How about we get this translated into Japanese?

[Holy_Diver]

I've recruited "the yellow brick road" (new forum member/pal of mine) to start translating these projects for the Japanese community (and also for his resume)

I don't expect any objections... just filling everyone in / kicking things off


PS: The only question is, should we do a DD simul-release? Or should we do DoM first?

PPS: Don't freak out if he asks you for IRL contact info... he needs it for his resume to look legit

[the yellow brick road]

Hello everyone!

I would love to be apart of a translation project as long as there are no objections. English to Japanese is usually done by native Japanese speakers, but I feel we could handle it, and it will be fun.

I am not doing this out of the goodness of my heart. I am honestly looking to hone my Japanese skills and writing skills. I am looking forward to placing this project (upon completion) into my portfolio.

Well, I am looking forward to hearing from the game creator. If it's ok to translate then let us know!

[Holy_Diver]

^And he's not some Jap fawning teeny-bopper. Tell everyone your credentials. Go ahead, get it over with

[the yellow brick road]

BA in East Asian Studies
 - Concentration in Japanese

ISEPTS certificate for completing the intensive Japanese language program at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Studied Japanese for 5 years.
 - 3 years at University in New York
 - 1 year at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (http://www.tufs.ac.jp/)
 - 1 year on my own since graduation

Lots of experience abroad:
 - 2 years in South Korea
 - 1 year in Japan
 - a few months in China doing paid research on Buddhism

Lots of experience playing (Japanese) games.

My level of Japanese is probably around JLPT2 though yet to fully test it out (I will be taking the exam this December though). I have been brushing up my Japanese a lot lately! That is one of my motivations for picking up a translation project.

During my time at UA in New York I also studied Chinese, though it's at a basic level. Also while studying in New York I worked part time in the International Student Services office. I had too many duties to bother listing, but basically ranged from office work to organizing events for foreign students to assisting foreign students adjust to life in the USA.

I am now living in Seoul, South Korea and I am an elementary school teacher (English). I am currently working on some professional writing (English language textbooks for Koreans). Living in Korea has pretty much forced me to pick up the Korean language as well.

I have worked at a private English academy in Incheon called "Avalon". 

http://www.avalonglobe.com/

I have also worked at a public elementary school in Gyeonggi-do.


Feels like a resume and an application process haha  thinking about what I missed 

Oh yea, and the creator's real life name and email would probably suffice for my portfolio! Need to keep all information together. I need to be able to present it to potential employers, they may ask about it!

[Holy_Diver]

Don't call us, we'll call you

[Holy_Diver]

All we game makers need to do in order to help make this process go as smoothly as possible, is whenever you have a text field in your project. You should go ahead and add as many spaces as you can to the end of it, to make sure SoM saves the project/game with as much free space for translation as possible. I'm not sure exactly the encoding SoM uses (would have to do some investigation) but it's possible all of the English (ascii) characters are only 1 byte instead of 2, which means Japanese/etc might need a lot more space, because a typical Japanese character is 2 or more bytes, though words tend to have fewer characters.

Also if you don't mind writers messing with your stuff, translators tend to also have a writing education, so they could technically rewrite your stuff for you while translating (or at least fix any obvious mistakes/typos)


PS: I did do some tests to make sure trailing spaces would be outputted. FYI: They are~

[dmpdesign]

We may have an easier way to pump out and pump back in text info.

Kilroyfx knew a way to do this fairly easy apparently where literally pages of text could be pumped in and auto generated into chunks that SOM can handle as displayable messages.

He is going to get me a copy of the programs he used to accomplish this ( I think) so in essence we should be able to strip out all the english text for an npc dialogue and paste it into a text file, then you can convert it to perfect japanese (not worrying about spaces) and then let this program pump the data back into SOM.

I will double check on this, but that is what I got out of the conversation he was having with me the other day.  If it is the case, this should simplify your project immensely.

[dmpdesign]

Further consideration....would it help you out with your japanese stuff to convert the sample KF1 game to english from japanese?

I know there are several folks out there trying to make heads or tales out of the events that were created with the KF1 sample and it might be useful if not cool to have an SOM perfect english version of KF1?

[Holy_Diver]

I think it would be much cleaner to just translate the games text files. However your boy is doing that it's probably not kosher with the runtimes, ie. the binaries are modified or some extra thing is used. And anyway we don't know a lot about that yet, and if anything Japanese versions should be the cleanest of the bunch because it's Japanese software so if any licensing restrictions exist, they would apply most seriously in Japan/ese. Which is to say you could consider everything else (including John's translations) a patch which might not be legitimate (ie. should technically be distributed separately) 

As for KF1. Since John has translated all of SoM and the original KF1, it's probably best we wait for John to translate the remake. Personally I think this would only be useful if we decided to take it upon ourselves to improve the remake (a lot of it is really not up to snuff) ...but technically it is part of the SoM software suite, so there is no reason for John not to translate it (besides not being into the effort of course)

[the yellow brick road]

I have been curious about the swordofmoonlight homepage. How many hits does it get regularly and are there any statistics about the hits (countries where the hits originate from etc.)?

Seems like you guys got a nice comfy place here.

Note:
http://www.swordofmoonlight.com/DarkDestiny/DarkDestinyDemo.wmv

Isn't working for me. I just wanted to let someone know in case there is a problem. It's from the link on the home page.