[marsraven]

Hello, everyone. I'm marsraven. 

I am interested in translation work. I am a native speaker of English who has studied Japanese extensively in college and independently for the past eight years. I have never done professional or even informal translation work, but I am primarily interested in improving my own Japanese skills, making new friends, and having fun in the process. For those of you familiar with JLPT levels, I think I am approximately N3. Game translation was suggested to me by one of my video game-playing friends who said that hackers often are in need of translation help.

Although I have played RPGs occasionally in the past (Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy come to mind), I went to the "Help Wanted" section and discovered that I don't know anything if at all about the games being requested. As such, I'm hesitant to contact team leaders knowing nothing about these games, so I decided to introduce myself here instead. I apologize if this is frank or forward.

I don't really know anything about the technical aspects of ROM hacking, but I would like to help if I possibly can. If someone could help point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you so much for your kind help,
marsraven

[Eien Ni Hen]

Welcome, welcome! 

I recently did a long interview where I give some advice for new translators. You might want to give it a listen. It's at:

http://ettugamer.com/2014/08/18/romhacking-histories-2/

The two big suggestions I have are:

1) Research a game before you work on it so you know what you're in for. Specifically, try watching a video of the gameplay on Youtube or Nico Douga.

2) Make sure your hacker has the script dumped. If they don't, they may not have the skills necessary to reinsert the text into the game.

Good luck!

[marsraven]

Hi Eien!

Thank you for your fantastic, inspiring interview! You really gave a lot of insight into your experiences and the challenges of being a translator! It sounds like the ROM hacking community is a relatively close-knit community...which is great!

Your advice about staying away from all-kana games until you are more experienced was really interesting. I thought (perhaps as many naive translators have thought) that kana wouldn't be so bad...but there are so many homophones and so much context that needs to be kept in mind.

Thank you again. You're awesome!

mars

[tryphon]

I confirm she's awesome

[tog]

Hello mars,

I don't know if you are looking for specific projects to work on where help is needed.  Two of them that come to mind are Tales of Destiny 2 on the PS2 (http://www.tales-cless.org) and Tales of Rebirth (http://www.talesofrebirth.altervista.org).  Both of these are very highly-anticipated translation projects where progress is either stalled or slow due, largely to a lack of translation help.

Does that help at all?

[Eien Ni Hen]

Hi Eien!

Thank you for your fantastic, inspiring interview! You really gave a lot of insight into your experiences and the challenges of being a translator! It sounds like the ROM hacking community is a relatively close-knit community...which is great!

Your advice about staying away from all-kana games until you are more experienced was really interesting. I thought (perhaps as many naive translators have thought) that kana wouldn't be so bad...but there are so many homophones and so much context that needs to be kept in mind.

Thank you again. You're awesome!

mars

No problem! Like I mentioned in the interview, I've translated several all-kana games (including Psy-O-Blade for tryphon) and they really are harder than they look. I think it's best to get familiar with the jargon for the particular genre (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.) before tackling anything that's all-kana. Working with kanji is so much easier.

[Jorpho]

The "Abandoned" section over on the left has lots of script dumpers/inserters for various projects.  I'm sure a lot of people would love to see Tomato Adventure.