difference.