From Japanese to Italian: What we have to do?

[Oersted]

English is not our native language, so, first of all, sorry for eventual mistakes.
We want to translate a game, which is to be released on 1st December in Japan. I'm talking about Monster Hunter 3rd for PSP. I know there's a taboo in the emulation and the translation scene, about recent games, I don't know where do I have to check in order to read again the rules, so, if I write anything wrong, sorry, you can erase as well. I hope to get an answer anyway.

Well, the situation is that we have no translation experience. To be honest, I did something romhacking-related, nothing too serious, but English->Italian. So, we have an idea about what we have to do, but the difference between japanese systems and latin alphabet changes almost everything...
We've got the data and the file we *think* contains graphics, text and everything. So, with the help of a Hex Editor (we used Ultra Edit in trial version, if there are better freewares, let me know!) I managed to see a bunch of sexy hexadecimals. Hum! <3

And here's our first problem: What about the table, then? I don't really know where to start... I think that after we solve this problem there won't be any else, 'cuz we don't want to make a complete translation, just a menu patch, like the one Mato-san released years before the complete MOTHER3 translation. Capcom is very well known to be somewhat anal about western translations and release, with this menu patch we hope people will play this in time.

There's not too much text to translate after all, we're talking about a game that has very little (monster names, items, objectives and something else). So we hope to manage to find someone to care about the dump... of course, if someone wants to help is very welcome, but maybe I'll write something on the Wanted Help Ads...

EDIT: I tried to find docs and tutorials about our problem, but I'm a granny 80 years old.

[Ryusui]

The table is the easy part. You'll need this:

http://www.romhacking.net/docs/442/

You'll find that most games nowadays use Shift-JIS encoding for text. This sucker should be good for most modern titles, including DS and PS2 games. Fun times!

[Oersted]

Understood. =D Thank you very much. Hope to make a good dump... I don't think we'll need to mess up with pointers either.

Thanks again.

[SPennLUE]

This topic answered the question I was about to ask

But it brings up another question: How do I get my hex editor (in this case, WindHex) to display Japanese characters?  They shows up fine in Firefox and my Japanese word processor, but Windhex won't let me see kana.

The table looks like this:




The main window looks like this:

[KingMike]

You have to click "Display as Unicode (or Japanese, depending on the version)" somewhere in the menu.

(though I guess the WindHex window is just for a visual example, and you're not really working on Tetris Battle Gaiden, which won't be in Shift-JIS)

[Ryusui]

Yeah. You need to enable Unicode display in WindHex before it'll display Japanese characters. This will also have the side effect of reducing the text font to zero-point, but you can fix this by opening the "change text font" dialog and hitting "OK" without fiddling with anything.

[Auryn]

Why all the newbies want to start with a japanese game O.o
Anyway what are u up against:
-translations of actual games can bring u alot of legal problems especially if they are still planned for the PAL region.
-now u have a s-jis table and u maybe can see the japanese text and want to translate them: how u do that?? use google translator??
-u got the translated word now u have to insert it on the game...what about the problem of the 16bit vs the 8bit encoding of the english font?? this need serious asm hacking or just plain luck that u can write in 8bit encoding without crash the game but it will be the ugly english font included in the s-jis.
-do the game has an italian font in it?? I don't belive so especially the italian letters "à é ù ò" so u  need to find the fond and change that too.
-last and not least the place for each letters in the menu, or u cut baddly all the words or u need again serious asm hacking.

If u think u are up to all this then check out the docs in the italian sites like:
-www.romhacking.it
-http://www.sadnescity.it/index.php
-google in italiano

[Ryusui]

Why all the newbies want to start with a japanese game O.o
Anyway what are u up against:
-translations of actual games can bring u alot of legal problems especially if they are still planned for the PAL region.
-now u have a s-jis table and u maybe can see the japanese text and want to translate them: how u do that?? use google translator??
-u got the translated word now u have to insert it on the game...what about the problem of the 16bit vs the 8bit encoding of the english font?? this need serious asm hacking or just plain luck that u can write in 8bit encoding without crash the game but it will be the ugly english font included in the s-jis.
-do the game has an italian font in it?? I don't belive so especially the italian letters "à é ù ò" so u  need to find the fond and change that too.
-last and not least the place for each letters in the menu, or u cut baddly all the words or u need again serious asm hacking.

If u think u are up to all this then check out the docs in the italian sites like:
-www.romhacking.it
-http://www.sadnescity.it/index.php
-google in italiano

Um, yeah...lemme translate for you.

Anyway, here's what you're up against:
-Translations of actual games can bring you a lot of legal problems, especially if they are still planned for European release.
-Now that you have an S-JIS table and can see the Japanese text, how are you going to go about translating it? Google Translator?
-You have the translated text and now you have to insert it into the game...what about the problem of the 16-bit encoding of the Japanese text vs. the 8-bit encoding of the English text? This will take some serious ASM hacking, unless you're lucky enough that the game won't crash when it tries to read ASCII text, but even then it'll probably use an ugly wide font.
-Does the game's font even feature the characters you need? If it doesn't have accented vowels, you'll need to modify the font to include them.
-Finally, don't forget that you'll need enough room for menu items. If you don't have enough space, you'll either need to crunch them down to fit (which will look ugly), or again, you'll need to do some serious ASM hacking.

[Auryn]

Yep...english is not my first language and maybe got a bit upset about newbies trying to translate things for advanced hackers but anyway Ryusui, (first) u would had less fun if i answer his post in italian and (second) we made work for nothing because that newbie never came back to check the post...I love that LOL

[bobonga]

we made work for nothing because that newbie never came back to check the post...I love that LOL

Maybe he did come back to read but didn't log in to his account?

[Gemini]

Or:
1) he has already found a solution for his problems, and forgot about this place;
2) he abandoned the whole thing and couldn't care less to come back here and check.