Second Draft, Part 2 + Many Other Things
Been real busy with real life stuff, but also been working hard on Draft 2 and other things whenever possible.
First, the whole thing about text “blocks” seems to confuse people, so I figure I’ll try to give progress with an approximate # of lines done. There are 7658 lines total, and as of right now, I’ve finished 498. So the second draft is like 6.5% done. For those following with the map viewer, the latest stuff was maps 11-14.
But, like I mentioned before, there’s a lot of re-used text, and counting all that + other special cases, Draft 2 is now technically closer to the 25% mark. For some reason, each hot spring map includes the text for every other hot spring too, so that’s the biggest reason for the sudden jump.
Anyway, here are some pics from the latest stuff. These are just for fun, please don’t over-analyze them, especially since they’re going to be looked at again by fresh eyes soon enough anyway 😛
Hot spring haiku 
The stuff this cow says will
so be used for immature jokes
You smell 
om nom nom
It’ll be kind of hard to give approximate line counts since there’s no easy way to do it, but it’s probably better than giving text block counts, since blocks vary in size and people are sometimes confused by the term. But this sudden jump to 25% is the same reason I said that later on text blocks would just fly by faster and faster. Things won’t jump forward quite this quickly anymore, sadly 😛 There may be smaller jumps, though.
In the meantime, Jeff’s still hacking away at all sorts of things, fixing bugs, finding little things here and there. It’s a cool feeling to know that stuff is progressing on all fronts at such a nice rate. Things are moving faster than even I expected.
Oh yeah, earlier I tried an idea on how to fix the weird text “morphing” that happens in some menus with sprite text. It didn’t work out so well, but I’ll give it a better try later, when I’m not busy fixing/re-translating/re-writing.
Oh yeah part 2, Jeff tried out a new hash algorithm for sprite text stuff. It seems to work as well as we need it to, though it does make things slow down an ever-so-tiny amount. Probably not too hard to speed it up though. I get the feeling sprite text will still continue to haunt us until the day the patch is released, though. That galdarn menu programmer. Can probably cross that off the to-do list now though.
Oh yeah part 3, I actually should make this its own post, but I want to get an idea of what post-patch release work is going to entail. We’re going to help people translate the game into other languages, but it’d be nice to know about how many languages/people we’ll be working with. A French and Spanish translation are already a given, and I have people in mind for those, but if there are other *skilled* translators out there who want to translate this into their language, let us know. Non-English translations won’t begin until after the English patch is out, but this way we can add extra letters into the font and stuff to make future work easier. So let us know.
Whew, what a big update for something so unmonumental 😛
A Spanish translation would be awesome 🙂
so would a release date that said 5/29/08
Keep up the good work man! We’re counting on ya’ll!
I wanna help with a Spanish translation!!
Arigato Gosimasu Mato-san!
P.S. Don’t respond in Japanese because I still don’t know Japanese (unfortunately).
it looks like it’s done.
i want to play it now, gimme.
this is great! everything seems to be moving along wonderfully. i can’t wait, and it seems i won’t have to for too much longer.
spahgettios: I dunno, this(warning! spoilers in related videos!!) doesn’t seem very “done” to me 😛
Mato, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Mato. Will you stop, Mato? Stop, Mato. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Mato. Mato, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid….
sadly seeing someone type “i wanna” does not make me feel too secure to let them do a translation
Like I said, I already got people in mind for the Spanish and French translations. I’m mostly curious how many other translations there’ll be, so I can figure out how much booze and coffee to stock up on for later in the year 😉
I laughed pretty hard at Lucas in that video.
Also, is dat sum Moonside?
Mato, ProTip: stock up on lots of booze, and even more coffee.
Great work! I can’t believe how quickly things are progressing. I’d offer to do the Chinese translation for Mother 3, but I think when I leave China next month, there will be no more Mother fans in the country!
Didn’t they hack EB to Spanish? I remember seeing it somewhere… Mato and gang, the work you’ve done is phenominal. I can’t wait! 🙂
Dude. Like, totally. Tubular.
You keep exceeding my expectations and giving me more hope. <y anticipation for his game might just make me explode before you release the patch. Thank you for something to look forward to reading every few days… I will miss this devblog when you are done~
(you read something else in this comment, but it was insignificant)
The thing about a Chinese translation is that none of this work is necessary for it. The game is set up perfectly for a Chinese translation, so I’m kind of shocked there isn’t one already. I’m assuming there isn’t one yet, because we still get plenty of hits from Chinese forums. Dunno what Chinese translators are waiting for, there’s a font bank of like 1000-2000 letters already in the game, most of it kanji, and it’s in SJIS or some standard form. Slight alterations to the font would be simple to get correct hanzi. Oh well.
I really hope there won’t be too many non-European language people wanting to translate this game. Most of the hacks and everything have been done with European languages in mind.
It’s not only that I want. It’s the fact that I think I’m able to do it, and do it fine.
geez, it almost done right?.., i’ve been watching this for over a year now….*raises glass* cheers to you mato!
More good news!
How about an Al Bhed Translation?
Well Mato it’s looking very nice.
I’m just glad to see that much of the quirkyness, like Earthbound’s, is being passed on in similar fashion to the translation.
Ups to how much thinking it took you to make it not sound so “concrete”.
TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT? So quickly?
You keep saying this is going to take six more months at least, then you come out with a huge leap forward. You’re confusing me!
“Mato…
Jeffman…
I wish you luck…”
*Mato wakes up from his coffee-induced slumber*
Mato when you stock up on coffee, be sure to get the “special” Saturn Valley Blend.
Also… I fail to “see” anything in that video that is a spoiler, although I did “hear” something that may be indicative of a spoiler in the third screen.
You keep saying this is going to take six more months at least, then you come out with a huge leap forward. You’re confusing me!
Here’s a word of advice. Simply don’t expect it to be done any time soon. That way, you won’t be disappointed by what sounds like a far-off date. And if six months is a modest estimate that turns out to be a stretch, you will be pleasantly surprised by the early release.
Don’t underestimate (starmen.net joke here, etc.) the incredible difficulty of a project such as this. There’s still a considerable amount to be done and all we can do is wait, really. Major progress is not an automatic indicator of an earlier release.
Lothis: The “related videos” will often have spoilers. Which is the warning I gave.
I could translate the script into Latin. I don’t know if there would be any demand whatsoever for it, but I am throwing out there that I would enjoy the opportunity.
Man those screenshots look fantastic… especially the “…But not that way!” one. That one in particular makes me happy that the game still has the distinctly Earthboundy sense of humor.
I’m so stoked for this.
You should translate the game into Japanese. :p
You can close the Related Videos thing to avoid spoilers, yay 🙂
And wow surprise after surprise. Hope you’re enjoying script revision more than you are enjoying haxing 🙂
Also I demand a Korean translation :V Also arabic.
BTW, while I’m still awake, I recommend checking out Gideon’s Live-A-Live translation, the new powered-up awesome version was just finished. Haven’t played it yet, but it looks light years better than the old one from years ago. I even did some stuff for it years ago too, though I don’t remember much and it was probably not that great 😛
So if you want some fun distraction, go forth!
