Translation Ni no Kuni Translation [ENG]

[AL_16]

Anjiera, do you still need more playtesters?

but did she ever need it?

 

[Anjiera]

Anjiera, do you still need more playtesters?

I think we're good for now. It takes a while to get a new team member up and running with our work flow.

Thanks for the thought, though!

 

[Marco_Paggot]

We aren't releasing a way to patch the original cartridge, so you'll be playing with a patched ROM file either way. I've personally tested with Drastic on Android and it runs beautifully - you also get the benefit of being able to use the touch screen to draw the spells, just like the DS was able to do. I use desmume when I'm testing on Windows and I have an R4 card for testing on actual DS HW, and all seem to work fine. We did have a couple of issues with certain ROM files at one point, but we'll make sure to provide a list of exactly what you need to do to be able to get things up and running.
.

Indeed, I was talking about DraStic! that emulator is wonderful, and really fitting for a smarthpone... so far I've completed at least 6 titles with no issues.


Thanks for the reply and THANKS for the hard work, to you to the rest of the team!

 

[Anjiera]

Quick update, based on a question someone had on the Discord server that I rarely check (yes, even more rarely than here):

We've got a few tricky rom hacks to work out still, but are otherwise pretty confident in the progress. The rom hacks are for things like making the numbers legible on screens like this:

Little things that would annoy people if they had to play a whole game that way. BUT! As you can see most of the menu just looks gorgeous. Huge props to all the graphics people that put so many hours working with a limited pallette and a picky as hell image importing program.

Note that the misaligned quest title (Murtey Bounty) at the top of the screen was a tough choice we had to make. Basically, we shifted up the text to write into the space that the Japanese game had reserved between lines for furigana (pronunciation help written above kanji). This bought us 4 full lines of text on most of the dialogue screens, and the quest and item description screens too. But, that font is used in tons of places in the game so the cost of having more space in most places is that the text looks misaligned in a number of places. That we can't fix, because we've made good use of the extra line of text in quite a large number of places.

Anyway, overall it is not quite ready for primetime yet, but it feels close. We're running some more complete game playtests just to make sure that there aren't game breaking bugs in the middle of the game that we forgot to fix.

 

[LastduaL]

Would it be possible to move the digits to the left of the quest title up to match the higher alignment of the text? Overall it's definitely looking like a high quality translation. Congrats to all involved!

 

[Anjiera]

Would it be possible to move the digits to the left of the quest title up to match the higher alignment of the text? Overall it's definitely looking like a high quality translation. Congrats to all involved!

Thanks for the suggestion!

While it *might* be possible, we've got other issues that are more worth fixing, so I don't think it'll be high on our priority list. We're not aiming for perfection, because we know that's not possible. We want you to be able to play the game with all of the relevant text visible and legible.

I know not all of our decisions will be met with praise, but my point is to try to show that everything is done for a reason, and anything that is odd is likely due to the limitations of a ROM hack vs a build of code from the original source. Hell, if we had the original source we wouldn't have had to hand-wrap every string in the game and that alone would have been a miracle!

As always, thanks for the enthusiasm, folks! It does help keep the team motivated to know that we're not just making this for ourselves and the friends that we will force to play the game when it is done. LOL.

 

[AndyPRO]

I've been following this project since the start, but haven't joined this forum before now.
I just wanted to say that I can't wait to finally be able to play this game! You have done such a great job, Anjiera! <3

 

[kosterix]

It's difficult. I have JLPT N3 with 600 kanjis and can't play it....

forget about it. It's very text heavy. If you don't understand the instructions the stuff you need to do to progress is impossible.

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has anyone taken a look at the tools pleonex has made available, and could anyone make any sense of it?>

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quick reaction at the image upload: better English would be southeast of, instead of southeast from.
If you had uploaded the text files as they are now, we all could help with improving the text Anjira.

 

[Anjiera]

forget about it. It's very text heavy. If you don't understand the instructions the stuff you need to do to progress is impossible.
quick reaction at the image upload: better English would be southeast of, instead of southeast from.
If you had uploaded the text files as they are now, we all could help with improving the text Anjira.

[1] I really feel that few things are impossible. It just depends on how motivated the person is, and how much they mind interrupting their gameplay to look up words, or to skim past words/grammar that they aren't 100% sure of. When I was a kid I would read gigantic books aimed at much older children and young adults, and I would just skim past words I didn't quite understand. Over time I was exposed to lots of new words, and slowly figured out what they meant in context. However, I realize that not everyone likes to be partially in the dark when they are reading things. It's entirely up to the person, and I would say discouraging people from new experiences is very different from cautioning them that it would be difficult and/or giving them examples or alternatives.

[2] Thanks, I appreciate the feedback! We have had lots of debates about good / proper English on the team as we have people from all over the world contributing, and regional differences can be strong. We're not aiming for perfection and given the large variety of people that have contributed to this project we know that there is some inconsistency in some of the characters' voices. For instance, we went with a guideline to make Shizuku slang-y rather than try to write him as Welsh as he is in the PS3 game. Without the English audio to help you figure out the context of his pronunciation, his written words on the PS3 almost sound Jamaican or something. But, slang-y to one person is different to another, so the slang does kind of shift and change throughout the game. That's okay by me because having one person go through and edit a character throughout the entire story would take forever.

