other translations ?

[innerstep]

well,

I don't have much computing skills, I can't translate japanese and on top of that I'm french. I was just thinking, would it be possible to learn how to do translations ?
I mean I could spend some time on translating english versions into french for my french pals
I'm sure they would appreciate.
For instance, France is the second reader of mangas after Japan, we also love Japanese culture in general. However, for videogames, we only get blockbusters like FF or Dragon Quest, probably Grandia III in few months. But we will probably never get Valkyrie Profile 2 nor Tales of the Abyss. I'm sure you got my point.
Here's my email innerstep@gmail.com
If you think I can do something, please let me know.
If you think it's a crazy idea, I'll understand.

innerstep

http://www.myspace.com/innerstep

[Cless]

I think the biggest problem with non-english european language translations is the fact that I think accented characters would look really bad, especially uppercase ones, with this game's font system...

[Cless]

Oh, yeah. There's also the issue of other european languanges that require more space than english to convey the same thing. That makes it a lot more possible to have problems fitting translations back in to the games.

[Kikujiro]

I dunno about other languages, but in french we do not use accents in uppercase characters.
Oh and I know about the limitation hassle, however I know from experience there's always tricks to bypass these. Like using abreviations or removing chunks of sentences to keep only what's important...
Cless, you'll probably find these tricks pretty lame, but that's the only options we have.
In the end, I think the final quality pretty much depends on the translator capacity to adapt things.
The result can be very good once you get used to such methods.

(damn, I'm starting to sound like an old guy who's been in the business for too long. Poor me)

I wouldn't mind about working on a french project myself, and i know a lot of people who would probably volonteer to help in translate, edit, test, etc... but I definitively do NOT have the computer skills required. Knowing how to use a hex editor probably probably won't help me.
(not like I'd want to use such a thing anyway, I had goddamn NIGHTMARES after that FF3 menu translation last summer)

[PacoChan]

Hi, we made a full spanish translation of Tales of Eternia and the font not a problem. We used the space used for Kanjis for the accented letters. The uppercase accented letters doesn't look bad. So I think that's not a problem.

[Cless]

A big problem is that the half width font is natively 12x16 and stored anti-aliased with an outline, so you lose a bit of that tiny resolution available due to that. It's then scaled in software somehow depeding on how the game defines the font sizes.

It might be hard to find a good font for this job... I thought a lot of small text looked borderline unreadable or an eyestrain on a regular TV. The bolder font helped a bit...

Also, I don't know how to edit the double byte font. It's stored differently and nothing I know of can decode it properly. I do know that it's lower res than the half width. if a a euro language doesn't have too many accented letters they could fill some unused half width font slots...

[Cless]

by the way, if you guys could tell me what accented characters are used in your language I might try doing some experimentation.

also, this is how the current font looks, as stored in the game (pixel accurate). blue background is transparent in-game.

[PacoChan]

In spanish we use: á é í ó ú ü ñ ¡ ¿

Also these, but they are barely used: Á É Í Ó Ú Ü Ñ

[Leiw]

French :

ç  é  è  ê  ë  ï  à  â  œ



German :

ä  ü  ö  é

[Cless]

Okay, well.

It seems that not only 0x20-0x7F can be used for single byte/half width characters, but range 0xA0-0xDF can be used as well. So that gives us quite a bit of room for accented characters, probably enough to have support for a significant portion of other European languages.

[Cless]

I added all the accented characters in this thread to the font...



Hopefully those will read just fine most of the time on tvs...

[Datschge]

German :

ä  ü  ö  é

There is also ß for German.

[PacoChan]

That font looks very good. You could use that font in your translation, so, if someone wants to translate ToD2 from english to his language using your translation, he would already have the font done.

[Leiw]

There is also ß for German.

true but I don't have a german keyboard so I couldn't input it 
is there any special ALT+(Number) combination for this?
I can't use charmap because I removed it with nLite


by the way, I looked up a dictionnary and French has a few more characters (those are not used often) :
ù  û  ü  ÿ  ô  î  ä


And well if Cless allows us to do translations based on his English script when it's final, I might be able to provide some help for a French and German translation

[Datschge]

is there any special ALT+(Number) combination for this?

Google is your friend, one useful hit there: http://www.xplor.org/charactermap.cfm

[bungiefan]

true but I don't have a german keyboard so I couldn't input it 
is there any special ALT+(Number) combination for this?
I can't use charmap because I removed it with nLite


by the way, I looked up a dictionnary and French has a few more characters (those are not used often) :
ù  û  ü  ÿ  ô  î  ä


And well if Cless allows us to do translations based on his English script when it's final, I might be able to provide some help for a French and German translation

You don't need a German keyboard. Just tell your OS to switch to that keyboard layout and it will map the characters to the proper buttons, regardless of what the ink painted on them says they should type. The paint on your keyboard is only there for if you don't know the layout by touch. It's the software that actually interprets what each button should type, and you can change that on all modern OSes to be a different keyboard layout. Thus if you are familiar with Dvorak and not QWERTY, you can tell your OS to use Dvorak even if you only have keyboards labeled for QWERTY. It's the same when dealing with foreign keyboard layouts.