Holy crap. The multiple font thing is is a really neat touch. I’m impressed!
Don’t worry about all the ass people freakin out about the blocks Mato. I’m sure they’re just starting to take your GENEROUS updates for granted. Regardless we all appreciate the updates no matter what’s in them. Keep up the amazing work.
beautiful. its great to see things coming together.
Heh… cool video. I didn’t know Mother 3 had a Moonside! Without videos like that, it’s hard to understand exactly what you mean when you say “still some minor hacking left to be done”.
If you ever have a slow news day, so to speak, maybe you could get Jeffman to post and tell us what bugs he’s been squishing.
NICE way to go mato
hey did u no that:
the only reason chuck norris doesnt kill jackie chan is because he likes chris tucker movies
how much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck norris? none.
if u say chick norris accidentally in front of a mirror its instant death.
you can do things 3 ways the right way the wrong way or the chuck norris way, thats the wrong way with a whole bunch of roundhouse kicks
only one woman can have chuck noriss’ baby and thats wonder woman
it would be impossible for 4kids to make the super special awesome chuck norris show because of violence
theres 2 types of women in this world the ones who slept with chuck norris and the ones who want to sleep with him again
girls=. chuck norris /girl=!
if u say anything bad about chuck norris u get the middle finger and thats how long u have to live
the only time chuck norris was stuck between a rock and a hard spot was when he was between two mirrors
no one is more super special awesome than chuck norris
sirron kcuhc naht retteb si otam dna namffej
OH HEY.
I WANT SOME MILK. 😀
OH BABY! MILK WENT UP BY 3!
> Arigato Gosimasu Mato-san!
You mean arigatou gozaimasu (ありがとうございます) if you want to say thank you very much 🙂 Even if you don’t romanize the long o at the end of arigatiou somehow, it’s zai, not ‘si’ (a syllable that doesn’t actually exist in Japanese–they have ‘shi’ in its place). And yes, ‘ai’ is pronounced as the word ‘I’ because the two vowels (ahh, eeee) sort of blur together a little.
—-
Mato:
Glad the hash worked out / didn’t cause too much slowdown. Once dispersion became a problem, I didn’t think there were any faster hashes that would still work. If speed is a problem, I just hope there’s some way to optimize something else and get rid of whatever useless things it’s doing.
If you can find any loops, there’s got to be something you can trace and squish down a little. Or at least, you’d think there ought to be 🙂
And WOW! Live-a-Live is finally done? Sweet! Now if they can finish up Laplace no Ma and then you finish M3… 🙂
i think its safe to say that “……” is totally out of his mind
“Mato, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Mato. Will you stop, Mato? Stop, Mato. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Mato. Mato, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a… fraid….”
wow.
Wow. It’s bad to get your hopes up, but I can see this finishing earlier than expected if you carry on this way 😐
Keep it up guys, it’s looking great!
I wouldn’t mind seeing this translated to Moonsidian.
“There’s writing not carved into the tree.
You didn’t read it, but it was something of importance.”
Keep up the good work…DOING!
tree.. si… de mon…side… carving carving tree de mon… side…
I have this strange urge to publish an Al Bhed translation shortly after the patch comes out after what Genowolf said, mostly because, if I recall, it’s a simple 1:1 substitution, and I wrote a program ages ago that did it.
Great work team!, you guys seriously kick rump!
Rince:If you are indeed the author of that Al Bhed translator, I think I still have it floating around in my hard drive lol. From way back in my FFX Crazy days 😛
I doubt it – I wrote a really lame one that was command-line only and had two binaries for the encode and decode. 🙂
If so, though, I’ll be really amused.
Oh baby! Project completion went up by 25 percent!
Just asking though: are you guys gonna fix the name boxes again in the final draft?
Ahh of course Mato, I didn’t even think about that. Yeah that’s how M3 got spoiled for me was those darned related videos… I haven’t played it yet I know all of the shocking plot twists ;(
I guess I didn’t even notice that your warning specifically said realted videos… eh well it was like 2 A.M. and I was tired lol
thanks a lot Mato ^_^ i can’t wait to try it out
Mato I can translate to spanish but i dont now anything about hacking if i can help you e-mail me at pokemaniac.is.reyes@gmail.com
I took two classes in [insert foreign language here] in high school! Truly I am the right man for the job!
“For some reason, each hot spring map includes the text for every other hot spring too, so that’s the biggest reason for the sudden jump.”
Perhaps they originally thought about using the same map for all fo the hot springs and making a flag for which text to display.
Anyway, great progress, this is going much faster, and steadier than and other translation project ever. I thank you for that! keep up the amazing work!
I said before that I want to translate it into Brazilian Portuguese, so I’ll need a lot of accents like á é í ó ú ã õ â ê ô à ü and ç – and caps too… I guess if I forgot some…
And… Hummm… How can I translate Earthbound (MOTHER 2) too?
Thanks!
Could we have Mitch’s comics packed in next to the final patch? That way any translations in another language can be included with wonderful comics that illustrate the sweat and tears that went into it.
TRANSLATION
I could do the swedish translation if there’s room for three characters somewhere in the font. I’ve fiddled with NES translations before where I’ve simply replaced QWZ since they’re the most uncommon letters in the Swedish alphabet, although Mother 3 might use these for names. But if there are tools and all the hacking is done, then I’d love to give it a shot.
Where do I sign up?
Wow. There’s a Moonside palette in M3? What’s next? Sprites of Ness or a hidden hippie battle? I LOL’D
I could help for an Italian translation 😛
Like Foffano said, he wants to translate it to brazilian portuguese. If you don’t mind, Foffano, I’ll translate it individualy to portuguese from Portugal.
This is turning out to be amazing Mato, keep up the good work!
“Just asking though: are you guys gonna fix the name boxes again in the final draft?”
There isn’t any more fixing to be done. If you’re talking about the boxes not being shorter when the name is something like “Cow”, that’s because the name boxes have a minimum width, after which they are stretched to fit bigger names. It worked the same way in the Japanese version.
I am just amazed and in awe on how much work was done up to this point in just one year. For those of you wanting Arabic, Hebrew, etc. translations, then you’re going to have to wait until the text go from left to right. So it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
As well, we shouldn’t translate a game into a language unless there is a certain audience involved that wants it. Like, I wouldn’t translate the game into Hebrew, because I know there are probably a total of 2 or 3 Earthbound fans in Israel, excluding me. As far as Arabic goes, there are 80 or so different symbols.
But if someone translates it into Latin, I will be happy. I took Latin in High School and forgot most of it, and playing a game in Latin would be a way to remind myself. So thumbs up for that.
Ohh, quick someone request a Bantu translation!
BreakingOrder: Ok, I think this way will be better, because there are a lot of words and expressions that are very different in Brazil and Portugal. ^_^
It’s great how mato and sm.net go through all the trouble of leaving out or warning before a link to spoilers. And then people just start discussing them all over this blog.
I volunteer to translation this into SMS English.
go wherevs ur <3 takes u! LOL.
I could do an Indonesian translation but noone knows of MOTHER 3 here.
