As more of a "let's see if I can even do this" kind of project, I'm working on translating my copy of Picross DS into Esperanto. (Hopefully, if this goes well, I'm thinking I might try tackling translating Chocobo and the Magic Picture Books: The Witch, the Girl, and the Five Heroes into English. Probably just Google translate English for my personal use because I'm an impatient sonuvagun who doesn't know a lot of Japanese, but English nonetheless. Once my copy of that game gets delivered, anyway, since I couldn't find a single rom of it to save my life. And I looked.)
I'm fairly new to hex editing, though this isn't my first rodeo with programming in general, so I'm hoping I'll be able to pick up on things well enough that I don't immediately fall flat on my face. Something that's throwing me off, though- how do experienced translation romhackers deal with the fact that different languages take up different amounts of space to convey the same concepts? Like, "Quick Save Data found" in English turns into "Rapida Konservaj Datumoj trovitaj" in Esperanto, which. THAT'S A LOT MORE CHARACTERS. I'd been sorta squeezing past that issue when save data came up beforehand by just chopping out the konservaj/save part, since the rest of the sentence was able to more-or-less still stand on its own without it, but for this one I'm kinda screwed. I can barely imagine trying to work around the built-in character limits like that for an entire story-driven game!
...unless the character limits are all in my head and it's actually perfectly fine to alter the length drastically, but I don't think that's the case.
I'm fairly new to hex editing, though this isn't my first rodeo with programming in general, so I'm hoping I'll be able to pick up on things well enough that I don't immediately fall flat on my face. Something that's throwing me off, though- how do experienced translation romhackers deal with the fact that different languages take up different amounts of space to convey the same concepts? Like, "Quick Save Data found" in English turns into "Rapida Konservaj Datumoj trovitaj" in Esperanto, which. THAT'S A LOT MORE CHARACTERS. I'd been sorta squeezing past that issue when save data came up beforehand by just chopping out the konservaj/save part, since the rest of the sentence was able to more-or-less still stand on its own without it, but for this one I'm kinda screwed. I can barely imagine trying to work around the built-in character limits like that for an entire story-driven game!
...unless the character limits are all in my head and it's actually perfectly fine to alter the length drastically, but I don't think that's the case.