Translation Ni no Kuni Translation [ENG]

Madikan

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I guess that the text and images translating processes are done and there's only the editing process left, but I don't really understand what it involves. Could someone enlighten me ?
 

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I'm not sure, I never did it, but I think this is part of the process :

1. Verifying the consistency with all names (item names, towns, location, character's and NPC names matching their name in the script when someone talk about it, etc.)
If someone tell you "go see and ask Lutchy" and the NPC is called Lucie, it's not good for the player.
Same if someone ask for an item and in your inventory it has a different name.

2. If the game doesn't have an automatic word wrapping, it could overflow the message window.
Even if it has line overflow, it's possible it doesn't have height overflow.

Example, the window message is 3 line height:

This is a line overflow issue.
-------------------------------------
| This is line 1. |
| There goes the line 2 and if it overflow
| and line 3. (A)|
-------------------------------------

to fix it, you need to force a line feed before the overflowing word so line 3 get the word and it look nice.

The message correctly has a "press A to read next message" after line 3.
You need to press (A) to display the next bloc of text.

Now the height overflow, if your translated message is 4th line long, but the window can only display 3 line, you'll either miss a line, or see it outside.

You might miss this 1st line completely
---------------------------------------
| this is line 2. |
| and line 3 is so long than you need |
| a fourth line. (A) |
---------------------------------------

to fix it, you need to properly add a "press A to read next bloc" after line 3, and make a new bloc only for line 4.
the game might not be designed to allow your own added bloc of message to be inserted.
Maybe the NPC is designed to only display one bloc, and not two. you'll have to re-translate to make all your text fit in a single bloc.
 

zfreeman

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Quality Control. Involves rereading the translation, this time without reference to the source document, looking solely at quality of expression. Final edits will be made to further refine and “polish" the translated text.
 

Anjiera

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Wow - I am SO sorry for not checking this more often. I realized yesterday that I hadn't gotten any emails from GBATemp about forum posts in a while, and then when I checked here I noticed there were tons of posts. My sincerest apologies. I had been getting email notifications regularly, and then I don't know what happened, but I guess they stopped.

HUGE thanks to CYAN for holding down the fort and answering people's questions here. I've read through everything that has been posted while I was not getting notifications, and I *think* everything specific to the project / general ROM translation has been answered. Please kindly repost any question that you have that you feel has not been answered.

As for the examples, above, about line wrapping (so text doesn't run off the right edge of the screen) and length wrapping (so that text doesn't run off the bottom edge of the screen, since it doesn't automatically create new dialogue boxes for extra text) we have to do both of those things by hand putting each line end in ourselves, and then checking it later to make sure it worked as our preview tool indicated it would. It is time consuming, and spending 8 hours fiddling with spacing so that translated text is readable is quite boring and unrewarding since there is SO much text. I have translated and formatted SO much flavor text for this game that I now cringe when I see massive amounts of flavor text in games that I am playing in English for fun because I am imagining the pitiable translators that had to do all of that leg work that many players may not ever actually read (and in their case they get paid and get resume-worthy experience, which none of us can really do given the legal grey area that ROM translations sit in for most people's countries).

When wondering why this takes so long, please keep in mind that we want you to be able to enjoy the story and understand the item names and, as someone pointed out, understand all the sidequests and story elements in this game. If you want to play the game for the non-written content, you can just play the JP version. I assume you're interested in the translation because you want to be able to read all the quests correctly, understand all the character and place names and their references to Ghbili works, and that you don't want your game play experience marred by spelling mistakes, weird idiom translations, or string wrapping issues. We will not catch every bug, but we are trying to catch the obvious ones. There are over 700 Imagen with names and descriptions, nearly 500 items with names, descriptions, and battle effects, over 300 skills with names and descriptions, and more than 100 special items with names and descriptions. That doesn't even count all the area and NPC names, or all of the quests and sidequests. Each one of these things requires us to do the hardcoded string wrapping fix for each and every line, and some text is shown on multiple screens with different available space, so prioritizing which screen is likely to be used most and then getting the spacing right for just that one also takes time, and involves internal team discussions about what people actually seem to use more when they are playing.

