Oh, don't take me wrong Belmont. I appreciate the work you're doing, I was hypothetically speaking. Of course, it's not 'easy' to hack and change pointers and such. I didn't mean it as such. It would be alot easier if you could just take the word bank and replace it by a new one without changing anything. I might have been misread on that, but I blame myself from not being any more clear.
What I meant is that when we were doing NES and SNES translations, there was no decompression or else there was some VERY talented people finding ways to hack and change the pointers. I did a translation for FF5 from English to French back in those days, and one of our coders apparently had such a tool as they just asked us to translate the text dump line by line, no matter the amount of letters used.
On the other hand, when I was trying to translate Lufia at one time, I had the space limit to work with, and even then I could only translate the intro text as the game seemed to use a 'word bank', basically each word was given a number, and the text only pulled the word from that bank.
So basically the ROM would read like this :
Sinistral love island Selan magic you defeat
And then the actual text would be something like this :
I [2] [6], [4].
I shall [7], [1]s.
They called that some sort of text compression. I still ahve no idea if they actually counted word blocks between spaces, or called on actual position pointers, so I never messed with it to see if I could change the lenght of those words.
What I meant is that it would be much simpler if you could just change the word bank without conern about the spaces and other things. I gave DQ4 as an example as the text is already in, because it's not activated either. If you switch it to other languages there's a ton of things missing, such as checks for genders and numbers in the party or current leader, and items had no capitals as I would have expected normally.
The example was given that the script to actually convert those control codes into text is possibly into the cart but not 'turned on'. If they are smart they would make most games like this today, with the idea that it could be translated into other languages, so they should be leaving themselves some 'backdoors' open for an easier translation later, instead of composing with either space constrictions (Fenix Down, remember?), text compression (like my Lufia example), or any other kind of work around I don't remember of.
