Has anyone else noticed this already? What do you think we should do? Does anyone besides myself have a book they will be able to reference from?
I have a physical copy of the book and I know exactly what you're talking about. When I first saw the Astram language cipher in the back of the book, I realized the problem immediately. But it will be impossible to make the Astram code work with English letters unless you rebuild the cipher from the ground up.
*EDIT*
Eh, maybe not
impossible, but I can't think of a practical solution for doing a straight translation.
That was my first thought too. Bellow is my solution to this problem after thinking it through for a bit. We will need to choose if we want to try this option or not. Naturally removing the code will be much easier and quicker, so if this turns out to take too much time we can always go with the back up plan of a directly translating the code into English and Spanish and leaving it uncoded.
1) We'll need the following types of people for my idea to work:
A) 1 (or more if necessary) Graphic Editors to clean the original code from the pages where the code takes place. Ideally we'd want someone like a manga scanlator who has cleaned RAW manga in the past and has experience with removing text without affecting the artwork.
B) 2 translators for the 2 languages there are being translated into (Spanish and English). They both use the Roman Alphabet, so the simplest solution is to turn the code into the roman alphabet and then at the end create the 2 new codes that reflect the 2 languages. The only significant difference would be the Roman characters in Spanish that aren't in English.
C) A Codebreaker/Codemaker to take apart the code in the book and redesign the new code in order for it to be as authentic to the original as possible. If no one else has enough experience with children's symbol puzzles like these, I'd be willing to take up the role when I am not busy with my other projects since I have plenty of experience with there types of codes and know in general how they work.
2) We decode the symbols into their Kanji meanings. We will need one of the Japanese speaker to decode the direction of the text due to the style of the code featuring arrows that I can only assume not knowing Japanese myself to indicate the direction of the text in some fashion. It is important we remember this structure so as to maintain the difficulty found in decoding the code in Kanji by a Japanese reader.
3) AFTER, we translate the kanji into English and Spanish. It is important these are confirmed for accuracy since it will take considerable amount of work to correct any mistakes in translation made. These translations will then be sent to the Codemaker so that they can redesign the code to fit the 2 languages.
5) WHILE we are decoding and recoding, the graphic editor will need to clean the symbols from the pages of the book. It is important the artwork remains unaffected from the symbols being cleaned from the page.
6) We leave the number symbols of the code the way they are. They're too integrated into the artwork on the maps and pages to allow for changes to be made for them, even for a skilled graphics editor. Besides, it saves us the work since they have identical use in Spanish and English. However, the number symbols will still need to be cleaned from the image of the book file when inside a group of text so as to fit with the new code.
7) We try to use all the symbols in that are not used in any of the pictures by just themselves to fit the coding of the Spanish and English Alphabet and punctuations. If too many, we remove those that are unneeded. If too few, we can add our own symbols to the code.
8) When this is done, the codemaker will then create 2 new keys to replace the Key on page 350-351 for the 2 languages that the translation will be released in (Spanish and English).
9) Using these Keys, the code maker will recode the code once in Spanish and once in English so that, when uncoded, it means the translation of the original meaning to the Japanese Code. The two new coded messages will need to be double checked to confirm that they are the correct code that successfully uncodes to say the correct message.
10) Finally, once everything else have been completed and reviewed, the Graphics Editor will insert the 2 new coded messages into their locations in the cleaned books.
Does anyone see any problems or issues that I have not thought of? Is this too difficult a task just to maintain 1 of the many puzzles in the game in it's original form rather than just removing it for simplicity's sake?