DO YOU WANT SLUMBER?
KAY-O!
Hey, someone should put a hit counter on this site to see how many people actually visit it. I think it would be interesting! I’m guessing Reid would be in charge of that?
AGAIN! Every time you say it’ll take a bagillion years to do, something happens and things speed up. There’s almost always a “breakthrough” that makes everyone happy. It makes me happy to see that some of this is going easier than expected. Unless I’m totally in the dark, isn’t translating something you’ve wanted to enjoy/are enjoyING?
Woo! good job guys! as for the text for all the hot springs in one spot, it could be they had an idea of what they wanted for each hotspring to say or such, and they just had it grab the text from there, so they could get it out of the way, just like it worked in the translation =D
Thanius: What are the three letters?
I’m a professional pig latin translator. and I’d love to have this game in the Latin Pig’s native tongue to minister to them the glories of mother three. Please let me do this.
Also, please give me some golden nuggets and a picnic lunch (the ones with the little octopus wieners, not the one with cake) and mail them to Nigeria.
The language I’m most fluent in is Dutch, so I could help with a dutch translation, although I think most dutch people already speak english, but it would be nice. Otherwise I have some proficiency in German, Russian, and Korean. But I’ve been so busy with work lately that my language skills may be getting rusty. Oh, and I’m also proficient in Frisian, but I doubt that there’s going to be a high demand for a Frisian patch of M3.
Oh, and Kiswahili. Are there any Kenyan/Tanzanian Mother fans out there?
Translating it into OTHER languages?!? o_0
That’s awesome!
Mato, the letters Thanius mentioned are Å, Ä and Ö. They’re distinct letters in the Swedish alphabet. That’s about all I know about Swedish, other than that I think verbs don’t conjugate for person, and to say “the”-something you put a suffix on the end of the word instead of the beginning (-en, -et) and the plural usually ends in -r. Did I get that right, my Swedish friends?
Zip Code Ness: I’m surprised that someone actually supports the idea of translating the game into Latin.
I’ve actually contemplated trying to translate other games into Latin, for educational purposes (after all, that is all the language is relegated to nowadays). But I’m a novice programmer at best, so hacking a ROM myself just wouldn’t work. =P
Please, make a swedish translation for this game when this translation patch is done!
Cant wait to see one Mother/Earthbound game in Swedish for the first time in my life!! :D:D:D
Go, Mato! 😀
I could also help with a Latin translation. I’m not a professional (do they even exist?), but why not? Maybe we could go for some kind of record for most languages or somthing. I can see it now:
INTRA UNUVERSUM MATRIS III
I still want an Engrish patch :\
Change UNUVERSUM to UNIVERSUM, sorry.
Latin translatoin? I’m in.
I just beat the robot part of Live-a-Live. With any luck, I’ll finish it around the time M3 comes out (or maybe they’ll finish & I’ll play Laplace no Ma in the mean time).
I see that you did some translation for Live-a-Live. Thanks, Mato! 🙂
Itsaplanet: I’m assuming almost no one knows the Mother series in Portugal as well, even so I’m doing it since I’ve always wanted to do some voluntary translation work 😛 And I think you would feel great to play a game you translated, don’t you think?
I would like to help with a dutch translation
Characters for a brazilian portuguese translation would be very nice… Foffano already mentioned it, and I think he didn’t forget any:
â Â à À á Á ã Ã / é É ê Ê / í Í / õ Õ ô Ô ó Ó / ü Ü ú Ú / ç Ç
or (in another order)
á é í ó ú / â ê ô / ã õ / à / ü / ç
Á É Í Ó Ú / Â Ê Ô / Ã Õ / À / Ü / Ç
I’d like to help translate it into brazilian portuguese, but I can’t read japanese =/. I can only translate from english to portuguese… if this can be of any help I’d be glad to participate =D
HOLY CRAP GID FINISHED THE NEW LIVE-A-LIVE TRANSLATION?!
The old patch wasn’t really even finished…
I was almost as excited for the new Live-a-Live patch as I am for Mother 3
Mato, its great that you’ll be helping people translate this game into other languages.
Good luck finishing the patch!
Sweet. Live A Live is out. Again.
*goes to check it out*
Oh man, am I glad that I decided to wait. It looks like this is going to be awesome.
Hoorah! for progress.
It would be hilarious if you got Google Translate to do this.
Could you imagine?
“person send wherever heart adventure.
… object except no direction!!”
XD
But yeah. ‘Grats on the progress leap! 😀
Actually, a long while ago someone made a little program that analyzes the text at the bottom of the screen, runs it through an automated translator, and spits it out into English. The results were funny, but it was also a neat little idea.
See it and pics here
Keep up the work. im playing the game for the first time in Japanese and i know im missing stuff but its still great. cant wait for you all to finish. good luck!
sidenote: ive got my girlfriend playing Earthbound for the first time. she loves it.
Hehe, someone should translate it to swedish just for ownage^^
Ahahaha, I was expecting some mention of the Live-A-Live release. That one’s one of my favorite games, and the excitement I had last night when I saw that the new translation was out made me think of how much MORE I’ll be excited when this patch is finally done.
My boyfriend is a native Norwegian speaker, and if he could use the tools to translate the game into Norwegian, that would at the very least be an AWESOME way for me to learn the language (since I at least need it to talk to his mom)! His English is nearly perfect, too– it’s about on-par with his Norwegian, it seems– so he could do it competently. Norwegian has just three non-English characters: æ, ø, and å (and their respective upper-case forms), so it wouldn’t require too much effort in changing the font. I’m sure he could prove his competency somehow, if need be, although he wouldn’t be able to translate direct from the Japanese, if that’s required… Also, for what it’s worth, I’m sure there’s an audience for that language, although most people who speak Norwegian know at least some English.
Also, funny that this ends up being my first post on here! Been watching this translation since sometime last year, checking just about every day. Really looking forward to playing this when it comes out! I can’t even let myself go past the title screen in the Japanese, and I’ve been avoiding spoilers this whole time (it’s fairly easy, since I don’t have Brawl), just so I can see it the way it would have been meant to be in English. I’d rather experience the story in English and then come back to it for extra nuances when I can actually read some Japanese without resorting to automated translators. … And that won’t happen until I know Norwegian at least decently!
Lol, I looked at the topic on that translator that you posted a link to, Tomato, and that was just hilarious.
Either way, awesome update, can’t wait 🙂
You mentioned before you have found a ton of unused stuff, do you think you could post some of it?
I already have in the starmen.net M3 spoiler board.
I can translate the game into engarish if you want me to. Oh wait…
DON’T translate it into Dutch! XD
Although I’m Dutch, please don’t translate it into Dutch. I really prefer to play my games in English. Mostly because Dutch translations suck, but i just find Dutch-translated games much less enjoyable. I find it ugly to read. (Although Beyond good and evil was an exception. It had really good Dutch voices, and very well translated text).
And, as was already mentioned, most Dutch people, and all Dutch gamers, en especially all Dutch gamers who are interested in Mother 3, can read and speak English very well. (i guess. No, wait, I hope XD )
Do you guys make Dutch Apple Pie? Or is that actually an American thing that uses Dutch ovens?
