Are there any Wii games left to translate? What would you like to see!

[Brand Newman]

Some combination of all of those, I expect. But probably not creating a font. There is an ample selection of fonts nowadays.

Retroarch already includes an auto-translate feature.

Hello!

I can only speak for myself, but font is actually one of the first things I get into when I start a project.

I never created a font from scratch, granted, but I had to tweak, or even replace, the original font of the game more than once.

Sometimes they're close to unreadable, due to western characters not being used (Earth Seeker and Ikenie no Yoru), some other times, I replace special characters with "double L" and such, so I can save space... and all the games I've translated that had brfnt/brfna fonts were actually modified, with an extra space after each punctuation mark, once again to save space!

As for auto-translating feature, I'll admit I've never tried these, and I suppose some games would be easier than others to translate: correct me if I'm wrong, but it would be like having subtitles on movies? I don't see how the original text could be replaced without issues with some of the games I did, which didn't have an automatic linebreak for example.

Anyway, the old fashion way certainly is better, but requires a lot of time, something that should be taken into consideration, as enthusiasm alone will eventually fade a bit off.

But it's so nice to finish your job, and feel like the game didn't have that much Japanese script to begin with, which of course is never true!

 

[Kwyjor]

As for auto-translating feature, I'll admit I've never tried these, and I suppose some games would be easier than others to translate: correct me if I'm wrong, but it would be like having subtitles on movies? I don't see how the original text could be replaced without issues with some of the games I did, which didn't have an automatic linebreak for example.

There are ample videos of it in action at this point. It is of course far from ideal – but that applies to most "AI" things so far.

 

[Brand Newman]

There are ample videos of it in action at this point. It is of course far from ideal – but that applies to most "AI" things so far.

I've looked it up. So basically it's like using Google translate on a panel in a foreign country : creates a window over it and puts translation (either machine generated or not) on it.

This alone makes it inferior to actual translation to me, as the window can be quite unaesthetic (especially if the translated part isn't on a window itself, like for example if it's in a background artwork), although I'll admit it can be impressive.

Still, this proves there's no easy and quick (I'll go as far as say "lazy") way to provide a translation of quality : you still have to put effort and time in it, so it looks at least half-professional.

I find it a bit reassuring.

 

[Gamemaster1379]

Some combination of all of those, I expect. But probably not creating a font. There is an ample selection of fonts nowadays.

Retroarch already includes an auto-translate feature.

> Some combination of all of those, I expect. But probably not creating a font. There is an ample selection of fonts nowadays.
For newer games that makes sense, but my understanding for older, especially Nintendo games, it was rather common for them to kind of build their own font system and it would take some hacking to get an English font in there and reference it, basically.

> Retroarch already includes an auto-translate feature.
Neat. I'm sure that works well for older games by doing it at runtime, which is smart.

Post automatically merged: Sep 24, 2023

Hello!

I can only speak for myself, but font is actually one of the first things I get into when I start a project.

I never created a font from scratch, granted, but I had to tweak, or even replace, the original font of the game more than once.

Sometimes they're close to unreadable, due to western characters not being used (Earth Seeker and Ikenie no Yoru), some other times, I replace special characters with "double L" and such, so I can save space... and all the games I've translated that had brfnt/brfna fonts were actually modified, with an extra space after each punctuation mark, once again to save space!

As for auto-translating feature, I'll admit I've never tried these, and I suppose some games would be easier than others to translate: correct me if I'm wrong, but it would be like having subtitles on movies? I don't see how the original text could be replaced without issues with some of the games I did, which didn't have an automatic linebreak for example.

Anyway, the old fashion way certainly is better, but requires a lot of time, something that should be taken into consideration, as enthusiasm alone will eventually fade a bit off.

But it's so nice to finish your job, and feel like the game didn't have that much Japanese script to begin with, which of course is never true!

This is sort of what I expected to be the case. Sounds to me that text extraction -> translation probably isn't even the difficult part. The most difficult part would be swapping the fonts and then re-injection following the font swapping (given mapping probably won't be easy).

With the statement around the "ll", that also suggests to me there's not a lot of opportunity for expansion of the ROM, and you're probably fighting space constraints of the original ROM file. So I imagine there's difficulty in having to be creative in how you translate in a way that doesn't consume more data than the original string (or shuffle ideas across multiple text boxes in dialogue to compensate).

 

[NewGBAXL]

Out of curiosity, what is the most difficult part of translating these types of games? Is it text extraction? Creating a font in the target translated language? Extraction of the text? Translation of the text ? Localization? Re-injection?

Always been curious about how these processes work. I know nothing about game translation/localization. I am fairly technical overall though and have been playing with lots of text based AI. I'd be keen to see if text based AI could do localization + translation if configured correctly. I wouldn't know the first thing about getting into all of this though.

