animal forest translation?

[Quvack]

Additional posts won't garner more attention. If Quvack is around and has something to report, he will.

Exactly thanks Allnatural

I see no point in replying to the questions/crap most people post because I've already answered it numerous times, in here and way too many PM's for my liking *shrug*

When it comes to releasing the patch which I might have had some time to tweak lately :whistling it'll be released when I'm happy with it, even if its a test version/just a proof of concept kinda thing I see no point in releasing something buggy.

 

[GMwizard]

lalalalala you're back D:

And I'm back too o_o"

hehe good luck on the translation ;D

*Thinks of something relevant to say o.o*

hmm... take your time! =D

 

[rus94]

I am relly looking forward to this. My ds is broken and i really anna play animal crossing.. even if it is the GC/64 version.

 

[Enzo Dragon]

If you kids translate this game, I think I'll be assembling some kinda' team to retexture it.

It'd be sweet to see AF in full glory, comparable to AC and ACDS.

Needless to say, I'll be watching this thread.

 

[rus94]

I dont see why you can't just release whats done of it, just for a taste. Even if it is very glitchy.

 

[stratton_865]

This might help! Its not much, but:
AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation
could be handy for translating the scripts to english :bouncy:

 

[Agozer]

You should be locked in a dark room, bound to a chair and poked with sharp sticks 24/7 for suggesting using BabelFish for any serious translation work.

 

[Allnatural]

You should be locked in a dark room, bound to a chair and poked with sharp stick 24/7 for suggesting using BabelFish for any serious translation work.

Not to mention, this is like the third or fourth time someone has "helped" by linking to babelfish, as if the entire world wasn't already familiar with it.

The 'fish isn't new folks.

 

[ScottJC]

Plus its not a good enough translator tool to do professional translations, You input something in japanese like say: "My family dishonors you" and it'll probably come out "My father dishonors me"

 

[boegie]

Hi, this is my first post here, although I use project64 for 6 months and have 56 ROMS for it ^^ .

I have read this topic and i thought : "damn, I need to register now cuz I want to play the egnlish version of animal forest to!"

so anyway, good luck and I really hope You guys can get this job done!

ps : sorry for my bad english, I'm "just" a boy from Belgium

 

[Pokemoner]

wowow so this topic is still alive!!!!

no complaint..just stating that I waited for this one so much,more than 2 years and still it's not done it's really too hard to make it guys,plus a GC or a DS version will do..again not complaining,just saying hello to Quvack

cheers

 

[Lysol Pionex]

Greetings to all, I come bearing information. I've been working on this Animal Forest translation for a few weeks or so, following this thread and such. So far I've made some progress that came much more easily than expected. What I have so far is a Word document compilation with the entire Animal Forest character set printed, along with its corresponding hex value and the actual character as used by computers. So for instance, say you want to translate おわる. You would go to the Word document and find each character as depicted in AF. Then you would copy (painfully) letter by letter into an online translator or an e-mail to a friend who knows Japanese etc. to get it translated. Once you found out what it means you then go back to Word and get the hex values for some characters that can make up a string in English OF THE SAME SIZE. In this example those three characters mean "to finish" and are found when you're writing something on the town bulletin board or a letter to someone. So it means you're done writing. So for our English translation, which MUST BE THE SAME NUMBER OF CHARACTERS, we goto our hex editor and find the string of characters that matches the hex values of the above string, in this case 04C17D. Then we replace it with something like 456E64 (End) or 4F4B21 (OK!). Then we check it in the game, of course. (NOTE!! The above example does not actually work. Sorry about that, I was doing it while I was posting. I assume the text that hovers over the start button is a picture and not actual text, as I haven't been able to find any instances of it in the ROM.)

The annoying part is that such a short string like that can be found a whooooole lot of times in the ROM, so it takes a while. Also, the strings must be the same size (at least until someone figures out how to change that), otherwise the ROM doesn't load (I've never had it crash, it just wouldn't load, but that might not always be true).