Mato, this is not a time for silly questions.
Well, Dutch apple pie comes from our Golden Age (1626) and is really a Dutch recipe.
But i guess your kidding, mato XD
Apple pie is tasty, though. My girlfriend disgusts it, however.
But enough Apple Pie science.
Wow.At this point,you’re doing so good,even Gigyas is intrested…
Yeah, I figured the Nederlandse fans wouldn’t want a version in their own language. (Too proud, imho) but sometimes I do think that even well educated dutch speakers don’t catch all the nuances of reading/writing/speaking English – bijvoorbeeld, G@MIE: dat jij gebruikt “en” in plaats van “and”, ook dat zin zou: “My girlfriend is disgusted by it” or “it disgusts my girlfriend.” Oh well, but it’s not a big deal, so nevermind. Sometimes I think I learned just about the most useless language in the world, except for translating old family letters for my grandparents. Beh.
BR Portuguese Translation, right here!
An Al Bhed translation? Then certainly we can leave out Melnics.
On a more serious note, I think adding the ß character would be a good idea in case someone wants to translate it to German.
“For some reason, each hot spring map includes the text for every other hot spring too”
Man, this game coding just keeps getting weirder and weirder. Who knows what those guys were thinking when they thought all these roundabout ways to go about things.
Anyways, keep it up, keep on truckin’, etc…
Ich muss Deutsch lernen,
aber kein Ubersetzen?
Niemand liebest mir.
Let’s translate it BACK TO JAPANESE.
Goldy ist traurig
aber niemand hat gesagt,
“kein Übersetzung.”
@Nutsjesmoar
The “En and And” thing was just a fast-writing typo. And my Grammar, I’m not perfect. I know the difference now you’ve put the two sentences together. (it could confuse people into thinking that my girlfriend is disgusted by me not liking apple pie XD )
And the proud thing, I don’t really know. I just prefer my games in English, that’s all.
A response… in German,
and a Haiku, impressive.
I’ll stick to English
@G@mie: lol, I understand. Actually, I think I made some mistakes in my dutch sentences there.. 😛 I’m a hypocrite.
Ah, it’s my mistake.
Meant to say Uebersetzer.
It is getting late.
Naah, I understand. Sometimes when I write text in english I don’t see it being somewhat agressive or overly proud or arrogant. In Dutch, it doesn’t matter, because in Dutch you need more words to say something. Also, Dutch IS somewhat of a proud language to new ears.
Your Dutch is rather good, actually. It’s a really difficult language. I forgot the word for it, but maybe you know it in Dutch. Werkwoorden. Onregelmatige werkwoorden. 😉
That’s the though part. And pronunciation. It’s kind of a “hard” language to speak.
Oh, jajaja, those irregular verbs drive me crazy sometimes! I think the pronunciation is fun though. My friends think I’m joking when I pronounce it. At this point, it’s mostly in little cultural differences and odd expressions where I get lost. It took me a loong time to figure out what things “alles kits” and “weten van wanten” are all about. 😀
lol “Al Bhed” Has anyone actually learned to speak it? Also I’m surprised that no one has yet mentioned Klingon.
@Karol: Ur, oac, uv luinca! Ed ec dra sucd payidevim myhkiyka ajan eh dra funmt, tuh’d oui drehg?
I need to learn it for my ultimate fantasy three-way makeout session with Yuna and Rikku. Someday, someday…
Yeah, we really got too mutch odd expressions. But hey, i just recently (Last year) found out the difference betweent To and Too XD So nobody’s perfect!
So no problem, You know what they say…
Verstand komt met de jaren XD
Dutch posts are confusing me.
Maybe Mato should decide what he wants to do several months after the break of an English translation?
Nobody better say they want a British English translation…
Well Arashi, now that you mention it…
我喜欢妈妈三
@Anna: Why did I know someone would say something like that the moment I posted it?
I say, Duster old chap! Might I impose upon you to staple this wall for us?
Well, Lucas, my good man, I dare say I would need to rearrange some items in my schedule(pr: “ssshedjyule”) but that sounds like a bully idea! Righty ho!
Ha ha, Mato. Apple pies don’t get made in Dutch ovens. Anyone with a vile boyfriend knows better. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dutch+oven
It had to be said XD
We also need a Mr. T translation.
lol, not to mention that Star Trek language and Pig Latin
or logjam or esperanto…
Lucas: Listen up, fool! I don’t need you givin’ me no back talk, we got ourselves an unscalable wall here, so you better cut the jive and get to staplin’ before I get mad, punk! Gonna PK Love you right into next week, sucka! ( 😐 sorry that sounded kind of wrong)
Duster: Look here, Squirt, you talkin’ some big bad fightin’ words there. Ain’t you supposed to be in school or somethin’? Mr. D pities the fool who don’t stay in school! Now drink your milk! Talkin’ bout, good for the kids, give ya strong bones.. don’t play me no jibber jabber, fool! But I’ll staple that wall, don’t you worry boy! Cos the names Mr. D! First name Mister, middle name period, last name D! Now step aside! I pity that wall!
What about 1337speak?
1|_|(@$: @11 ur th r be-
*GoldyK gets shot*
I’m an expert romhacker (not assembly-savvy, though) and I’ve already started translating Earthbound into Italian some time ago… I’m gonna complete it as soon as I have a bit of free time 🙂
I would be glad to help with the italian translation of Mother 3, as the Mother series it’s one of my favourite series ever… 🙂
If someone did a French trans I’d download it just to see if I could play it, but I’m not good enough to actually volunteer (which is a moot point since you have someone anyway).
Incidentally, if someone did remake it with Brit spellings of things I’d definitely download it. Every time I see “color” a small part of me dies. ;_;
I could translate this into 1337
I’M QUALIFIED.
“In Soviet Russia, wall staples you.”
I’d like to help with a Japanese translation. 🙂
And how come as soon as you mention other languages, people start talking Japanese? lol
Also, once the Spanish translation is made, I’d like to play through it just to help learn some spanish, since I’m trying, anyway.
Man this draft stuff is exhausting.
Anyway, I might’ve missed some stuff, so let me know if I forgot any.
-Spanish
-French
-Italian (how could I have forgotten this???)
-German (there’s a German EB patch so…)
-Swedish
-Portuguese A
-Portuguese B
Those are the only serious ones I’ve seen so far. By serious, I mean ones that a significant # of people will actually play, making our time/energy not a waste 😛 I’m not against Latin, that seems like a novelty rather than anything else. We’ll see.
I’ve heard that someone leaked the japanese translation online, but i can’t understand any of it. (of course I’m joking)
I remember you saying something about “releasing the hacking tool so others can translate it”
I’d be willing to do an Esperanto translation!
anybody..?
Still love the remark about the Flying Mouse :3
of course, if you find a one hundred year old language to be stuffy, you could always try Lojban…
Though I can’t make a contribution to the translation effort itself, maybe this Photoshop creation of mine will produce some good effect.
