You face two main problems, maybe three.
1) Lack of Arabic glyphs
2) or maybe 1a) It is a computer so some opt out of it but no joined up letters which is of more importance to Arabic than some other languages.
3) Arabic tends to be written right to left where most games are not built to work that way.
1) is generally solved by finding the font (most computer games will have pictures in one form or another, PC will tend to have vector images but we can skip that for now). A tile editor is the main tool here. If indeed it is compressed you will want a tool to handle that.
You will face a secondary issue in that Arabic has more characters than some other languages so you get to find space to fit them all in, or maybe add more which makes life considerably harder on older systems.
2) Joined up writing is quite complicated to implement, or you add extra characters to account for it. That said if you are happy to go with the unjoined thing because computers then so it goes.
3) Two things people do here
i) Use a lot of spaces to make it appear right to left. Main problems being lack of space in either the ROM (there is a reason people use French games in a lot of Arabic translations -- French tending to give you the longest sentences to begin with to make room for all the spaces) or the RAM if it is copied to it, secondary problem being if it is a game that pauses for a fraction of a second to write a new character then it can take a while to get to it.
ii) Actually recode the game to handle it. Difficulty of this is not so very much (in many ways I would place it as easier than a variable width font) but will see you messing with game code where a basic translation and using spaces can be learned over a weekend and no great technical abilities necessary. Anyway most games text handlers and game system hardware will start in the left hand side and go to the right. It is not so bad in some cases to set the origin on the right hand side, change the add to a subtract and greater than to less than, for all the maths that determines placement on screen, or maybe when to start a new line (some games will have a character in the text itself do that, others will use pointers, others will determine when something gets too long and go from there). The SNES even has the nice bonus of having decent subtract functionality (some older devices do not). Worst case you get to add some form of negative handling; add 1 to 256, which we will assume is the limit of the distance you want, and you get 257, subtract 5 from 4 and you get -1 which is a whole different game in binary maths and the ways computers will handle things (or alternatively you only have letters say 16 wide and if the number gets below 20 you say start new line).
Topic: translate Super Mario World to Arabic (Read 882 times)