Starmen.Net

I would love to help with the Norwegian translation. Not that many would play it in Norwegian, but it would be fun trying to translate it. I have played quite a lot of games, read a lot of books and have good grades in Enlish so translating it should not be a problem. I don’t know how to insert the translated text in the game, bur hopefully some one can help with that.

The hardest part to translate from what I can gather is the names of the enemies. Many of them is so unusual that trying to find a good translated name can be quite difficult.

So, I would like to translate the game into german. If someone else wants to do this too, please send me a PM, so we can organize us.

MOTHER 3 IN SPANISH!!! MOTHER 3 en español

Aunque en mi humilde opinion hubiera desea que nintendo hubiera traido la versión en español en earthbound.

Por cierto, no veo ningun problema en cuanto al lenguaje para traducir mother3, excepto que en los caracteres falta “ñ” y “á é í ó ú”.

Cualquier ayuda para la traducción en español, contactenme ^^

The name was originally ushihebi. Ushi = cow, hebi = snake. Many of the names are better in translation

Make sure that Midna can create her own translation. (This and This should help you remember)

To be honest, when I first decided to do these other translations, I didn’t think there’d be 90 people per language wanting to help

That rocks! We have 6 Brazilian Portuguese translators!:DD

Until Mother 3 is ready, we will translate Earthbound to Brazilian Portuguese! Let’s see how this will end.

It’s possible, though I have no idea how to program my stuff to accept that input. I could probably get my tools (which aren’t ALL the tools mind you) to read stuff in in UTF or someting, but I’d need to know more about those languages.

As far as I know, Korean would be impossible without completely reprogramming the text display routine. Korean works by combining a limited number of phonetic symbols into thousands of possible syllable blocks.

For example,

ㅂ + ㅐ = 배 (“beh”, stomach)

ㅂ + ㅐ + ㄱ = 백 (“bek”, white)

ㅂ + ㅐ + ㅁ = 뱀 (“bem”, snake)

ㅂ + ㅣ = 비 (“bee”, rain)

ㅂ + ㅣ + ㄴ = 빈 (“bean”, empty)

ㅂ + ㅣ + ㅊ = 빛 (“beet”, light)

So, yeah, there are way too many possible combinations to be pre-programmed into the font table, unless there’s some way to enable thousands of characters. I don’t know enough about how that works. Maybe there is some space in the rom allocated to kanji (which are almost never used in Korean) that could be used instead for the syllable blocks?

For anyone who’s interested, here’s a link to a PDF containing all possible syllables in Korean (most of which are, admittedly, quite rare): http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UAC00.pdf

Russian seems a lot more doable, but I don’t know too much about that language or about the variations and requirements of writing in Cyrillic.

Well, thousands of characters are possible (note that the font that came with the game had over 7500, mostly kanji) but we’re using nearly all of that space right now for text data. :\ That’s pretty neat though, I didn’t know it worked like that either.

Does every possible syllable block have a meaning? I would think that the way it’s set up a lot of them would be meaningless, in the same way that if we took all the possible three letter words in English, we’d not only have things like “cup” and “log,” but also things like “nur,” “fep,” “grf,” etc. Or did I misinterpret you?

Does the alphabet in that one pic have everything needed for a Swedish translation?

Zinco:

Does every possible syllable block have a meaning? I would think that the way it’s set up a lot of them would be meaningless, in the same way that if we took all the possible three letter words in English, we’d not only have things like "cup" and "log," but also things like "nur," "fep," "grf," etc. Or did I misinterpret you?

You’ve got it right: tons of them are meaningless, just like lots of syllable spellings in English. Many do have meanings, but many of the meanings have been lost over time and with spelling standardization.

Only the main translators (one for each translation) I have contact with will have the scripts and files and tools.

I thought I had made it clear in the blog update, but these other translations won’t begin until AFTER the English patch is out. Please understand. A few people from different teams have already been mistaken about this. It will be 3+ months until then.

