What it takes to fan-translate a video game (2022) [video] | Hacker News Reader

What it takes to fan-translate a video game (2022) [video]

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25 pointszdw11 comments

I've only played a a handful of text heavy fan-translated games and while I'm always grateful for the chance to experience media I couldn't otherwise at pretty much any level, I've never been very impressed with the results. Even without access to the original text you can often find sections of dialog are clearly just rewritten with whatever the translator thought was hilarious, 4kids-tier localization, and errors that could have been caught by letting even one person fluent in the language it was translated to/from read it over.

It's hard to complain about something that takes a ton of work and is given freely, but I can't help but notice that fan-subs of TV/film seem to be of much better quality. It may be that text heavy games are so much more time consuming, and game translations often seem to be solo-projects (which is damn impressive, even though the end result seems to suffer for it). I haven't gotten into fan-subbed novels, but I wonder if they tend to have the same problems.

Like you said, it’s hard to complain about other peoples free effort, so let me complain about people’s praises:

No the final fantasy III/VI fan translation is not better than the official. You don’t even need to look at the original Japanese to know that “imperial witch” is correct and “imperial bitch” is not what is being said.

Translators get their degrees for a reason. While they can't make everyone into a master, they can help with avoiding mistakes most amateurs do. Then, of course, there's a question of personal breadth. If a person imagines that lively characters talk like they are in a sitcom, there is little you can do about it.

Consider that Vladimir Nabokov rarely, if ever, mentioned that one of the very first works published under his Russian pseudonym was a translation of “Alice in Wonderland”. It was a very thorough work in which each twist was given a match from more or less similar saying, poem, nursery rhyme, etc. Alice became Anya, and names got translated to something familiar to kids. The thing is, one might wonder where Lewis Carroll was in that. What is worse, because of the Revolution, almost all of the rhymes and jokes to which he alluded would be unused by next generations both inside and outside the country, and therefore forgotten.

https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/1718/#review

(also look at the other reviews)

Love it. I remember the fan-made rom-hacks of final fantasy 5 ( they called FF6 FF3 in the USA, super confusing). Was super incredible and blew me away that it was even possible.

i tried to extract assets from the ps2 version of 007 agent under fire. i thought it would be straight forward but it wasnt. i came to the conclusion that most of the game was compressed. it was so interesting to see this guy blow past where i got stuck. i made it as far as looking at the code as it was running in psx2… but i found their debugger hard to use. and iirc it doesnt let you simply dump memory, which should contain decompressed assets, into a file. the next thing would be to just look through the code for decompression function but i didnt even know how i would do that. i traced out function calls, starting with main, but that tree grew lots of branches very quickly and again i just gave up. maybe i would give it another go but i dont really see the point when the next GTP will tackle the whole thing automatically in a year or two when im 80% done and hundreds of hours sunk into it.

ChatGPT is surprisingly good at translating games. There are some tools for RPG maker and Unity games that extract text, run it through ChatGPT, and place them back into the game.

This post is mostly about retro video games that predate Unity by a couple of decades.

If they're PC games (I can't watch videos so I don't know what the OP is talking about) you can still quite often hook them up to AGTH or similar and use that to run them through an automated translator. While it doesn't compare to a real translation, it can be enough to let you play.

> There are some tools for RPG maker and Unity games that extract text, run it through ChatGPT, and place them back into the game.

For the love of god, please don't do this. This shows an immense lack of respect for players using other languages.

1) Text in games often comes as bits of out-of-context text which are easy to mistranslate. A button that says "attack" should be translated as an imperative verb, for example, not a noun. Even human translators have problems with this if the developer doesn't provide appropriate context.

2) Text in games also tends to involve game-specific jargon. If your game has names constructed from English words (e.g. a place called "Stonehall"), those names should probably be translated to similar terms in the target language, and that translation should be consistent throughout the game. An LLM may be able to come up with a substitute name, but it might not be thematically appropriate, and it'll have trouble keeping that translation consistent.

3) There's more to translation than just getting the words right. Tone is important, especially in languages that have marked distinctions between speech registers. Again, even human translators can have trouble with this; shoveling a bunch of text into an LLM is unlikely to work any better.

When these machine translations fail, they tend to reflect poorly on the brand as well. It can cost more than simply hiring translators in the first place. [1][2]

[1] https://www.escapistmagazine.com/minecraft-legends-arabic-tr...

[2] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-legends-ar...

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