Mother 3 Tee
> (it could confuse people into thinking that my girlfriend is disgusted by me not liking apple pie XD )
Nope, it’s clear from context that you just had the wrong verb tense 🙂 English is a weird mongrel of a language sometimes. We have so many words, I don’t think anyone knows them all. I mean, there was a time when I had _no_ idea that “furth” was a word (though it makes a lot more sense when you realize that there’s a furth to go with further and furthest). I was reading a language blog where native speakers who are experts in the language were quite surprised to find a preposition they didn’t know 🙂 As you might imagine, nobody actually uses the word any more, though.
——-
Mato: Heh, you should just add the whole Latin charset 🙂 Just pick a font like MS Sans Serif and make your own version of the font with all the crazy letters 🙂
Of course, the hard part would be enabling those for input on the naming screen & such, right? I guess you could keep the main screen normal, then enable the other screen that would’ve had katakana input on it for all the other crazy chars or something.
But that’s best worried about while the rest of us are playing M3 in English 😉
I assume by Portuguese A and B, you mean European and Brazilian?
When you translate things on internet translators from english to Japanese and copy the Japanese text and translate the Japanese text back to English, you get the ye-olden-english type of stuff like that screen shot above
I pity the foo that thinks they can jibber jabber with the pig army.
Mato: If you only support the languages you’ve listed right off the bat, would you still be authorising and giving the tools to people who want to bring it into other languages? I’d go right ahead and make the letters needed for a possible Norwegian translation (as I mentioned before) myself, if I had a way to insert them, without you needing to place those three (six, I guess) letters in yourself. I wonder whether it’d be easier or harder (survey says: the latter) to make the extra characters in the font replaceable/addable by those wanting to translate, rather than placing them yourself, though…
If you don’t want to release it for other translations, oh well… It would just be nice for the possibilities to be there. I’ll check out the French translation when it’s out myself, anyway! I should brush up on my French so that I don’t forget it entirely, after all.
No, I’m asking now, ahead of time, because it would be easier to add support for all that stuff now. It’d probably be a difficult chore to translate the game without our tools, so if you want a Norwegian version, let me know what extra letters you need… unless it’s a crazy language with crazy letters. I hope it’s not.
I’d totally play a Latin patch for kicks.
What about a Japanese translation?
a Hylian translation is a must.
I’d just go ahead and add pretty much all the ‘normal’ funny chars that are in there 🙂
Here, this should cover what most languages use, I think.
« » ¡ ¿ (Don’t forget punctuation!)
À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ
à á â ã ä å æ
È É Ê Ë
è é ê ë
Ì Í Î Ï
ì í î ï
Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø
ò ó ô õ ö ø
Ù Ú Û Ü
ù ú û ü
ß Ç Ð Ñ Þ Ý Ÿ
ç ð ñ þ ý ÿ
(Sure, you don’t need an Icelandic thorn *now*, but…)
Zero, that is one awesome shirt:)
How on earth did you manage to make such an addicting site?
Hey Mato, this is my first time posting. I’m a game development student and I’ve taken a few classes in assembly. I’m also almost fluent in German. I’d be happy to put work in on a German version of the patch. Let me know if you need me.
That’s so cool, and you’re right. Immature jerks will use that cow as a basis of cruel and unfair..jokes.
Klingon translation for the win.
I don’t know how it happens, but sometimes weird coincidences between projects I’ve done occur. The latest weird coincidence being that Bahamut Lagoon had legendary dung with a quick story behind it, and so does this game. How odd.
Before I die, I want to create legendary dung.
Sounds like a good T-shirt quote actually.
sometimes i use this mother 3 project as a means of trying out some things i never really get the chance to do elsewhere. So, as a result, I made this. I’m sorry it’s sucky today.
http://i27.tinypic.com/11cfn2f.png
Still not sure if I should make Wan Sum Dung talk all Chinese-like, he didn’t talk special in the original because he didn’t have that kind of name. But it also seems weird without non-standard text. But also tough to make him sound Chinese-ish without going too far into stereotype/cliche/racism land ala chingchongchoochongcha.
Anyway, made a lot of progress so far today.
Now, if only Mother 3 would release in Japan… I wonder why they didn’t release in Japan…
Just out of curiosity, what sort of name did he have before and why was it changed?
For what it’s worth, in almost every single case I’ve seen where an English tranlation added some speech manurisms not in the original game, it ended up hurting the character. Examples are Faris in FFV (really aweful pirate slang, Kid in Chrono Cross (aweful Australian slang), and Barret in FFVII (aweful Mr. T slang). The only good examples I can think of are those where they had to translate an accent, like in FFVI with Cyan (apparently in the original he had some old style speech not used in modern Japanese, so they translated that as old english style speech, and it worked well enough) and Ayla (she’s a cave person, and frankly she was never supposed to be that smart, so it works there).
? but they did
Mother 3 was released in Japan. Remember?…GBA?
I bet you’re just joking, but if you’re not…
GO TO PRESCHOOL AGAIN!!!
A possible Latin translation? I would get some of my friends to help me out with something like that. Although none of us can read Japanese… we’d have to do a re-translation of the english text into Latin.
Hm… interesting school project…
Add the em dash so you can use it instead of two hyphens ^_^
I say go with the Chinese accent if you think it would be funny. It’s not that big of a character, and with a name like that the accent would actually fit 😛
@itsaplanet: let’s do Indonesian translation 😀 I’ll give you all help I can give.
@Mato & Jeffman: You guys ROCK! I guess we won’t be needing any special characters in Indonesian language.
Thanks for the frequent updates, they’re very interesting
Mato: A Fan has the six symbols in that big list of symbols, and… Well, I actually DID mention the three lowercase Norwegian characters in my first post… but I suppose I should’ve included their uppercase forms. Those symbols are: Æ/æ, Å/å, and Ø/ø. One of those, you might notice, is also used in Swedish, so it’s even less work than it might be, since Swedish is already planned. =)
“Kid in Chrono Cross (aweful Australian slang)”
Not just Kid, half the playable characters had annoying phony accents created by some sort of auto-accent program. I could stand one or two funny accents in Mother 3, even if it’s a little stereotypical. EarthBound lovingly (I assume) stereotyped all sorts of western people.
I would also like to see a German translation. All that German really needs is an umlaut in conjunction with some “A”s, “O”s, and “U”s. There is also the ess-set. But that can easily be replaced with a double “s”. Many street signs in Germany already do this.
I decided it would be best to take a blank script file and copy-paste-rewrite each line one by one into it. This has a few advantages, one of the main ones being that we can tell exactly how far along we are now with Draft 2.
After a loooooot of work today, we’re now at 30.3% done. Tired zzzz.
wow
Tomato, I think you might be a machine. Just out of curiosity, what’s your model number?
> Not just Kid, half the playable characters had annoying phony accents created by some sort of auto-accent program. I could stand one or two funny accents in Mother 3, even if it’s a little stereotypical. EarthBound lovingly (I assume) stereotyped all sorts of western people.
The ‘cha thing is something you actually hear in Japanese sometimes. I think they transcribed Korcha’s clan’s ‘cha ending quite literally from the Japanese.