I would also say the reinjection is one of the biggest hurdles
While there are tools out there that can find the text to be edited just fine, often there are proprietary formats etc that also need to be modified for the text edit to work (i.e. in addition to the text, the length of the text might also need to be edited, in a separate location)

 

[Gamemaster1379]

I would also say the reinjection is one of the biggest hurdles
While there are tools out there that can find the text to be edited just fine, often there are proprietary formats etc that also need to be modified for the text edit to work (i.e. in addition to the text, the length of the text might also need to be edited, in a separate location)

Interesting. It makes sense that an engine might store the length somewhere else as an offset. Seems like I was catching onto that above in my post just before this.

There's probably not sufficient training data for it, but I almost wonder if you could train a large language model to look at an old game or ROM and to do some limited level of decompilation, where it extract out text strings from byte code and then tries to find where it's correlated text length offset is located and build that out in a mapped layout sort of deal to start doing translation with.

 

[Brand Newman]

With the statement around the "ll", that also suggests to me there's not a lot of opportunity for expansion of the ROM, and you're probably fighting space constraints of the original ROM file. So I imagine there's difficulty in having to be creative in how you translate in a way that doesn't consume more data than the original string (or shuffle ideas across multiple text boxes in dialogue to compensate).

The ROM expansion situation doesn't really apply to disc-based games, but pointers do.

With some files, they are very easy to find (my current project is Ougon No Kizuna, and most files have very obvious pointers, since I only have to type their hex address to find them).

Some other files, even for the same game, can be a lot trickier (I couldn't have used pointers with Chibi-Robo, if it hadn't been for my devoted beta tester @Chao-Etta !)

Anyway, sometimes you can place your text at the end of the file, and change the pointer so the dialog redirects to it, and sometimes you have to find a shorter way to express the general idea of the Japanese sentences.

Latter situation doesn't allow you to use any more characters than the original, though if you are lucky (as far as Wii games are concerned) your file could be encoded in Shift-JIS, meaning each Japanese "letter" (kana and kanji) takes two Western characters, doubling the space for you.

I hope I could make myself clear. One final thing, though : sometimes it's part of the fun to rephrase, I can't say I hate the exercise!

 

[Gamemaster1379]

The ROM expansion situation doesn't really apply to disc-based games, but pointers do.

With some files, they are very easy to find (my current project is Ougon No Kizuna, and most files have very obvious pointers, since I only have to type their hex address to find them).

Some other files, even for the same game, can be a lot trickier (I couldn't have used pointers with Chibi-Robo, if it hadn't been for my devoted beta tester @Chao-Etta !)

Anyway, sometimes you can place your text at the end of the file, and change the pointer so the dialog redirects to it, and sometimes you have to find a shorter way to express the general idea of the Japanese sentences.

Latter situation doesn't allow you to use any more characters than the original, though if you are lucky (as far as Wii games are concerned) your file could be encoded in Shift-JIS, meaning each Japanese "letter" (kana and kanji) takes two Western characters, doubling the space for you.

I hope I could make myself clear. One final thing, though : sometimes it's part of the fun to rephrase, I can't say I hate the exercise!

No, all makes sense to me. As I mentioned, I've never touched translation or game-decomp in my life, but I'm fairly technical given my day job.

Sounds like as you enter the Wii and disc era, you're more likely to have leniency given the format and lesser constraints. Older era ROM style games may be a bit harder to wrangle and the like though.

So from what I'm gathering, the actual translation of text/localization of text seemingly isn't really the hardest part. Seems like extraction is more of a challenge, with re-injection constraints being the biggest by far.

 

[Brand Newman]

No, all makes sense to me. As I mentioned, I've never touched translation or game-decomp in my life, but I'm fairly technical given my day job.

Sounds like as you enter the Wii and disc era, you're more likely to have leniency given the format and lesser constraints. Older era ROM style games may be a bit harder to wrangle and the like though.

So from what I'm gathering, the actual translation of text/localization of text seemingly isn't really the hardest part. Seems like extraction is more of a challenge, with re-injection constraints being the biggest by far.

And that's when you don't have to determine the files compression first! (we were very lucky to have passionated people trying to extract them all these years, a lot of credit goes to the Mario Kart community)

I'm taking the opportunity to talk about an issue I had, which I believe was connected to the Wii RAM, since I only encountered it with real hardware.

You might like the anecdote, as it is technical.

As I was doing "Zangeki No Reginleiv" a few years ago, I stumbled on freezes that would always happen at the same moment, and it took me some time to realize that the font I had changed were the culprit.

You see, I didn't know at first why some fonts only had a few characters instead of the whole Western alphabet + Japanese kanas, but then I found out Reginleiv was so demanding, that any font bigger than the original one would make it crash.

You can imagine how difficult it was for me to recreate the words (in this case, the characters' names) with such a limitation.

If you're curious, below is what the font displaying the characters' names actually is.

So you see, in a way the size of the files can still be an issue!

Thank you for showing interest in the world of fan translation, it really is refreshing to talk about the process as much as about the result.

 

[Gamemaster1379]

And that's when you don't have to determine the files compression first! (we were very lucky to have passionated people trying to extract them all these years, a lot of credit goes to the Mario Kart community)

I'm taking the opportunity to talk about an issue I had, which I believe was connected to the Wii RAM, since I only encountered it with real hardware.

