[ I want frames! ]

TRANSLATION F.A.Q.

Q: What can I do to give back to translation groups for all of their hard work?
A: There's PLENTY you can do! =D Here are the words of the famous ChrisRPG from RPGOne Translations:
"If you are good at art, make some and give it to a site, or put up a site of your own. If you are good at music, make some and put it up for download for free. Or there are many things you can do for the translations groups/people. If you are good at art, and translation groups/people need stuff like fonts and title screens designed volunteer your services. If you are good with English, and have some free time, volunteer to edit scripts for the fan translation groups. If you are a good web coder offer to help make and/or upkeep their websites. If you have really good attention to detail offer to help beta test when the groups/people ask for it. If you are really good at PC hardware stuff, offer advice to the people in the groups who need help with where to get it and how to set it up. If you are a huge fan of a certain game offer your insight in an intelligent manner about that game they are working on. There are tons of things that need to be done when doing projects. If you have some hardware for the platforms they work on and/or PC that you want to get rid of, think of them first and offer it to them maybe at a lower price. And all of these things help to take the load off. Any one of these things and more, I always appreciate more than any monetary donation.

Q: Why do translations take so long?
A: For this question I have a special guest speaker, the one known as Kurasu! ^_~

"Now, I'm not a hacker, myself. I've just been around ROMHacking enough to get a feel for just how much work it can take. :) About all I could give is the basic overview of it, in that the text actually needs to be dumped from the game (which can be simple, if the text is a single file or script, but more often is in several pieces, hidden, or even compressed, which makes the data very hard to find) and then identified. Once that's done, each bit of data has to be changed to be able to read as American and yet still make sense, when the Japanese characters may not be so easily changed piece-for-piece. They also need to make certain that it makes figurative sense, instead of just literal sense. Jokes in Japanese might not make the same sense once they're translated to English. A good example is a pun in Dragon Warrior VI, where the sentence can be read in two different ways with the Japanese text: 'When you eat ice, it's cold and flowery regret will come' _or_ 'When you eat ice, it's cold, and snot and phlegm will come out'. As you can see, just directly translating the joke wouldn't have been as funny, so they had to retranslate it completely. Sometimes, those translation differences aren't censorship, but a necessity to be able to make a comment, joke, or phrase make sense in English.

And script translation is only part of the work! After the text has been dumped and translated (and believe me: there aren't enough translators to go around for all the hackers! They always need more!), it has to be reinserted into the game, and checked to make certain that the new text doesn't break the game in one way or another. Different fonts have to be tried, windows have to be sized and re-sized, hidden words and data may crop up in places that are changed. Bugs may crop up that crash the entire game, and the text has to be re-dumped and re-checked to find out what changes were badly-made, or if it's simply that the way the game is made requires a different direction of 'attack'.

Really, if you take a glance at the 'translation' section of ROMhacking.net, you'll see just what sort of troubles these folks are discussing, so you can get a feel for how difficult this can be. Everything from dropped letters (or even entire words!), to commands and questions and story text being stored in different places, to the various dumpers they have to use since one type doesn't work on one game while it works great on another.

And perhaps most importantly, and something else that most of the people forget, is that these people have real lives outside their ROM hacking. They don't get paid to hack ROMs for the most part; they are doing this for fun, for the love of the game, and for the people. However, they still need to eat, pay rent, and pay the bills. Therefore, a lot of hackers are trying to do this while going to college, working, or otherwise making money for themselves. They're often very overworked, and people pleading with them to finish this game or that game don't help. They rarely have an ETA for when a game will be finished. Those that have tried often get themselves in major trouble with a patch because _something_ crops up, either in life or in games.

So when you're thinking about which games you'd like to see hacked and why they're not being hacked quickly enough for your liking, try and think back on all this stuff. Remember that behind those games are people who did a hell of a lot of work to get that game translated into English. Yes, even the easy ones. Let's put it this way: could _you_ do it? And if the answer is yes, then the better question is: why don't you?"

Q: I know Japanese and I want to translate some games. How do I go about doing that??
A: Yes!! Please do! Check out RomHacking.net or the hacking documents at Zophar's Domain. Also, you should check out the help wanted ads at RomHacking.net. There are several translation groups out there in desperate need of a translator for the game they're working on.