So no, they DIDN’T make that up as far as I can tell. 🙂 I think they just used some of the weird Japanese suffixes literally, because the more I’ve watched anime, the more of those weirdo suffixes I’ve seen (-desu, -de gozaimasu, -cha, -dattebayo, and a WHOLE lot of other oddballs I can’t think of right now).
I think the most famous ‘cha speaker would be Lum from Urusei Yatsura, BTW. She uses that a lot, not to mention some other oddities (I think the pronoun ‘uchi’ is one of them).
The new Live A Live patch is very nice! It’s been a long time since I played through the old patch. Didn’t realize you had worked on the old one Mato! Cool.
Cool news on the script progress, too. I always enjoy the updates. Even if some might find them mundane, they almost always seem interesting to me. I didn’t really have an issue with the blocks method of explaining things, but I’m all in favor of whatever makes it easier on you really.
I don’t know if this is a stupid question, and it’s probably been addressed multiple times before, but what is the file size of the entire script dump?
Mitch: So what kind of attacks does a Boob Wizard badge reflect? 🙂
> Tomato, I think you might be a machine. Just out of curiosity, what’s your model number?
Probably 1337… 🙂
—–
BTW, before I make too many posts in a row, why don’t people look at that big list of funny chars I posted and tell Mato if they need anything NOT on the list. And don’t forget punctuation! I know that Spanish uses the upside-down ?s and that French uses the funky angle bracket-like things instead of quote marks, and that all sorts of people use the accented bits between. Other fonts have weird accents on practically every single letter (b-umlat? WHY??) but those seemed like a more reasonable set that might actually get used.
Well, okay, I guess I don’t know about the Icelandic thorn. But it DOES make good smileys! :þ
Heh, I just came here to mention Live A Live after seeing Tomato in the translation credits for the Wild West segment, and find I’m beaten to it by the man himself. (Hey, Chrono Trigger flashback. It’s… the MAN!) And now, I just made myself think of “I Wanna Be The Guy!” for no good reason. So sadistic, yet so satisfying. Fun stuff if you like old-school frustrating platforming goodness with lots of (mostly) retro gaming references and music in there. L
Alright, I’m already starting to derail my post here, so goodbye for now.
Further and Furthest,
They’re superlatives of Far.
Never heard of Furth.
Two things:
1) TEE HEE MILKING
2) Don’t forget to translate the game into Japanese, guys. I’m sure they’ll want to play it.
This slowdown that you’re talking about…. Will it throw off the combo system? I remember that having even 99% on an emulator would make it impossible for me to even try to combo.
Hey Mato, here’s a suggestion that might cover most future translations… just implement most of the important characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapping_of_Unicode_character_planes I actually just went through the “relevant” code ranges in the BMP, and only about 699 characters (which includes all the characters in the first few ranges) are needed, likely much less after slicing out the lesser needed characters. I don’t know how easy it’d be to implement support for that many characters in Mother 3, though. Actually, if you wanted to have a bunch of fun hacking, you could make Mother 3 have the infrastructure for full Unicode, but I don’t know if that’d ever be possible, or so hard it is essentially impossible. Anyways, nice work on the English translation and all!
Yeah, combos on emulators was sometimes a mess. I had to learn how to do perfectly off-rhythm, which was impossible. I’m guessing the safest bet would be to play the translation on one of those GBA flash cards. Or perhaps we could convince more emulator programmers to do specific mother 3 speed hacks for play on their emus.
30.3% in terms of lines or in terms of blocks?
@Peugeot: Well, let’s see if Mato agrees.
Mato, btw, what timezone are you in? You post at such odd times.
Hello. I posted up my email here.
I would not mind doing some work on translations. I speak and write fluent Spanish and Serbo Croatian (as well as English of course).
While I’m quite sure there won’t be a Serbo Croatian version haha (just posting in case :P), I could help out with any translation necessary for the Spanish translation.
Send me an email if you need help,
Mat.
We need a Leetspeak translation, for the lawlz.
“!7’$ n07 r!gh7… n07 r!gh7… n07 r!gh7… 4hh, grr, 0hhh… Ness!”
Leetspeaking Giygas. 😛
Anyone seen Star War: Backstroke of the West? Its star wars, translated into chinese from english, then translated BACK into english.(with funny results) Maybe someone can do that by feeding the game through an auto-translator to see what kinds of funny text we find.
nightmareci: Heh, we only have room for maybe 80-100 more.
Oron: No, the slowdown is with sprite text in main menus.
Negi: Lines.
Hey Mato, i´m not trying to be obnoxious or anything but I was wondering, what kind of Spanish translation you have in mind? because Latin American spanish is WAY different than Spain´s spanish, for example, saying “YOU” in Spain is like saying THOU” in Latin America, I would suggest a Mexican spanish translation because for what I know its like the “neutral” spanish in all Latin America, TV shows are mostly translated to Mexican or Chile spanish for the same reason (I made some research), well in the end I really don care at that much coz´ I always play the games in english even if they come with the spanish option, just letting you know my senseless point of view
@Foffano: I definitely want to be involved in the Brazilian Portuguese translation! Can’t believe I saw this post so late, but yeah, that would be awesome.
Yes, I know there are many types of Spanish, which is why I’m surprised nobody asked before. I’m fine with letting there be different Spanish versions, but we’ll see. I’m actually not sure who to ask to do the Spanish version now, so who knows. I was gonna ask the guy who did the Spanish EarthBound project, but I’m not sure he’s interested, so…
Once this is done I’m so doing a french translation.
I’m gonna have fun with this thing.
Yeah now that I think about it I don’t really want there to be a Dutch translation, I just want to help translate but I suck at any other language besides English and Dutch 😛
Action52: Already got someone lined up for the French translation though…
can you at least give what is done so far? you know, every thing before the second draft. the things that are essential. please? that would give us an even better look on how you are doing.
make sure to do the debug translation!
I dunno, I like the idea of the dung beetle just being a little humble guy who does what he can in this big world.
If you do the Chinese name though, at least pick something that uses actual sounds that are in Chinese!
Yay Brazilian Portuguese translation! I’d like to help, though I’m not a skilled translator or anything…
hey! I’ve been following the project since it first began.
I’m really interested in helping with the Spanish translation. But like Chronel said there are many types of Spanish and I also suggest using a neutral Spanish.
I lol’d at the you-thou part, it’s so true. 😀
@DeMessias: Yeah, it would be fun(leuk 🙂 ) to work on such a thing, but probably not relevant enough to warrant its own project. Oh well. Tja, geen “Moeder Drie” dus…
Bienvenue au monde d:|
You guys deserve a chwarming Bag of Bi :D.
😐
(Yay, old funny text sprite errors D:..Atleast I thought they were funny)
…*shifty eyes*…
I’m still laughing about the
“Welcome to th
😐 ”
Thing.
*More shifty eyes*
I forgot to mention: I’m a native Spanish speaker and I understand English very well. I hope I can be of any help in the future with the other translations.
Yes, Spanish Spanish (lol) and Latin American Spanish are very different in some cases, though I’m not sure if it’s worth making two separate translations.