You might like the anecdote, as it is technical.

As I was doing "Zangeki No Reginleiv" a few years ago, I stumbled on freezes that would always happen at the same moment, and it took me some time to realize that the font I had changed were the culprit.

You see, I didn't know at first why some fonts only had a few characters instead of the whole Western alphabet + Japanese kanas, but then I found out Reginleiv was so demanding, that any font bigger than the original one would make it crash.

You can imagine how difficult it was for me to recreate the words (in this case, the characters' names) with such a limitation.

If you're curious, below is what the font displaying the characters' names actually is.

View attachment 395680

So you see, in a way the size of the files can still be an issue!

Thank you for showing interest in the world of fan translation, it really is refreshing to talk about the process as much as about the result.

Yeah, it's fun to learn about new things. And that makes sense, file size isn't a constraint insofar as storage available, but what can be loaded into RAM.


That's an interesting problem as well. It makes sense. I can't imagine anything is ever going to load a partial font into memory, it's all or nothing. If the game was designed to be optimized and use every byte available, even adding a few characters may be just enough to go over the limit.
Reminds me of this old article I read where someone made a Wordle clone for the Gameboy and employed similar compression tactics where they turned popular suffixes in words into their own "character", similar to the double L you were mentioning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30402407

 

[PTwr]

Mobile Suit Gundam: MS Sensen 0079 I have to double down on this one!

I have been playing this game. It's awesome and the menus are already in english.
Too bad all dialogue and cutscenes are only in japanese and I can't understand a thing.

I have smashed this game open, and obtained unholly ability to not only fully translate it but even add subtitles to cutscenes through Dolphin.

All the nasty reverse-engineering part is pretty much done, but if someone could assist with actual translation it would go much better as my Japanese is limited to what I heard while watching Gundam shows.

There is a lot of story text to crunch through, and tooooons of voice files to turn into subtitles.

Spoiler: pics or it didn't happen :)

 

[Felold]

You're such a hero!!! I hope this will lead to a great translation in the near future.

 

[PTwr]

You're such a hero!!! I hope this will lead to a great translation in the near future.

I am making some progress
You can follow it on romhacking discord. https://discord.com/channels/266412086291070988/1156659500430929930

In meantime, here's UI and Ace mission translation patch in Riivolution form

 

[wiiAdventurer]

So I touched on a couple of Wiiware titles in the opening but I'd never gone through the list of Wiiware titles that were exclusive to JP. Ignoring the ones in the opening and Line Attack Heroes (which was translated by @Brand Newman ), here are some of the ones I found might be interesting:

Bakutan
Boku wa Plarail Untenshi: Shinkansen & Jōkikikansha Hen - seems like there are multiple in the series?
Discipline: Teikoku no Tanjou - already mentioned I think but put it here regardless
Downtown Nekketsu Dodgeball - never played on the NES, would be interesting to hear how they compare
Hirameki Card Battle: Mekuruca
Sugarbunnies Wii: Yōkoso Bunnies Field e
Tokyo City Nights

 

[Kwyjor]

Downtown Nekketsu Dodgeball - never played on the NES, would be interesting to hear how they compare

I expect it's comparable to the DS version, which was in fact localized. (Maybe they even use the same localization data? But that would be too easy.)

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

I would like to see a Team 4 Star Dragon Ball Z abridged game for the Wii... I think you could kind of treat it like a translation? Just throw in the voices and text from the abridged episodes? Probably laugh my ass off.

 

[Kwyjor]

I would like to see a Team 4 Star Dragon Ball Z abridged game for the Wii... I think you could kind of treat it like a translation?

Are you talking about translating an existing game, or writing something from scratch..? Because those are two very different things.

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

Are you talking about translating an existing game, or writing something from scratch..? Because those are two very different things.

Like one of those Bodaki (I am sure I am spelling it wrong) just changing the dialog and changing the voices to the ones from the DBZ Abridged youtube video's. wouldn't be a new game just altered the regular Wii game with some text and voices.

 

[Brand Newman]

Hello everyone,

I hope you won't mind me getting a bit off-topic, but I'd really like to share this video from Hilltop with you, considering the questions I've been asked throughout the years about fan translation.

Many of the difficulties he encountered were mine, and I think it gives people a good overall look about what fan translation really is, and why it is sometimes difficult to grant the requests we receive.

And to anyone starting their first project, it's kinda reassuring to read Hilltop didn't know much at first either, considering the quality of his job!

 

[SPAC3W4IFU]

Just discovered another game that might be an interesting curiosity called Sugoro Chronicle: Migite ni Ken o Hidarite ni Saikoro o.

Spoiler

Looks like a board game/RPG hybrid similar to Dokapon Kingdom, and may or may not be related to the Sugoro Quest games on the FC/SFC?

There's like barely any footage of it out there bizzarely, but what I saw of it looks pretty neat. Might be quite the undertaking to translate, though.