I am very interested in seeing games such as Kanon, Air, and To Heart translated in english and brought out over here. My japanese currently isn’t good enough to fully appreciate these titles. Does anyone think that these high profile games could someday be brought out here? I would suggest Peach Princess or other companies to look into them, but I don’t know what the issues or politics involved are.
Oh man! Here is another one! I think I have ask the similar question before, as history suggests, I think a long and very detail eassy from Miss Kumiko will be here any moment now.
I am very interested in seeing games such as Kanon, Air, and To Heart
hate to disappoint you, but even NEC Interchannel (a Japanese company) had difficulties securing the rights to do a Dreamcast version of Air, so I think it’s quite unlikely that the two works (Kanon and Air) will ever get translated…
Got a question though, if someone actually translates (sort of) the game–line by line–and put it up as a text file, how effective do you think that will be. and how many people will actually bother to use them?
uh…another long answer from Kumiko again…? GAO— (^^;
[This message has been edited by yyoshi (edited 06-05-2001).]
I’d say a couple hundred to a thousand or two, depending on how popular the game is.
I did a similar project for a RPG a while back (Tales of Phantasia PSX version) and that’s about how popular my guide was before I abandoned it…and I’m willing to bet that ToP has more fans in non-Japanese countries than Kanon/Air/Whatever.
Sakura Taisen’s a bit different though, since it’s a hybrid
Always difficult to do an RPG translation, since it’s not linear.
Kanon/Air shouldn’t be too tough, except for the length. To Heart’s a different story, since it’s practically a digital novel–and translating would be like writing a book.
"Translating a game from a player standpoint is no different than translating an anime, or a manga. The complexity of translation only occurs for companies like PeaPri who are actually converting the original game script and game - just translating off the actual screen is far easier."
Whoa whoa whoa. Having a script makes it FAR easier to translate than to do it off screen for anime. In anime you have to backtrack a couple times to make sure you didn’t miss any lines and you have to pause frequently so you don’t go too fast. There are also times when a person mumbles too much to make out what they’re saying clearly and/or you’re not sure exactly what they’re saying. Having a script in front of you makes life much easier 
"RPGs have a big advantage in that their script is usually not as long as adventure games or visual novels. They are not as story intensive - they SHOULD be, as far as what an RPG truly is supposed to be, but that has not really happened, for the most part, as RPGs tend to focus too much on combat rather than actual role-playing. "
I disagree wholeheartedly on the story intensive portion, though RPG scripts are shorter than a graphic novel, mostly because you get rid of a lot of the descriptions of the evironments, what the character is thinking at the moment, etc. In terms of dialogue I doubt there’s as much difference.
" The reasons for this deal with the game code imbedded in the script, plus the tendency for a great deal of repetition. Japanese game engines do not have word wrap - that means that getting the words to space out properly and to wrap to the next line requires hard coding of carriage returns or actually physically inserting spaces so that the words break properly."
Then you’re talking about the localization process, not the translation itself. As for pure TRANSLATION is concerned, it is much more time consuming to do so off screen than to read off the script.
"Or, to put it in another light… fan translations for anime are abundant, and they do NOT have scripts they are using. All they do is watch the show and translate, and they can do it much much faster than anyone doing a game script because they do not have to worry about the issues that game scripts have (as mentioned above.) As a practical example… Dave E was contacted by a person who had a young girl translate the entire first LD Box of Wedding Peach - it didn’t take her more than a few months, simply listening to the episodes on cassette (not even watching them) while she translated. In contrast, it takes several months to do just one game, unless it is incredibly short."
That’s because there is less things to translate than in a typical game script. Besides, the first LD box of a typical anime series would mean only 25 episodes or so, which would have a total of maybe 500k of text total at most, where as all but the shortest games have more than that.
"Everyone can also note that the top bishoujo games are not RPGs because they do not have the story intensive nature of a visual novel or an adventure."
All but most Alicesoft games, that is.
…then I guess we have different definitions for what the word “Translation” means, I guess. Most professional translators I know seem to agree with me though.
And umm…I work here. I translate…according to my definition anyway. I’ve already gotten a fair amount of work done for PeaPri already for the past 8 months or so, so I expect you’d see them not too far into the future.
As for how big anime scripts are, my experience has a typical episode being approximately 10-20k in length(depending on amount of dialogue) if you type it out into a regular text file, while the game script I’ve worked with has about 4-500k of text, so a 25-30 episode her typical adventure game is a pretty fair trade off, in my opinion.