I’m Chilean and I can write in a very “neutral” Spanish when I want. It’s not like I’m a professional translator or anything, but I’m a native Spanish speaker, and I’m very fluent with English, co I could help in a translation like this one. I’m a writer, too (sort of), so I have good redaction and spelling, at least in Spanish.
I honestly think I’m able to help, so please consider me.
Also, is there a Spanish translated Earthbound? REALLY??? That would make my brother really happy…
Aww…I kinda wanted to do the French translation…it woulda been kinda fun 😀
Further and Furthest,
They’re superlatives of Far.
Never heard of Furth.
—–
Was that a haiku? 🙂 Clever, but wrong.
Far has farther and farthest which are NOT the same words as further and furthest, even though they’re VERY easily confused!
But I wouldn’t expect most people to know that, given that furth is NOT used these days! It reminds me of ‘outwith’ (which is NOT the same as without), which nobody ever uses, either 🙂 And I don’t think anyone understands them, either.
So I don’t recommend that those here who know English as a second language start using them, or people will think you’re talking funny, even if you use them correctly! 🙂
Anyhow, my source on this is:
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/005500.html
Which says:
(Note, though, that as Jim Smith points out to me, all modern English dialects have preserved the comparative and superlative forms further and furthest.)
HEY! I’m the real Captain Planet! That guy under me is a poser!
I’m surprised at how few people know that “thou” is the singular form of “you,” NOT just simply an olde timey word. Really, “you” is the plural and/or formal form of “thou.” That’s why Shakespeare’s screenplays feverently switch between usage of the two words.
And an Al Bhed translation would be incredibly easy. Just swap the location of the letters in the font graphics sheets.
Since all simple letter substitution “languages” are actually just alphabets, they would be just as easy, too. For instance, Standard Galactic Language (Commander Keen) would be a snap. Although Fairy Writing (Artemis Foul) would prove to be a little tough, since “e” is a letter modifier rather than a character.
All this talk of the English language makes me head hurt.
Oh I also second a l33t translation of Mother 3, it would pwn.
Exp, you are now Mr. Thou. That’s all there is to it.
Mato, what kind of “morphing” is it that you’re talking about?
Also, I’m gonna go ask ProtoKnux if he’d like to work on it with you.
Wow too few sylables 😮 OMG.
I likr making up my own alphabets. It’s fun. I even made one for Japanese, even if I can’t really speak it fluently XD
“a l33t translation of Mother 3”
No. Just no. English is fine. We don’t need internet jargon in our precious Mother 3.
Hey, last update I remember you telling us about a bunch of unused music in there. Any chance of it getting released? I think it’d be sweet if you added a couple things to the game yourself; Maybe a Sound Room, other cool stuff. It’d be awesome.
Hey, I think a 1337 translation would be cool for laughs, as long as it wasn’t in the english version.
Translating to Lojban would probably be such a heinous nightmare, it wouldn’t even be funny. Going from a language (Japanese) that is nearly 100% nuance and context, to one (Lojban) that is all about having 0 nuance… Oi.
Q: How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken lightbulb?
A: Two. One to figure out what to change it into, and one to figure out what kind of light bulb emits broken light.
Beating “I Wanna Be The Guy” on Impossible is probably an easier task. ^_^
I beat it without dying once on Hard.
Is that close enough?
You say “coi”, and I say “co’o”
Co’o, co’o..
I don’t know why you say coi
I say co’o.
I’m surprised at how few people know that “thou” is the singular form of “you,” NOT just simply an olde timey word. Really, “you” is the plural and/or formal form of “thou.” That’s why Shakespeare’s screenplays feverently switch between usage of the two words.
—–
Yeah, I wonder how many other languages have gotten RID of their t/v distinction in politeness levels? Or how the Japanese ended up with so many ridiculously nuanced levels 🙂 Quick! What am I implying if I call that person ano hito, kimi, omae, anata, anta, kisama, aitsu, temae, or…
> And an Al Bhed translation would be incredibly easy. Just swap the location of the letters in the font graphics sheets.
Since all simple letter substitution “languages” are actually just alphabets, they would be just as easy, too. For instance, Standard Galactic Language (Commander Keen) would be a snap. Although Fairy Writing (Artemis Foul) would prove to be a little tough, since “e” is a letter modifier rather than a character.
Someone mentioned making two programs to ‘translate’ Al Bhed. But all you really need are a few lines of Perl (and to know what the substitution is in the first place). If they’re letter-for-letter substitutions, you can easily make it into a one-liner with the tr/// function 🙂
*still proposing the idea of a hit-counter for this site*
PK Countin’!
Typhin:
rinsa munje 😐
I should probably clarify (Ha ha!) something… I don’t actually KNOW anything in Lojban. I only know OF it.
Mostly thanks to a xkcd strip. (I’m sure you know which one I mean.)
I know some German, perhaps i could help translate?
I think a pig latin version would be perfect.
It’s wacky, the Mother series is wacky, and when’s the last time you actually played a video game in pig latin?
The obvious thing to do is translate it back into Japanese, filled with thinly-veiled insults directed at the twisted programmers.
And then send the patch to them.
Clawclaw: Does telling the Thraddash to greet people with Pig Latin in Star Control 2 (or Ur-Quan Masters, whatever) count?
“Pig-Latin, eh? Isn’t that where you take the first letter or two of a word, put it at the end and then add an `ay’ at the very end? Hmm.. let me try `Upidstay Eaturecray! Eparepray otay ieday!’ Hey! I like that! It gives one the semblance of wit and education without all that dreary studying! Just one question, Great Teacher. How do you say `example’ in pig latin?”
“Eway areyay ethay igpay atinlay eakingspay Addashthray! Ortsnay!”
There’s more, but I figured this is enough.
MetallicaBreath: YES. Yakov Smirnoff translation.
Seriously, do it.
“Scoot upstairs and change your clothes.
In Soviet Russia, clothes change YOU!”
=D
The Boob Wizard badge would reflect Sexy Beam attacks.
I would be interested in hearing block numbers, Mato. But I may be the only one. Heheheh.
If you don’t want to go with the Chinese route, you could just call Mr. Beetle “Wunts Umdung” or “Watsom Duung”.
Would it be hard to make a utility that easily allowed people to create their own alphabets, on the off-chance that someone wanted to translate the game into Russian or Greek or the like? Although that really seems to be getting into the territory of people who, if they’re remotely interested in Earthbound or Mother, already know a language it’s in…
Typhin: Especially if you can get the full version.
Aussi, Je doit jouer Mother 3 en français pour etudier la langue, je ne peux pas l’écrire bien…
è_é
elcomeway otay htay 😐
> Aussi, Je doit jouer Mother 3 en français pour etudier la langue, je ne peux pas l’écrire bien…
It may have been several years since I last studied French, but yeah, you do need a little practice 😉 I’ll let a native speaker correct you, though.
你们说中文吗？
So, I’m not the only Commander Keen fan here o.o;
Commander Keen fan here too!
Excitable Boy: Full version of which? IWBTG, or SC2? I’ve been slacking in IWBTG, I haven’t grabbed the 6th Item, only the first 5.
