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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - ROM Hacking - Chrono Trigger Japanese Script & Retranslation Project |
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xZeaLitYx Paragoomba                   Since: 11-17-05 Last post: 6311 days Last view: 6310 days |
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| Hey guys, I'm going to go ahead and put this in rom hacking since JLukas did undertake a good portion of it to extrapolate the Japanese script. The retranslation doesn't really involve rom hacking, I guess, but...guess it's rooted in it or something.
~ For over a decade, American fans of Chrono Trigger have wondered how the game originally appeared in Japan. While Ted Woolsey did a fantastic job making Trigger accessible to English-speaking audiences, some text was cut and altered according to Nintendo of America's censor standards. Today, thanks to JLukas, I am able to present to you the Japanese script of Chrono Trigger! It is saved in Unicode format and contains every text string from the original game. It is currently divided up into string blocks as they are stored in the game. Download the Script 
But there's one problem, of course: it's in Japanese! To penetrate the mysteries contained in the original script, the Chrono Compendium is launching its own Chrono Trigger Retranslation. It will tentatively be accomplished by fans of the games who know Japanese; these contributing translators can come and go as they wish, doing as little or much as they desire. We will make every effort to involve great linguistic talent with the project; soon, we hope to present you a fully retranslated script. If you know anyone who would be interested in helping translate, please let them know about the project or have them e-mail Zeality@gmail.com. We need your assistance; we appreciate it! |
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Xenesis Blipper   Since: 11-19-05 From: Australia Last post: 6284 days Last view: 6283 days |
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| Hmm, I should get stuck into some of this.
Anything to keep my japanese from going rusty. |
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Heian-794 Red Paratroopa Since: 01-02-06 Last post: 6284 days Last view: 6318 days |
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| I would love to work on this! The "come and go" part is good as sometimes I have plenty of time to do this stuff and other times I'm too busy.
One very important question: what kind of limits will there be on text length? Should we retranslators stick to the number of bytes in the original? I have no idea what kind of multi-character strings are being used in the English CT. Could all those bytes devoted to kanji be reassigned to words or parts of words in English so that we could write nice long lines of text? Second important question: have any decisions been made on the speech styles in different periods? For example, will the ungrammatical baby talk of 65M BC be kept? At the least, all the mistakes in the medieval English used in 600 AD should be cleaned up. It was probably intentional, but this goofiness didn't match up with the somewhat-serious original speech style at all. And has anyone spoken for any parts already? If not, I'll start with, say, the 600 AD text. If someone's got that, give me 12000 BC. |
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Dragonsbrethren   440   Since: 12-01-05 From: New Jersey Last post: 6470 days Last view: 6470 days |
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| Prepare to take a lot of flak for this, even though you're doing it for research purposes. There will always be those who will feel the need to attack this project for the simple fact that you're translating a game that's already been translated. Try not to let their words get to you.
That being said, I wish you guys luck, I'm sure you'll find a lot of interesting stuff that never made it into the US release. How far do you plan on taking the project? Just a retranslation of the script or will you actually be inserting it into the ROM? |
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Dwedit Rope フクト オン フォニクス  Since: 11-17-05 From: Chicago! Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6284 days |
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| I'm sure you'll get even more flak from the dragon quest fans who are pissed that FF4 and 6 have been retranslated, while DQ6 is still incompleete. | |||
d4s Shyguy  Since: 12-01-05 Last post: 6405 days Last view: 6303 days |
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| yet another ct retranslation?
