I'm from Vietnam and i really want to translate this game. Please share the tools that can help me translate.
Thanks!
Before you start the translation, I would like to give you a bit of into about the big adventure you want to start. Usually people don't realize what they have ahead. Spoiler: it's not easy to translate this game. It's big. There is a reason why the game wasn't released outside Japan.
Fan-translating this game (actually any game in general) is not opening a text file and writing text in another language. It requires having a team of
at least: translators (2-3 people), graphical editors (1-2 people), reviewers (1-2 people), developers with assembly knowledge and "rom-hacking" experience (1-2 people, usually there is only one because it's a hard role to find) and a leader to coordinate all the work. This game especially is hard to translate (which is why it was only release in Japan). I would say that in average it takes 3 years for a team to translate it, given the tools are already written (but need to be adapted for other languages).
This game has about 700 images with text to edit (and some of them really hard to import into the game since you need to edit 3D vertex or because a single image is using different palettes as the game is using "segments' of it in different screens).
The Japanese game scripts have in total about 30k segments (sentences) and 300k words so it's not a
short translation. Some parts quite difficult to translate as you need to adapt riddles, poems, stories and text in the Astram language (which is a fixed alphabet you need to adapt too). A stable and good glossary is a key point for this point.
There is also a lot of text in the "overlays" files. These texts must fit in a specific amount of bytes or you'll need to find free space and change pointers. That reminds me the beautiful menus of this game. Well, you will need to write assembly code to move almost every textbox as the menu were implemented to show 1 Japanese kanji, not 6 characters. Oh and the keyboard, ahg, that one took me one month to change it because of all the use-cases and places where it's used.
Then we have the magic book. ~300 pages to translate as it's impossible to complete the game and have a great experience without it. So 300 pages of translating and graphic editing (that one alone could take 6 months of work).
I am probably forgetting about many other funny things you'll find in the way. Unfortunately I didn't document any of that. It was my first fan-translation so there are many things that we could have done better and more generic (e.g. we didn't use any CAT tool, now we are using Weblate for other projects). I learned a lot I must say.
Luckily for you, 99% of the tools we used in the Spanish and English translation are open-source and available here:
https://github.com/GradienWords/Ninokuni
Including all my assembly hacks to move textboxes, change the keyboard and even to fix a bug in the game (they forgot to initialize a variable so it crashes randomly if you change an image). Your team will need to learn how to use them and adapt them to your translation.
The only tool that it's not public available is the one to export and import the scripts
I usually share it with teams that can show they are advancing well with the translation, and they are taking it seriously.
I don't mind answering some questions about how to translate the game or it's curiosities but I can't really work on a new one anymore. I already burn out translating this game twice (I am sorry for the English team because they were affected to my lack of participation... Maybe some day I'll find energy to fix some technical issues it may still have). But I still enjoy playing it (I am even now researching about its AP code, quite interesting topic. I found for instance the reason why it doesn't work in no$gba).
This is not a very encouraging message but I have seen many teams failing to translate
this game and other games (e.g. 6 failed tries to translate Pokémon Conquest because of lack of motivation, and that one is easy).
If you still want to continue, go for it and good luck! It's very rewarding to play the game in your native language