Nora Stevens Heath: SH3 Lyricist (or is she?)

[Droo]

So, in the instruction manual for SH3, Nora Stevens Heath is credited for the lyrics, but further investigations shows Heath is a Japanese-English translator with no apparent experience as a lyricist: http://www.fumizuki.com/resume.html

An IMDB search shows no other video game lyric writing credits.

Given her career as a TRANSLATOR, I wonder if Akira really did write the lyrics for SH3 which Heath then translated and adapted for the soundtrack.

What think you?

[Xev]

These guides werent long in production were they? How many runs did this guide have? I wonder if consecutive prints would have corrected that.

If that sort of mistake was made I think I would want to be credited with the lyrics! SO Id say the print is wrong: why would he work with a translator on lyrics? Interesting.

[The Adversary]

Hiroyuki Owaku wrote the lyrics. Nora Stevens Smith, from WORDBOX, translated them. Lost Memories: Silent Hill Chronicle indicates this in the credits section for Silent Hill 3. It also elucidates:

"The lyrics in Silent Hill 3 were made to fit the songs from the original Japanese verses and produced with the English translation. The Japanese is written strictly in poetic verse, and the English translation isn't exact in quite a few sections because it was fitted to the music and converted to English."

[Norasuke]

Nora Stevens Heath here. I can vouch for the info in the last post: I was given two poems (for lack of a better word) to translate directly; neither of these were used in the game. I then had four poems to translate loosely and fit to music provided by Yamaoka (as sound files and as sheet music); these were the four vocalized songs eventually used in SH3.

So I did write the English lyrics in that they didn't exist before I came along, but they were indeed based on Japanese lyrics presumably written by Owaku. Both the English and Japanese versions of the game contain only the English lyrics (and voiced dialogue).

And for what it's worth, despite what the manual may say, I translated all of the nonvoiced text in the game.

(Incidentally, I also translated the original lyrics for the Little Mermaid minigame segment of Kingdom Hearts II, some three years after working on SH3. I consider translated lyrics to be a subspecialty of mine within my specialty of video games.)

[The Adversary]

Thank you, Ms. Heath. And welcome.

[SilentWren]

If that really is you, thank you for clearing up the confusion love.

[Typographenia]

Thank you for stopping by to share that with us! Some very interesting stuff, and I'm sorry you weren't given the proper credits you deserved. I really appreciate all the hard work you put into your translations!

[ur-vile]

Nora Stevens Heath here.

(Incidentally, I also translated the original lyrics for the Little Mermaid minigame segment of Kingdom Hearts II.)

I'm sorry.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge KH fan but they didn't give you the best material to work with there haha

[AuraTwilight]

Thanks for clearing that up for us Nora, great to have you stop by.

[Norasuke]

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge KH fan but they didn't give you the best material to work with there haha

It's okay--the other hundreds of thousands of characters I translated for that game over my ten-month contract (again, pretty much everything not spoken aloud) more than made up for it.

[Matthewop]

it is very nice of you to stop by...