We know there will be issues found once we release, but we want to get it to as much of a playable state as possible so that we don't have a huge backlash when we release. It is a fine line to walk, but as I've said before you've waited this long, so you can wait until it is ready. Sounds a bit unsympathetic, but we *are* all volunteers and we *all* have lives and that we have to carve out time from to work on this project. The alternative to waiting is to learn how to read and understand Japanese yourself, and I doubt you'll be fluent enough to play the game before we release - that said, if you *do* study up and become fluent before we're done, I'm sure there are plenty of other translation projects that would love to have your skills.

So, the TL;DR is that I'm sorry I disappeared, it was not my intention and I will investigate why my email notifications have stopped. The team is doing the QA work that - even for us - feels endless and unquantifiable (just because we know about X number of issues doesn't mean that those are the only ones, they're just the ones we know about). The project is still alive, have no fear!
 

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You are alive :hrth:

Nice to see you again here, and taking the time to give better explanation on the Control quality and editing steps.
so I was right when I explained about the word wrapping, all is done manually :(
that might take so much time to fix and test again.

There is one question I asked you didn't answer, so I'll ask again :
You often say "we" and "us" when you talk about the project, how many people are (still) active and working on it?
don't name if you fear people would go ask directly to them for a leak, but just knowing how many members and their position in the team (checker, translators, etc.)
Thank you to all of you !
 

Anjiera

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You are alive :hrth:
Ha! Yeah, sorry for freaking you guys out! Better yet, I got an email notification for your post!! I checked my email, and the last one I got was back in August. Not sure what happened there, but it is working at the moment!

Nice to see you again here, and taking the time to give better explanation on the Control quality and editing steps.
so I was right when I explained about the word wrapping, all is done manually :(

Yes, it does. Here's a few screenshots of some of the easiest to explain issues we have to deal with (oops, they're giant, oh well...):
9h2dtz.jpg
[/IMG]
Peppy Syrup description shown on the main Item screen:
20h1302.png

Fits the space well.

Peppy Syrup description shown in the Imagen raising cage food selection screen :
9h2dtz.jpg

Different sized text box to the one on the item screen, but so small to be unusable in English. We eventually had to accept that the text here will always overflow but we gain better and longer descriptions on the main item screen as a result of not trying to shoehorn text to fit both screens.

Quest Description overflowing right side of screen:
2drxoie.png

Requires formatting fix to adjust hardcoded line breaks.

Imagen description in the Beastiary:
2vjo9br.png

Due to a misunderstanding when originally translated, it was written to fit 4 long lines, instead of 3. So this requires editing to shorten the text, and then formatting update to make sure the new text is hardcoded to have line breaks in the right places.

There is one question I asked you didn't answer, so I'll ask again :
You often say "we" and "us" when you talk about the project, how many people are (still) active and working on it?!
We're just coming off of the summer (when people go outside to enjoy nice weather) and the start of the school term (we have people who are, themselves, students, and people with young school-age children in the group), so it is still a bit slow for them. Winter seems to be when we get the highest participation rates.

I am doing playtesting and editing right now since our translation work is done.

Translation: None, since we are done the translation that we decided we would do. We left out only the tweet-like / newspaper-like messages that were DLC and didn't seem worth our time. We might still get to those, but we only realized we actually had that text available to us sometime earlier this year, so it was never really a priority. I can't remember if the Spanish team translated that text on their project, but I can assure you it is not nearly as important to the game as the Magic Master book, and we're not translating that book for this patch either, much like we're not translating the instruction manual for the game, since we have already translated the tutorials that appear in the game.
Graphics: We don't have any active graphics editors because we only have really tricky graphics that one person has said they have ideas on how to fix, but they have been busy for a couple of months and not able to try out their ideas.
Playtest: We have 3 playtesters that were very gung-ho in the summer, but have stopped responding. I was also playtesting.
Building new patch files / general ROM hacks: We have 2 people who are busy with school, and since the bugs from playtesting are piling up they aren't really in a rush to fix some of the more persnickety rom hack issues. Once we've got out known bugs fixed down to a reasonable level, and when they have time, they will take another crack at some of the issues we still have (some text needs to be shifted in places, some graphics sometimes don't show up i battle for some reason, etc. Little things, but necessary)

