Some Questions About Translations


xkitanox

Still Fresh
Joined
Apr 22, 2004
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so , i was wondering if things like translation of existing commercial games, namely astonisha story R, is iilegal?

its surprising to me that a game developer would make a game like astonisha story R and not cash in on an english language version, ive played the korean version that a friend owns, and i just wished i knew what the story even is.

so my question is , is a translation iilegal? if so that sucks, if not how would someone go about doing this?

i have a korean friend or two


my only concern is that it breaking down the files in the smc card would break any sort of tos.



(if it is iilegal please let me know and i will edit accordingly, or this post can be deleted)
 
I doubt its illegal very much - as long as you never ever go anywhere near distributing full datafiles, just the patch to translate them. As for how you'd go about it... I haven't got a clue.

Even if it is, if you manage to do what everyone's been asking Gamepark to do without much success for the last 2 years, it'd go down very well with everyone, them included, most probably.
 
It's not illegal to translate a game if you don't dirtribute the .dat file and if you just distribute a patch ( ips patch for example ). And it would be cool !!!! :)
 
Its not illegal per se. Distributing a modified copy (or any copy) is illegal, but unless specifically stated in the EULA you can perform any modifications to software you own, as long as it is for personal use only. From this you can create a patch (IPS) which records all the things you changed in the game (in this case some graphics for english text, and the text itself), and allows others to use this patch to change those very same things.

However, unless you are very experianced in the field of game hacking / translation then just swaping out the korean text for the english text is not good at all. The korean language can contain long descriptive sentences with a small amount of characters. The same sentence in english would be three times as long. So unless you are experianced and know how to expand the game (very very difficult to do properly) then you are stuck with trying to fit the large english translation into the small space the korean text took up. This usually results in cheap translations that look like a elementary school kid wrote them. (by no fault of the translator, they just have to fit the long english translation into the same space as the small korean text.)

There is alternate methods if you dont care how ugly the text looks you might be able to "piggy back" common letters together, giving you a bit more space to fit an extra word or two in each sentance.
 
yeah, i didnt even think about the space restrictions, i guess the community just needs to continue to bombard sonniri with emails. or someone who wants to type a hell of a lot could translate it all into a script , and then we would all just have to read along on the internet as we play.

its really unfortunate to have sucha beautiful and fun rpg become unplayable due to language barriers.
 
If the Euro launch goes well you can rest assured that GamePark will translate the great GP32 games into english. It would be stupid not to. Right now they are only official distributed in korea so its understandable that the majorty of the games are in korean. However the Euro launch will change all of that...I hope...
 
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