thinking of getting back into running this, noticed that the gamejolt page for space funeral has french, spanish, portuguese, and russian versions of the game. are these allowed? and has anyone tried timing them to see which has the fastest text?

A similar thing has been done in a different RPG Maker game, called Ib. We tested a bunch of languages and concluded that Chinese is by far the fastest language to run. In this case, it'll require some testing, but I'm going to predict that the languages you listed are slower than English, since their wording in sentences tend to be as long as English structure, or faster, in general.

The translations are allowed. Martha did their run in the French version, and that was ok.