anyway, good luck. |
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JLukas Goomba Since: 11-19-05 From: USA Last post: 6434 days Last view: 6434 days |
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Originally posted by Heian-794 Sent a PM Re: questions  |
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xZeaLitYx Paragoomba Since: 11-17-05 Last post: 6311 days Last view: 6310 days |
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| Yeah, I realize. CT has already been translated, and it's already being retranslated by RPGOne. However, RPGOne plans to do Dragon Quest 3 before Chrono Trigger, and on top of that, its main programmer and translator is currently going through a rough time. We're going to go ahead and take the bull by the horns. We've got about 3 volunteers from OCR, 2 from this thread, and 1 at the Compendium already, in addition to about 2 people who said they could help if things got desperate. I'm just floored by the contributions! I thought it'd be like, we'd only have one guy working at a time, and there would be periods of drought. But looks like it'll work! | |||
asdf Link's Awakening ಠ_ಠ  Since: 11-18-05 Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6283 days |
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| A rough time, huh? RPGOne seems notorious for its staff members having a "rough time". I swear that every time they do a translation, one of their translator's family members die or something. And they put tributes in their translations. But...*ahem*...
It looks like this is going smoothly so far. Chrono Trigger is one of my all-time favorite games, and seeing it re-translated would please me to no end. Good luck, guys! I hope you don't run into any problems along the way. |
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Rom Manic Since: 12-18-05 From: Detroit, WHAT?! Last post: 6283 days Last view: 6283 days |
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| Can I ask what the point of this is? It's already in English and in both PAL and NTSC format... | |||
The Kins Hoarder  Since: 11-18-05 From: Hurf. Last post: 6297 days Last view: 6283 days |
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Originally posted by Rom ManicHello! I'm the original post! I desire, no, CRAVE being READ!
Originally posted by DragonsbrethrenThe problem with some retranslations is that they are too, how to say, literal. As long as this group keeps things worth reading without six-screen long ways of saying "Esper", it'll be fine. |
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Dragonsbrethren 440 Since: 12-01-05 From: New Jersey Last post: 6470 days Last view: 6470 days |
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| If I suggested this to "someone" he'd probably flip out about it, but why not just build off of Woolsey's translation? Keep what was good, add in what had to be cut, change what was wrong. What I'm trying to say is retranslate the whole script to get everything, but write it into the official translation. Keep it readable and keep it as good as the original, a lot less people will feel it was a waste of time. | |||
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RyogaMasaki Newcomer Since: 01-16-06 From: Orlando, FL Last post: 6664 days Last view: 6664 days |
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| As one of the translators, finding that balance between literal and readable is daunting sometimes. There's alot of nuance in some Japanese that's really hard to convey in english and still make it sound good, hehe.
As for Woolsey's translation, I think it's a good point of reference for us for things like names (I often like to point out that Schala should, indeed, be Schala instead of Sara, the 'traditional' transliterated name), but I don't think there'd be a need to modify his script with the differences. I think if the translators just put a little extra effort in the translations it'll sound fine. =) |
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Dragonsbrethren 440 Since: 12-01-05 From: New Jersey Last post: 6470 days Last view: 6470 days |
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| Heh, Schala is one of the few things I wouldn't mind seeing changed, I think this is part of the... policy (I can't think of a better term) they had back then about using "real" or common names in translations. | |||
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xZeaLitYx Paragoomba Since: 11-17-05 Last post: 6311 days Last view: 6310 days |
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| Well, do keep in mind that our first objective is to fact-find and make a retranslated script. For an actual rom hack, the script can be edited to be more presentable and in line with community desires. So the first result is not necessarily the final.