@mato: if only the team supervisor gets the complete script and the tools, then how do you suppose will that work? then the supervisors would have to split up the script into it’s maps and each member of every translation team would get to translate a few maps. I think that would result in extreme inconsistencies. I’ll have to agree to BizarreAngel, but I’m not sure that would be the way to go, either… some maps or even whole chapters could turn out badly translated, laden with spelling errors and typos, and boring, while others may even be as good as your translation. will you leave it to the team supervisors to decide how the work will be split up (in drafts or in map packs), or will you decide how it would work best?

Nokonoko:

Hey, first post here.

As far as a Greek translation would be concerned, ~70 additional characters would need to be inserted. Retaining the Roman alphabet would be ideal, for foreign words and names.

It’s a fact that the script will get considerably longer — but it sounds like you need to address that problem with the English project anyway.

But all the accented character would not needed nor the esset so it might be possible

Man, I wish a Vietnamese translation would take off. It uses the latin alphabet, but has additional diacritics. So many characters would have to be added. xD

This was my reply to a recent Spanish translation PM, but it applies to all translation teams:

Each translation will have one person who’s the “head”. This person will have the tools, and will be like how I am to the English translation. You guys need to choose who this person will be for your translation. The person chosen should:

1. have a lot of free time
2. be a skilled translator
3. not be someone who causes internet drama
4. be responsible and trustworthy
5. not be lazy

So make sure you guys choose someone with those qualities.

I should point out that all the names on the walkthrough are VERY out of date, and most of them have changed for the translation. Those walkthrough names were done before the English translation even started.

In any case, there’s not much to do until the English patch is out. Once the English patch is out, I’ll contact the heads of each translation and get things started. Since the patch will be out in a few months, the other translations will probably start before the end of the year.

Until then, maybe you guys can play the Japanese version, read as much stuff as you can about the game, learn the game inside and out, and other things to get ready. I know the wait is annoying, but it won’t be long.

A few minutes ago I also had an idea – after the English patch is out (or maybe shortly before), I can give the teams the non-script files and have them translated and put into the ROM. This will be kind of like the current menu patch – all the non-script stuff will be in the target language, but the main text will still be in English. A kind of quick menu patch for people waiting for the full translations. I’m not sure what I think of the idea yet, but it’s a possibility I’ll think about. What do you guys think of this? Is it a good idea? Bad?

non-script files are things like item names, menu text, etc.

That sounds like an awesome idea to me, Mato. I’ve already been looking over some of that text (though outdated, as you say) a bit to prepare for helping out with the French… just to get an idea of what’s coming. That seems like a really nice gesture to have special patches for other languages at the same time as you release the English. Everyone would be really grateful to have that.

The pre-release patch sounds like it would help a lot. The chances of it leaking, I think, are pretty unlikely, as most people who are waiting for the English Patch aren’t going to want to play anything but the final product, but in our case it would be nice to get a head start on how the game is playing out in English.

But, in the end, if it doesn’t work out that’s fine

Tomato:

A few minutes ago I also had an idea – after the English patch is out (or maybe shortly before), I can give the teams the non-script files and have them translated and put into the ROM. This will be kind of like the current menu patch – all the non-script stuff will be in the target language, but the main text will still be in English. A kind of quick menu patch for people waiting for the full translations. I’m not sure what I think of the idea yet, but it’s a possibility I’ll think about. What do you guys think of this? Is it a good idea? Bad?

I was more or less responding to this post.

I hope I didn’t misunderstand, and if I’m way off just disregard what I said, but I was under the impression that this would be like a “menu patch plus” to kind of give us a heads up on how things are going to be.

Either way, it’s not a big deal. There is a lot of stuff the Brazilian Portuguese guys are working on until the final Mother 3 patch goes live.

Well, I guess I just see things as, if this is something you were going to just send to the translation teams, there is always the chance of someone distributing it without permission somehow. Unless you were planning on just posting it on the site for anyone who wants it, in which case that’s not an issue anyways.

Hey, translation groups:

If you don’t have one set up yet, can you create a public site for your Mother 3 translation projects? I’m going to link to them when the English patch is released. If you don’t have a project site set up yet, please talk with your group and then get one set up ASAP. It doesn’t even have to have anything on it yet.

Please do this quickly, if you can. For those groups that already have a site set up, please let me know what the URL is.