At any rate, all of this stuff is a good start:
I was successfully able to change K.K.'s name (see pic below), and to change the stuff that several characters say, but I am unable to translate it, and this is where I can use some help. Included is a link to the Word document. There are two characters in there that are represented by red asterisks. I cannot figure out what those are in Unicode. If anyone can put those characters into the document and PM me, it'd be great. Then the actual translation can ensue.

Here's some stuff to get you guys started if you wanna mess around with it. I'm going to try to translate this puppy, wish me luck!

To download, click the link, scroll to the bottom of the page and wait till the button is through counting. Then click it.
The Word document:
4shared.com - document sharing - download japAlph.doc

An online translator with which I've been very pleased:
Animelab.com: Online Japanese Translator

Pics:
4shared.com - photo sharing - download image snap0009.bmp
(Sorry about them being bitmaps. I'll try to change that next time.)

-=- Lysol Pionex
Isa. 12:3

 

[Quvack]

Greetings to all, I come bearing information. I've been working on this Animal Forest translation for a few weeks or so, following this thread and such. So far I've made some progress that came much more easily than expected. What I have so far is a Word document compilation with the entire Animal Forest character set printed, along with its corresponding hex value and the actual character as used by computers. So for instance, say you want to translate おわる. You would go to the Word document and find each character as depicted in AF. Then you would copy (painfully) letter by letter into an online translator or an e-mail to a friend who knows Japanese etc. to get it translated. Once you found out what it means you then go back to Word and get the hex values for some characters that can make up a string in English OF THE SAME SIZE. In this example those three characters mean "to finish" and are found when you're writing something on the town bulletin board or a letter to someone. So it means you're done writing. So for our English translation, which MUST BE THE SAME NUMBER OF CHARACTERS, we goto our hex editor and find the string of characters that matches the hex values of the above string, in this case 04C17D. Then we replace it with something like 456E64 (End) or 4F4B21 (OK!). Then we check it in the game, of course. (NOTE!! The above example does not actually work. Sorry about that, I was doing it while I was posting. I assume the text that hovers over the start button is a picture and not actual text, as I haven't been able to find any instances of it in the ROM.)

The annoying part is that such a short string like that can be found a whooooole lot of times in the ROM, so it takes a while. Also, the strings must be the same size (at least until someone figures out how to change that), otherwise the ROM doesn't load (I've never had it crash, it just wouldn't load, but that might not always be true).

At any rate, all of this stuff is a good start:
I was successfully able to change K.K.'s name (see pic below), and to change the stuff that several characters say, but I am unable to translate it, and this is where I can use some help. Included is a link to the Word document. There are two characters in there that are represented by red asterisks. I cannot figure out what those are in Unicode. If anyone can put those characters into the document and PM me, it'd be great. Then the actual translation can ensue.

Here's some stuff to get you guys started if you wanna mess around with it. I'm going to try to translate this puppy, wish me luck!

To download, click the link, scroll to the bottom of the page and wait till the button is through counting. Then click it.
The Word document:
4shared.com - document sharing - download japAlph.doc

An online translator with which I've been very pleased:
Animelab.com: Online Japanese Translator

Pics:
4shared.com - photo sharing - download image snap0009.bmp
(Sorry about them being bitmaps. I'll try to change that next time.)

-=- Lysol Pionex
Isa. 12:3

This stuff is all fairly easily found (not trying to downplay your findings), however using an online translator and limiting the translation changes to the size of the current japanese script isn't going to make a very accurate translation, unless you absolutely butcher the original script. There are much easier ways of finding/copying the values of a specific bit of the script without doing it all char by char (ie.. use a debugger and find where it loads text by default, it makes life so much easier and its always loaded into the same place )

The size limitation you've come across is because you havent worked out the control codes for the text, once you understand those its possible to change text size, colour, spacing, where line breaks are, etc.. however your still fairly limited there. The best option is moving the script within the rom, so.. extending the rom's size and then changing where the game reads the text from. I've sort of worked this out but havent found an easy way to rewrite all the pointers (my coding skills are still fairly limited).

