KiC said:
Writing a reasonable text compressor/inserter is way easier than translating 3,2mb of text referencing about 20 different series.
And there, my friends, is the attitude keeping me from ever getting involved in the thankless work of fan translating (sa1amandra's insane request already was irritating, but KiC's attitude perfectly captures why I won't get involved in one remarkable sentence).
It didn't used to be like this. Back when I was newbie, when people were translating the SNES RPGs, people weren't like this - groups worked on what they wanted and those of us without any skills kept our mouths shut and were thankful when stuff came out or when people put work in.
People with far more knowledge about ROM hacking than me have said that SRW has some weird compression making it hard to insert the English text. While it may generally be easier to write a compressor (I don't know, but it doesn't seem likely) it's not in
this case. In comparison, to me, the translation seems much more straight forward (the text OBVIOUSLY has an answer, the compression doesn't necessarily - and anyone with enough Japanese knowledge to translate the game knows enough Japanese people to be able to ask about questions - there's no guarantee the compression problem has an answer). Plus you're not writing something from scratch - you're trying to hack a ROM where you don't have the original code AND the original programmer has zero incentive to make it easy for you (and frankly has some incentive in making it hard for the game to be modified).
In short, if it's so easy, KiC, get English text into SRW yourself and I'm sure people, myself included, will be lining up to do the translation.
????!!