Encountering Japanese ellipses in English translations (2013)

Summary

A reader sent in this question about The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening: […]in both A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening (both Japanese & English scripts) there’s something I haven’t seen that much of in other game scripts, at least not as frequently used as in these two titles, namely very often alot of ellipses … … … … … in that kind of fashion. While I do understand the Japanese language use a more varied number of dots for their ellipsis, I earlier thought they either went with just two, three or a six dot variety? I suspect these are probably used to convey speechlessness or often in the case of Zelda make a dramatic pause after the important info just told, rather than just an omission or trailing off into silence. I just don’t recall seeing it used this often as in these two titles. Maybe it is more usual than I think. I’m a little confused if there’s a “correct” way or a “wrong” way to deal with it. Please explain this ellipsis madness to a newbie. I’ve only really played through the English version of the game, but I do remember getting the feeling that there were a lot of ellipses in the game. Japanese entertainment often uses ellipses way more than in English, so I was curious to see how the original script handled them. First, in my own many years of experience, it doesn’t seem like there is a set rule for ellipsis use in Japanese – everyone just does their own thing, it feels like. Actually, the Japanese versions are called “leaders”, since they’re not quite the same as ellipses. Looking online, it seems there might be some standard usage styles for formal writing (as covered here, for example), but in reality I rarely ever see them used in a standard, consistent way. For example, right off the bat in the Japanese version of Link’s Awakening, we see a five-dot ellipsis: Shortly after, three-dot ellipses abound, as do two-dot ellipses: And there are even one-dot ellipses, if you can believe that: The single-dot ellipses are different from sentence-...