Chances are if the rom doesnt load it'd be because of a crc error, you'll need to use a tool called rn64crc to fix this. Regardless thats the least of your worries when it comes to translation of a game this sized.

Have fun though

 

[Lysol Pionex]

HMmmmmm... Ok. Thanks. As far as the translation, all I'm wanting to do is translate it so that one can tell what's going on. Perhaps this project can be done yet!

 

[Quvack]

HMmmmmm... Ok. Thanks. As far as the translation, all I'm wanting to do is translate it so that one can tell what's going on. Perhaps this project can be done yet!

Of course the project can be done However the sheer size of the script means that its going to take a hell of a lot of resources to be done properly. Even if you do compress the language a lot its gonna be a hell of a lot of work, theres LOTS of dialog in the game.

Not trying to discourage you or anything, just saying its a large project. Good luck with it I wish I had more time to be able to work on the misc things I've done with the game.

 

[djknitex]

Sweet, hopefully this project will be done with at least 95% accurate english, this must be a huge project, might take forever

 

[Lysol Pionex]

Update

OK, I've found that my friend started taking Japanese, and while he doesn't know the language too well, he's going to help me as he can. He also knows the alphabet, so he can help me figure out those two remaining letters.

Something else I've thought of: how close are the "plots" of the Gamecube and N64 scripts? I have this game on my Gamecube, but I don't have a TV (can't stand 'em) and I'm getting a new monitor adapter soon, so I should be able to run the games side by side. "But the games don't happen the exact same way!" Yeah, I know. But a ton of stuff does (what the post office people say to each other, what the cat says to you on the train "Feel free to browse, but not to carouse!" etc.)

Besides this, finals are the next two weeks, so I doubt I'd have time to work on it significantly. Hopefully, I can seriously start on it around January 1th.

Edit:

Actually, I've just been working a little bit more and I've gotten the entire "ASCII" set figured out. A link to the new document, no longer in Word, PDF format instead:
4shared.com - document sharing - download AnimalForestASCII.pdf
Some of those characters don't look anything at all in AF like they do in Word. Now that I have all the letters, let's see how quickly we can do this. ;-)

 

[Lysol Pionex]

Update

I've made some progress since the last post. I'm experimenting with a contextual translation for certain parts of the game (i.e. when you're in the post office, obviously the bird says something like "welcome. Would you like to 1) make a deposit 2) mail a letter 3) leave.") Thus, there's no language requirements, because you can figure out what's being said based off of what's going on. This won't work, of course, when you're just having a random conversation with a friend. And for that I'm going to check out some Jap/Eng dictionaries from the university.

I'll see if I can get a demo IPS out soon. Until then, I'll shut up.

Edit:
Here is a demo IPS, as a small (very small) Christmas present to everyone. It encompasses all of the text of Totakeke when you are first starting the game (when you have to set the clock and when he's talking to you about starting a new life out on your own). All in all it is about five minutes of talking.

Other progress is I've written a program that converts the hex code to it's Romaji equivalent (the English pronunciation of a given Japanese word. There are a few more things that I'd like to add to it, but so far you input the hex into a text file and it translates it on screen and also keeps a backlog of all the words you've translated, for reference.

Please download the IPS, leave feedback, what you like/don't like so that this can be an awesome translation. Also any questions you might have.


IPS: 4shared.com - online file sharing and storage - download Animal Forest.ips
Screenshots: http://dc23.4shared.com/download/7771652/6e2263bf/clockBefore.JPG?sId=mLvIi2VVRA6qTsnW
http://dc21.4shared.com/download/7771659/f9f0ba37/clockAfter.JPG?sId=CD0YNhiPUdDmkrZw
http://dc23.4shared.com/download/7771668/a5dad962/textBefore.JPG?sId=WUWTuxfDGMVnAHoN
http://dc24.4shared.com/download/7771681/42854c48/textAfter.JPG?sId=bxDSPGtXACaOuUYn

 

[djknitex]

Nice! I can't wait for more updates!

 

[Enzo Dragon]

Nice to see someone is picking this game back up!