So I think that adds up to 0 + 1 + 3 + 2 = 6 people who are not working on the project every month due to lack of time / work to do, and then myself (army of 1) doing bug finding and fixing. One of the biggest problems we seem to have with getting playtesters is finding people that want to do all the drudgery of going through areas repeatedly to check for string wrapping fixes, or to check out our list of bugs and then go fix them. For some reason people that are interested in playtesting often seem intimidated by the hundreds of files we have in google drive, and while some people do find bugs, many people don't find them (or don't post screenshots if they do), and then even fewer people will actually go make changes to the text themselves.
 

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Thank you for your answer, and it's good to see actual game screenshots, it shows the progress and is satisfying enough for us to wait a little more :)
Play testers can't rebuild the game to see if their changes worked?
waiting for each other's availability is probably taking time too.

perfection is a thing, but not seeing the text on your screen is far from just perfection, it's vital for RPG.
maybe I misunderstood what you meant, I'm not fluent :P
 
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Anjiera

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Perfection is often the downfall of ambition >_<
Don't worry, we're not aiming for perfection. We just want you to be able to read as many of the lines we painstakingly translated as possible. We know there will be weird issues that we don't notice, or ways to meet an NPC before we were able to causing odd references to things that may or may not have happened yet. Hell, even as we translated this we found mistakes in the original text where characters would talk about stuff that they wouldn't know about until later in the game if you approached the right NPC at the wrong time.

We want to make sure that the things we know are broken are fixed so that rather than getting eight thousand release day messages about "XYZ thing is broken, OMG" we can get 8 messages saying "I found this one typo here in this out of the way place" or similar. :)

Releasing a translation where you can't actually read the translated text, in my opinion, is worse than just waiting a month or two longer. In the wise words of Miyamoto, 'A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.' Depending on how much attention this receives when it finally releases we may get C&D notices and have to stop all future translation updates, so we'd rather get it mostly right the first time.

Thanks for your patience!
 

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I've been following this thread for some time! Excited to see updates. :) Regarding the Wizard's Companion, are there any hurdles involving it? I have the Japanese physical release and I know it heavily integrates it throughout the game, and it's ever so slightly different than the English one that came with the PS3 edition.
 

Anjiera

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I've been following this thread for some time! Excited to see updates. :)
I've been working on this project for some time, and I'm excited that there are still people excited to see updates! ;) (As opposed to some people who seem more inclined to be incensed when an update doesn't announce the completion of the project.)

Regarding the Wizard's Companion, are there any hurdles involving it? I have the Japanese physical release and I know it heavily integrates it throughout the game, and it's ever so slightly different than the English one that came with the PS3 edition.

The ROM translation that we are working on does not require the physical book.

We have a list of all the pages that are different than the PS3 English release. It is about 100 pages of riddle-filled text that ties back into the game in wonderful, whimsical, and *complicated* ways. Our goal for the translated ROM release is to provide people with the ability to play the game, including as many of the fun sidequests as possible without needing a translation of the Wizard's Companion (the Magic Master, in DS terms). So, there will be a few places in the game where you will be given a riddle that is not possible to solve without the English translation of the Magic Master. In those cases, for the sake of allowing the game to proceed mostly uninterrupted, we have the fully translated text for the riddle, but then the final line shown on screen will say something like
"Answer: <answer goes here>"

Yes, it takes the fun out of solving the riddle, but we feel that it is worth spoiling a few riddles to allow people to play the whole game without any game-stopping issues related to untranslated materials. We also didn't feel it was worth waiting to release the patched translation until the Magic Master was translated, since that will be an entirely different thing to conquer, more akin to a manga scanlation project. Any time a riddle can be solved using the PS3 Wizard's Companion, I believe we have indicated that.
 
