Do you remember NieR? It released in 2010 about 1 month after Final Fantasy XIII to lukewarm response from reviewers, but has since been hailed by many as one of the most underrated games of the last generation. At E3 2015, it was announced that NieR will get a sequel for the PS4, called NieR Automata.
From Wikipedia: "The game is a spin-off from the Drakengard series and follows the fifth ending of the first Drakengard, the events of which have left the planet Earth in a state of decay. Set over one thousand years after this, the game puts the player in control of the titular protagonist Nier, as he attempts to find a cure for an illness, known as the Black Scrawl, to which his daughter Yonah has succumbed. Partnering with a talking book known as Grimoire Weiss, he journeys with two other characters, Kainé and Emil, as he attempts to find a remedy and understand the nature of the creatures known as Shades that stalk the world."
So if the game was released in the west, why am I making this thread?
NieR was released in two versions in Japan: NieR Gestalt for Xbox 360 and NieR Replicant for Playstation 3. Both games follow the same story, but the difference between them is the protagonist. In NieR Replicant you play as the same person, but he is potrayed as younger and is instead labeled the brother (instead of the father) to Yonah. In the west, we only got NieR Gestalt regardless of which console you bought the game for.
My vision is to make a team to translate the script from NieR Replicant to english, so that version can be played on Custom firmware PS3s.
Couldn't you just lift the translation from the western version and put it in NieR Replicant?
You can, and it has already been done. Someone has lifted the translation from the western version and replaced every word like "Father" to the word "Brother" and so on to make a more consistent experience. There are however inconsistencies between the japanese voice acting and the english script, resulting in a somewhat disjointed experience while playing.
To show you an example of this, here is the same scene in both the english and Japanese version:
1. English version (Jump to 18:21):
2. Japanese version with the patched official translation (Jump to 15:17):
As you can see, some lines of the japanese voice acting doesn't match the official english translation well at all.
What can be done to fix this?
Here is the best thing about this whole project. I have come over the same files used for the translation along with the original japanese script files. If this project were to start we already have the tools to translate and insert the text into a copy of the game. What we would need are translators, proofreaders/localizers and testers.
What is the scale of this project?
This might seem like a huge ordeal, and I won't lie, there is much translation to be done. However, most of the translation is already done. We use can parts of the official translation like: Item names, weapon names, most of the unvoiced dialogue (as long as it makes sense with the voiced dialogue). I expect most of the adjustments to be to the voiced dialogue scripts and since we have both the japanese and the english files, searching for individual lines will be somewhat easy.
So... Is this project started?
No. Nothing has started as of yet. I have contacted one person who is interested in making this a project. I won't reveal who they are until anything is started. I am making this thread to see if people are interested in making this happen. If you CAN and WANT to help out with translation, proofreading/localizing and/or testing then write in this thread or hit me up via PM.
With NieR Automata incoming it would be great to make NieR Replicant playable to people who are not familiar with the japanese language!
Thank you for reading this far!
From Wikipedia: "The game is a spin-off from the Drakengard series and follows the fifth ending of the first Drakengard, the events of which have left the planet Earth in a state of decay. Set over one thousand years after this, the game puts the player in control of the titular protagonist Nier, as he attempts to find a cure for an illness, known as the Black Scrawl, to which his daughter Yonah has succumbed. Partnering with a talking book known as Grimoire Weiss, he journeys with two other characters, Kainé and Emil, as he attempts to find a remedy and understand the nature of the creatures known as Shades that stalk the world."
So if the game was released in the west, why am I making this thread?
NieR was released in two versions in Japan: NieR Gestalt for Xbox 360 and NieR Replicant for Playstation 3. Both games follow the same story, but the difference between them is the protagonist. In NieR Replicant you play as the same person, but he is potrayed as younger and is instead labeled the brother (instead of the father) to Yonah. In the west, we only got NieR Gestalt regardless of which console you bought the game for.
My vision is to make a team to translate the script from NieR Replicant to english, so that version can be played on Custom firmware PS3s.
Couldn't you just lift the translation from the western version and put it in NieR Replicant?
You can, and it has already been done. Someone has lifted the translation from the western version and replaced every word like "Father" to the word "Brother" and so on to make a more consistent experience. There are however inconsistencies between the japanese voice acting and the english script, resulting in a somewhat disjointed experience while playing.
To show you an example of this, here is the same scene in both the english and Japanese version:
1. English version (Jump to 18:21):
2. Japanese version with the patched official translation (Jump to 15:17):
As you can see, some lines of the japanese voice acting doesn't match the official english translation well at all.
What can be done to fix this?
Here is the best thing about this whole project. I have come over the same files used for the translation along with the original japanese script files. If this project were to start we already have the tools to translate and insert the text into a copy of the game. What we would need are translators, proofreaders/localizers and testers.
What is the scale of this project?
This might seem like a huge ordeal, and I won't lie, there is much translation to be done. However, most of the translation is already done. We use can parts of the official translation like: Item names, weapon names, most of the unvoiced dialogue (as long as it makes sense with the voiced dialogue). I expect most of the adjustments to be to the voiced dialogue scripts and since we have both the japanese and the english files, searching for individual lines will be somewhat easy.
So... Is this project started?
No. Nothing has started as of yet. I have contacted one person who is interested in making this a project. I won't reveal who they are until anything is started. I am making this thread to see if people are interested in making this happen. If you CAN and WANT to help out with translation, proofreading/localizing and/or testing then write in this thread or hit me up via PM.
With NieR Automata incoming it would be great to make NieR Replicant playable to people who are not familiar with the japanese language!
Thank you for reading this far!
Last edited by Arizato,