Translation Project

[tysonrss]

I would like to form a team of dedicated people to translate the Super Gokuden series for the SNES, being one of my favorite(and one of the best)DB games ever, I feel it really needs a translation.

 

 

It also has mini games for the training sessions. This particular games starts from the beginning of Goku's adventure to the end of King Piccolo Daimo.

 

It's fun and I would like to make a decent translation, we don't have to go through the game's text to get an understanding, I guess we could fan translate it, considering I have a basic understanding of what is being said since I know the anime all too well.

[Iconoclast]

Well I like Dragonball, and it sounds fun.

 

The problem is: I am only familiar with the basic kana alphabet--not Kanji and not Romaji-to-English conversion. As things stand, I hardly know any Japanese words so much as a literal understanding of some translations I have experimented on.

 

But I've delved into a shitload of Dragonball [Z] memories and trivial information to the point that I'm somewhat of a nerd on it, and I'm great with some literal aspects and mechanics when choosing between Latin roots versus English.

 

I've never done a translation before. [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/biggrin.png[/img]/emoticons/biggrin@2x.png 2x" width="20" height="20" />

[tysonrss]

I've never done a translation either and I only know the symbol for demon king lol so I dont know Japanese either, but I figure that it can't be that bad if you know the series and how things play out, right?

 

There might be a dump of text from the game somewhere, so I light look into it so I can structure it correctly.

[Iconoclast]

Yeah, with a text dump ... here are some tools I have used successfully:

 

http://www.animelab.com/anime.manga/translate/

http://www.dicts.info/dictionary.php?l1=english&l2=japanese_romaji

http://www.romaji.me/

 

Those are all for converting between English and Romaji.

 

http://www.romaji.org/

http://www.whiteagle.net/

http://translate.google.com/

 

Those are all for converting between English and the kana alphabets (or Romaji).

[tysonrss]

Kakkoi

 

That's a place I found some dumps at, sort of. Apparently there are people that are trying to attempt this as well since Kakkoi himself quit the job.

 

Maybe I'll dump the text myself, the problem with that is I have to find teh time to do it.

 

I have to study for ASVAB, and fit Zelda into that schedule so usually..there is little time for such a strenuous task lol

[Iconoclast]

As far as the text exporting, although I have never done it, I have taken notes on the official Unicode layout of Japanese characters as well as the code page for pointing to the characters in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, so with enough dedication I'm sure locating the entry point into ROM where the code points are stored would be a start to devising an automated way to do it.

[tysonrss]

Ahhh...it's been so long since I worked with a hex editor. Last time I did anything like this was when I was hacking a Pokemon Silver rom, I had the unicode "transformation" sheet which helped me find the words but I doubt anything like that exists for this game since its not that popular.

[Iconoclast]

The various text strings are going to be referenced by a table of memory addresses to look them up before printing them to the screen, so with enough dedication, anyone could write an application to read the string pointers from the earlier section of the ROM and convert all the Japanese characters to Unicode code points to display on the common personal computer.

 

I've done something similar with the N64 Zelda games, but I haven't hacked much outside of N64 stuff [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/laugh.png[/img]/emoticons/laugh@2x.png 2x" width="20" height="20" />.

 

There's also that chance that the game uses the standard Unicode convention, too, just like most devices in the world do today. With at least that much luck, any hex editor could search the game for Japanese text that you'd see in the game. That would speed up the process, too.

[tysonrss]

Unfortunetly I don't posses the skills to build a program lol.

 

Sorry for the late reply, my internet was down since we switched providers.

 

EDIT: Apparently from what I read, there is no space in the game to do a translation. Which means one would have to make a dump of the text itself and delete them. The problem lies in finding the strings with the pointers that point to the texts that corresponds with the string itself...

 

EDIT 2: Well I read that one could expand the rom, so I guess that works too.

[Iconoclast]

Thing is, it's easy for me to do with ASCII text.

 

Japanese characters unfortunately don't fall under that category.

 

Unless the game is backwards-compatible with ASCII (i.e., Unicode code page for supporting the kana alphabet) then you would definitely have to rewrite the code page interpreter. Honestly I am not an experienced translator; I don't even know any spoken languages besides English. But otherwise, apart from that, it's easily done, without space being an issue (just offsetting some data most likely, as is the case for surely any translation).

 

Also [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/laugh.png[/img]/emoticons/laugh@2x.png 2x" width="20" height="20" /> from what you said in that first edit it sounds to me as though you do in fact have the skills to build a program. Hell, when I first started building programs off of tutorials, I was like..."Man, this shit is gay," but then I was like (years later), "Man, this shit is Grrrrr-REAT!!!" Kellogg's