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Anjiera

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does this mean that you need more play testers?

I think at this point we have a decent idea of what the major areas of issues are, so if anything we need people willing to sit and hardcode line endings for literally hours on end,

People like that are hard to find. For example, this weekend I'm working on reformatting all of the 4-short-line imagen descriptions to be 3 long lines. We have 739 imagen descriptions. It takes around 1 minute to reformat each one, depending on how much rewording needs to be done, so that's 739 minutes at minimum to just make the formatting nice - thats 12.5 hours of sitting and making strings the right length. I will fully admit that it doesn't feel very productive when you get up after a 2 hour session and all you have to show for yourself is nicer looking descriptions, so I understand why people that are new to the project might not want to do such grunt work. Especially because we have item descriptions and quest text to also check, and while those are generally much better, it is still tedious and fiddly work to be done.

I've got a pretty clear schedule this week, so I think I can make a pretty solid dent in the string wrapping. How's this: I'll think about it this week, and then if I think we could use some more playtesters or string editors I'll let you know.
 

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I really like the idea of providing the answer directly in the game's text.
sometime, projects are released with external .txt file that you have to keep with you while playing. keeping access to a file is not always a good idea, even less for a handheld. (unless you print it)

So I think this is a good choice.


Having too much people helping doesn't risk leaking a patch or rom before completion?
I suppose the checkers are doing it within the game, so they have access to the current project's state.
I really hope you'll only get serious helpers and not people who only want to leak the project early. that would be bad if you get a c&d for an uncompleted patch :(
 
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I really like the idea of providing the answer directly in the game's text.
sometime, projects are released with external .txt file that you have to keep with you while playing. keeping access to a file is not always a good idea, even less for a handheld. (unless you print it)

So I think this is a good choice.


Having too much people helping doesn't risk leaking a patch or rom before completion?
I suppose the checkers are doing it within the game, so they have access to the current project's state.
I really hope you'll only get serious helpers and not people who only want to leak the project early. that would be bad if you get a c&d for an uncompleted patch :(
i can completely understand not wanting to take that risk, but if you decided you did need help, i'd be more than willing to comb through every piece of text in the game for you guys
 
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Anjiera

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i can completely understand not wanting to take that risk, but if you decided you did need help, i'd be more than willing to comb through every piece of text in the game for you guys
Ooof. That's a claim that speaks to someone that doesn't know what they are offering... Haha... We have nearly 34,000 sections of dialogue, many of which span multiple lines and sentences. We also have over 1600 icons. I honestly don't think it would be possible for one person to read every single piece of text in the game without being devoted to the project for all of their time - i mean 24/7 - for months. It is a lot of stuff to cross reference.

It's still a very kind offer. I'll keep you posted, but as I said I'm pretty sure that we're just going to keep with the people we have.
 
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Cyan

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we just had one two days ago, after more than a month of work.
I don't think it changed so much after 72h.

At least, reading the messages posted by the project's owner to see if there's an update if the minimum. if not, there's no use asking for information to not read them.
note: the projet's owner is ONE post above yours, and it contains a status of what's left to do : read and correct 34 000 sections of dialogues.


edit:
I'll update the first post, to change the date of "last update", maybe that will help see the project is still alive.
Though, there's already a "Fall 2017 update"
 
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we just had one two days ago, after more than a month of work.
I don't think it changed so much after 72h.

At least, reading the messages posted by the project's owner to see if there's an update if the minimum. if not, there's no use asking for information to not read them.
note: the projet's owner is ONE post above yours, and it contains a status of what's left to do : read and correct 34 000 sections of dialogues.
Woa. That´s a lot of pages to go through.
 

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