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Fate/Extra and Fate/Extra CCC translation guidelines?

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xOblivion137x
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Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2013 4:36 am

Fate/Extra and Fate/Extra CCC translation guidelines?

Post by xOblivion137x »

Hey guys, hope y'all are doing fine. This is my first time posting in a forum ever and thought I'd get my feet wet. I'm a long time gamer and RPG fan and have recently stumbled upon Fate/Extra when trying to find some new rpg games on my Vita. The game gives me that persona 3/4 vibe but is just different enough to keep me interested. That said, I went ahead and imported Fate/Extra CCC and really wish it was translate to English. Being that it isn't and we won't know for sure whether or not it will be localized in the upcoming year, I was thinking of having a crack at it. I have some programming experience and a very basic understanding of Japanese, however I'm willing to work on this as a hobby in my spare time. That said, I've never tried my hand at a translation project before but I've read some documentation on GBAtemp and romhackers and was wondering if wololo had any resources that could be beneficial to me in this process. Please note, no progress has been made and I'm not looking to team up with anyone as of yet since no ground has been covered whatsoever. When I find some traction and get the project up and running, I will keep all of you informed. In the case aksys announces a localisation, I will stop attempting this, but any words of advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
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Last edited by codestation on Tue Oct 08, 2013 4:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: edited title to add more info
codestation
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Joined: Wed Jan 19, 2011 3:45 pm
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Re: Fate/Extra and Fate/Extra CCC

Post by codestation »

Well, is hard to make translation guidelines when the games are wildly different and the possible approach in X game doesn't make sense in Y game. The first thing that you can do is to find who was the company that made that game, then look if said company has made other games that were translated by fans. There is a big chance that the game engine, estructures and file layout are similar so you can use the other game as a base to translate this one.

Obviously isn't always that easy so you have to dump your UMD, extract all the files from the ISO and find out where the texts are located. In my limited experience, japanese developers uses SHIFT-JIS as the text encoding so try to locate any string that appears in the game with that encoding.

Are they embedded into the game executable? (ugh...).
Are they splitted into different small files? (less work to translate/test).
Are they inside a big package file? This is the most common case so you have two options: search the internet to see if the file format is already reversed so you can extract the files or look at the file header and reverse the format by yourself.

Once you found the texts you have two options to start the translation project:

* Hex editing: just replace the strings in the file: Tedious and you are restricted to the lenght of the japanese strings (in 90% of the cases the lenght isn't enough so you have to abbreviate texts and lower the quality of the project). Not much knowledge required.

* If somebody haven't done it already then make your own string extractor so you can translate the text directly and a repacker so you can reconstruct the binary file with the translated strings.

Of course there are lots of things that can go wrong:

* The game expect strings no larger than N.
* The game expect the resource files to have exactly N size.
* The game do some integrity check to the files to prevent translations.
* Other.

Personally i have found two of these cases while doing some game translations: Project Diva had the strings embedded in the game executable and Monster Hunter has the texts encrypted in a big file that i had to reverse and make unpackers/recompilers....

Have fun with the translation ;)
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xOblivion137x
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Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2013 4:36 am

Re: Fate/Extra and Fate/Extra CCC translation guidelines?

Post by xOblivion137x »

Thanks Codestation! I have some time off in the upcoming week, so I'll get started on some research. Appreciate all the help, I'll post updates on progress here. Any further advice that anyone has is welcome.
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