[3] We have over 35,000 blocks of text and over 1600 individual images. (EDIT: For some easy and incomplete math, assuming 1 minute of effort per block of text or image which is woefully low when you include checking for phrasing and terminology consistency, that is over 600 hours of time for one person to look at each item, and you need to look at things within the context of the entire translation. Few people are going to put in even a fraction of that time, and those that would do so made the effort to join the team already.)

We have multiple different project planning docs, a massive glossary to keep terms consistent, and a Slack group that has had some very lively discussions about translation, and about this game. While I appreciate the sentiment of "we all could help", there is frankly just way too much content for discussion like this. Our editors just go in and make changes without getting team approval because it is not feasible to do so for each block, let alone each file, and if we were to accept feedback on the giant list of files that we have I'm sure we would see some of the same fiery arguments occur repeatedly that we saw in the early days of the project. Every time someone new and inexperienced in translation sees a project of this scope there is a strong possibility that we will need to have the "literal vs. intent" translation discussion, and while our team has gone with a translation style aimed at preserving the spirit / intent / cultural flavour of the original, there are always purists that insist that a literal translation is best. Which style is correct also largely is determined by the type of content - a research paper might need a literal style, but a game with characters that are supposed to be relatable feels like it should have a more culturally aware translation. Another big argument about having publicly available files, outside of finding ways to manage the feedback, is that it makes the project more exposed from the early days which is more C&D fodder, in my opinion.

Overall, my point is that there are many ways to skin a cat (and many idioms and turns of phrase that are / aren't known in different parts of the English speaking world) and that the way we've chosen to skin this particular cat is not going to change at this stage in the process. If you would like to help a translation project, there are lots of them out there and I'm sure that there are some that would love to have a new member with your attention to detail when it comes to editing the translated English. I mean this sincerely as "Please take your desire to contribute *somewhere* because it will be valuable to another team, but we're good on that front. Thank you." I feel like the emotionless void of the internet might skew this post to sound mean, and I don't intend the message in that way.

 

[Madikan]

@kosterix If you're that interested in helping out any way you can without proper knowledge of Japanese, there currently is quite a project to translate the Mother 2 (Earthbound) side of Mother 1+2 on GBA. It's still very active and it gets updated nearly everyday on the thread (you can find more info here : https://forum.starmen.net/forum/Community/PKHack/MOTHER-1-2-translation-VWF-edition). There are quite a few blocks to translate and anyone is open to ask the right files and translate them with the appropriate tools provided by one of the guys translating it.

Glad to see this is still making progress though ! Keep it up guys !

 

[DmitriyRUS]

Would it be possible to move the digits to the left of the quest title up to match the higher alignment of the text?

I left it as was.

 

[Anjiera]

I left it as was.
View attachment 117388

Awesome, that's looking really great @DmitriyRUS !!

How is the Russian translation effort coming along?
(EDIT: Oh, I see you posted on the main multi-language NNK thread. Sorry, I missed that! Congrats on the progress! If you're using Google Drive for the translation files I can send you our progress calculation and planning docs if you think that would help.)

 

[Nirmonculus]

Haven't checked in here for a long while. Glad there's a lot of progress since last I checked!

 

[Anjiera]

There's a great mini-documentary about the entire Ni No Kuni franchise up today:



Extra emphasis on ENTIRE. I hope you enjoy the footage.

 

[Cyan]

does it contain any (important) spoil?

@DmitriyRUS : your work looks pretty good !
You are doing everything alone?
Good luck, hoping you complete it too
Don't forget you can ask me if you want to update the progress % on the other thread.

 

[Anjiera]

No spoilers about end game stuff, but he's got some footage of our unreleased English DS patch file and some interim quests throughout the game.

He discusses the overall themes of the game, and if you don't know what happens to Oliver's mom at the start of the game (or why he goes to Ni No Kuni) you should probably not watch it. Otherwise, it is pitched more like a "why you should go play this game" video also talking about how the collaboration between Level-5 and Ghibli came about, and how that relationship is evolving for NNK2.

 

[leon315]

Hi guys, really appreciate for your hard work! I hope we can play this awesome game soon!

 

[DmitriyRUS]

(EDIT: Oh, I see you posted on the main multi-language NNK thread. Sorry, I missed that! Congrats on the progress! If you're using Google Drive for the translation files I can send you our progress calculation and planning docs if you think that would help.)

Thank you. If I need help, I'll write to you.

 

[Pablitox]

No spoilers about end game stuff, but he's got some footage of our unreleased English DS patch file and some interim quests throughout the game.

He discusses the overall themes of the game, and if you don't know what happens to Oliver's mom at the start of the game (or why he goes to Ni No Kuni) you should probably not watch it. Otherwise, it is pitched more like a "why you should go play this game" video also talking about how the collaboration between Level-5 and Ghibli came about, and how that relationship is evolving for NNK2.

Ghibli also helped in the sequel? I had no idea!

Still, it's an awesome game nonetheless!

 

[Cyan]

What I understood is ghibli isn't part of NNK2, but I saw the music is still composed by Joe Hisaishi
Maybe only some of Ghibli staff was part of the sequel?

I might watch the video again. it was good, I hope it won't make too much advertising before the release is done.
I got little spoilers on sub-quest (helping people who lost their memory) and environment (maps, vehicles, level design), but nothing too bad. I really saw nothing from the game until now, it will be complete surprise when playing it.