I wish I could promote it more...I've been immersing myself in the Chrono Cross encyclopedia at present, so I haven't even followed up on asking a few fansub groups if they have any Trigger fans in the ranks (someone gave me the name of one and advised me to do this). But with the Cross encyclopedia, the huge foundation of my site will finally be done. (edited by xZeaLitYx on 01-19-06 11:11 PM) |
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RyogaMasaki Newcomer Since: 01-16-06 From: Orlando, FL Last post: 6664 days Last view: 6664 days |
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Originally posted by Dragonsbrethren Warning! This is a long boring post! =) Foreign names are always so touchy in Japanese, and in my opinion, when transliterating them to english, you have to take context into account. Schala and all of Zeal don't speak Japanese, seeing as how it's a fictional location. To transliterate words from their language (like names) into Japanese, a language which doesn't have as wide of a range of sound as say, English, would require some concession on 'correct' pronunciation. When it comes to things like katakana names, you must remember that it's all pronunciation, not 'meaning' per se. Which is where assumption comes into play. We can assume that, since a number of the names from Zeal (Dalton, Blackbird, even Zeal itself) obviously use Japanese phonics to pronounce a natively unpronouncable word (Daruton, Burakkubaado, Jiiru/Ziiru), that ALL katakana names in that area are also not natively pronouncable in Japanese, and have been 'converted.' Unfortunately, since Japanese is our source, we as translators have to make educated guesses on things like names, hehe. Alot of the time, for games and anime both, character designers/script writers/manga artists/whoever make 'official' names for them, written in their foreign language (most of the time, english). They're then transliterated to Japanese to make them readable by the populace, with as close to the original pronunciation as possible. However, translating this back to English will produce different results, much like running the same phrase on babelfish into one language and then back.  For example, Chrono Trigger -> ƒN?Eƒm?EƒgƒŠƒK?[ -> KURONO TORIGAA. The problem is, how do you put these names BACK in english properly, and still be true to the Japanese? Educated guesswork, or hope that the original producers created their foreign characters with their foreign names originally, instead of in Japanese from the start.
Now, I like to think that Ted Woolsey, working at Square, probably had access to quite an amount of internal resources, probably some among those being original notes and names and such. THEREFORE... (here's the point of all this!) I personally believe that all the foreign names in the game are correctly transliterated to English already (except blatantly wrong ones, such as Masamune vs Grandleon). Zeality, I understand that the point of this so far is to just get the facts, a 100% correct translation, but proper pronunciation is part of that. Make a note in the beginning explaining how foreign names work in Japanese, about what it really looks like in romaji, and then use the correctly pronounced names in the script. Otherwise we're gonna be facing questions like 'Is it Zeal or Jeal? Kajar or Kajal? Shilverd or Shilvard or Silvard?' All of this IMO, of course. I'll just go with the will of the majority of the project. =) (edited by RyogaMasaki on 01-20-06 02:12 PM) |
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xZeaLitYx Paragoomba Since: 11-17-05 Last post: 6311 days Last view: 6310 days |
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| Oh, that's fine. Right now, some things are coming out with romaji. Before we release the script, Find & Replace can remedy the names. I don't see any real value in keeping Engrish, so we'll take care of it. The things that are actually different in the Japanese will, as you suggested, be annotated in a section preceding the script. | |||
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Rom Manic Since: 12-18-05 From: Detroit, WHAT?! Last post: 6283 days Last view: 6283 days |
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| Can you make a changelog for it? Like, what was changed because of Ted Woosleys apparently shitty translation job? | |||
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xZeaLitYx Paragoomba Since: 11-17-05 Last post: 6311 days Last view: 6310 days |
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| Yeah, that's how the new script will be painstakingly organized. It'll be like:
~ Long before you were born... ...there was a kingdom where magic flourished. Everyone there could use it! But in time, people began to abuse their powers. It got so bad that no one was allowed to use magic except wizards. おめーらの生まれるずっと昔…… 魔法でさかえた王国、あった。その世界、みんな魔法使った。 けどその王国、魔力におぼれほろびた……。 それから人は魔法を使えなくなった。魔族以外はな。 A zillion years before you brats were born... There was a kingdom where magic thrived. In that world, everybody could use it. But that kingdom drowned in its own power... Since then, people haven't been able to use magic. Well, except for the Mystics, right? ~ We're still debating exactly the best way to format this system, since it can get a little out of hand (considering every line in the game will be accented by its original Japanese and a translated line, effectively bloating the script three times its size). |
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Tauwasser Red Goomba  Since: 11-19-05 Last post: 6375 days Last view: 6295 days |
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| I heard there are some fine organizing tools around for translating purposes. At least you could use Excel tables for a start, just to keep it organized in a manner everybody is likely able to read out.
TRADOS being one of them. Others are open source like OmegaT Just a thought 
cYa, Tauwasser |
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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - ROM Hacking - Chrono Trigger Japanese Script & Retranslation Project |
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