Hello! It has been years since anyone has worked on translating Black Matrix Zero and posted about it publicly, and those efforts have all seemingly been abandoned. It is such an awesome game, and I know there are plenty of people out there who would love to play this gem in English.
So far, there is a full Korean translation and a title screen/menu-only English translation. I am translating from the original Japanese, but I do speak Korean and can give insights from the full Korean translation as well.
I was able to extract the entirety of the script and put it into the following Google Sheets:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X4A7_J43WOkm9p_8KIRpRTmg6Ep0aK9dK45Rd9eOu5c/edit?usp=sharing
I started translating it but... it's a lot of work for one person. So I am turning to the community to help me!
I have all the rom-hacking covered (I have much, much more data from the rom if anyone is interested in doing more than just a translation patch).
Notes from my translation of the first 160 lines:
- The dialogue window has a visual character limit of 30 characters
- The Japanese word "インセスト" is the katakana transliteration of the English word "incest". I translated it more gracefully to "Verdant". Since a インセスト is defined as "Those who can hear the voices of plants and nature", I think Verdant is fitting.
- I also solidified the following proper nouns:
- カイン → Cain
- マティア → Matia
- メフィスト → Mephisto
- ルカ → Luka
- ヨハネ → Johan (ヨハネ is literally John, but since it is pronounced like "Yohane" it seems to be based on the Hebrew יוֹחָנָן - Yochannen. For brevity, I went with Johan rather than Johannes.)
- ニコ → Nico
- エクサル → Exal
- ヴァルトス → Valtos
- カルヒン → Karuhin
- シリア → Syria
- ステイエン → Stein