SC2, yeah, it’s free now, so why not get the full version? I even unpacked the uqms to extract things like voice clips and text… ^_^;; (I’m a geek. “Yes, absolutely, and with no qualifications.”)
All I can say in regards to Wan Sum Dung is this:
Wise Confucius say, “Man who go through airport turn style sideways going to Bangkok.”
Waaait… There’ll be translations for other languages too?
I’d love to help with the German translation~ I’m fluent in both German and English, so translating the game script shouldn’t be too hard.
Umlauts like ä, ö and ü can be spelled as ae, oe and ue too, and ss can be used as an alternative to ß, so it’s not neccessary to add any new letters either. It’d just be more professional… and generally look nicer. Still isn’t needed, tho’, so a German translation could be done without that.
I’m with the guy who said you should do a Japanese translation.
I’ll translate to British English 😀
You know, changing things like “color” to “colour”, “center” to “centre”, etc.
and “Mom” to “Mum”?
Mato, why does the To-Do list say the second script draft is at 30% if only 6.5% or so is done being translated?
My brother can help me with a Danish translation. I’d do the coding, he’d do the translating.
me: Have you not read the entire update, or any of the mini-updates, which are highlighted?
You’re overestimating the collective intelligence of the Internet again.
I need scissors! 61!
Heh, it’s confusing when Mato replies to someone named ‘Me”
How about for Wan Sum Dung
Wise Confucius say: “Man who sleep with itchy bum wake up with stinky finger.”
Why do people who speak english want different language translations…?
Because we have compassion.
Reply to Poop:
There might be kids or other people who doesnt understand english so well who maybe wants to play and everyone can enjoy it.
Yeah, the most people enjoy this game, the better. I have many friends that don’t play anything in English, because they don’t feel comfortable with it.
Mato, ProtoKnux, the guy doing the EB Spanish translation, has said he would be glad to do it. 😀
yep
I’m interested
Since you want to mainly focus on translating to languages that use the Latin alphabet, I thought I’d compile a short list off the top of my head of which languages (European and otherwise) that use the Latin alphabet.
The (living) romance languages:
Spanish, French, Italian, Portugues, Romanian, Catalan, Sicilian
(Esperanto is also derived from the romance languages)
(most of these will require some extra letters w/diacritical marks etc.)
Germanic languages:
English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Frisian, Scots, Plattdeutsch, Icelandic, Faroese, Afrikaans
(several of these of course also include extra characters.)
Slavic languages:
Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian, Slovene
(all these have extra letters, Polish might be the only remotely relevant language in this group though, I don’t know.)
any modern Celtic languages – doubt there’s a high demand for Irish/Scottish Gaelic or Welsh versions though?
Baltic languages:
Latvian, Lithuanian, couple others (have extra letters)
other languages of Europe:
Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Basque, Turkish, Albanian (most of these will require some extra letters)
Several languages of Africa use the Latin script, Swahili is probably the most widely recognized/relevant?
Languages of Asia:
Indonesian, Malaysian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Uzbek
Several native american languages use latin alphabet too, but i don’t know if that’s relevant. Any Inuit fans out there?
Don’t know if that’s helpful, but I think that should make it clear that there’s a lot of languages out there that use this alphabet.
Impressive, it looks like the script is really coming along. Whoda thunk it?
Erm, what I said didn’t make sense because of some sort of format error.
I’m no interested in doing it, Knux is.
Also, it would be nigh-impossible to do a Russian translation, right?
к сожалению, кажется что это правда.
Greek? Un-NESS-esary
I just beat EarthBound(for like, the 20th time) in my new EB shirt that I bought from you guys(starmen) :). Ahh…I love life.
I cannot grasp the true meaning of Nutsjesmoars’ post!
Here’s a message in my own made-up Japanese alphabet.
がもやわるとぐめか?
It’s surprisingly simple once you know how it works, yet clever enough that none of my Jap. classmates or teacher can get it. Can it fool even Mato? muahaha…
On the topic of character sets and fonts: You should be aware of all the standards they have for European languages. Here are some helpful links:
Unicode Code Charts: Every character from every language in the Unicode standard are in these charts. See the “Latin” section in the lower left.
ISO 8859: I think you should implement this standard. It specifies different character sets for the different families of languages. The first 128 characters of each set are the same (“ASCII”), and the next 128 characters depend on which set you choose, so you could make different fonts for each set and translators could use the one most appropriate to their language.
For our sanity, I’m hoping we can just use one font set for all these various languages. We only have like what, 80-100 more letters we can add, maybe less, I dunno.
D: so many language-related questions!!!!!
I was wondering, when Demi’s working on draft 3, do you expect him to revise every line, or just certain ones that he thinks need improvement?
I guess what I’m asking is: How much, if any, script text in the finished product do you think will have been typed by you, and how much by Demi?
ISO 8859-15 should accommodate all the languages we care about, and a whole bunch we don’t care about.
Of course, you ought to replace some of the useless control characters in the set with alpha, beta, gamma, and omega.
Your blogging software isn’t updating the “x minutes ago” indication anymore. Did I just crash it?
Esperanto would be way more awesome than Latin.
Just saying.
@Checkmate: Nah, it’s been like that for a while. I noticed that when I post, until someone else posts, it’ll continue to say “Arashi said 0 minutes ago”
Hey Mato, how are words combined in Japanese. Like, sound stone for example. “Ota” is sound and “Ishi” is sound. Is it just Ota Ishi? It doesn’t sound right to me…
sorry, I mean “Ishi” is Stone
Hey Mato you should put yourself in the game saying many translation errors like “Welcome to th :|”
rah i stil Wait forr dwarfis. tranlaton well dwarfis orr elfis but my elf Is. eroded
What do you mean by skilled tranlator?
And, if you think translating it to portuguese would be good, I would like to do it!
( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/CPLPmap.png )
Brian: Dwarfish uses a different alphabet, so unfortunately it won’t be translated with this next batch. Luckily Dwarfish is similar grammatically to Japanese, so it should be easier to hack, as long as you can find a dwarf friend who knows Japanese. Rally-Ho!
there’s too much concern about translating into all these other languages. we need to get english done first. all this nonsense is cluttering the blog.
Itoi’s love child: Tomato did ask. I doubt people would be talking about it this much if he hadn’t asked what languages people wanted support for.
According to Wikipedia, the most common languages that use this alphabet are: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German. By the way, you aren’t talking about making one alphabet-set in the game for ALL the languages, right? That seems inefficient. It also seems that once you have the different problems in the English version sorted out (e.g. VWF and more letters), it would be relatively easy to switch it to other alphabets, or did I miss something?
yeah, the fact that some languages need more letters to say something
English: I’m really hungry
Spanish: Tengo mucha hambre
Portuguese(BR): To com muita fome
(little line thingy on the o of To)
see?
ó
that little line
this might be really random but am i the only one who thinks duster’s theme is almost identical to one of the songs playing during one of miyazaki’s films?(i think it’s howl’s moving castle)
@Trimalchio. I assume what Mato IS going to do is create a single alphabet set that includes all of the characters, which is much easier for other translators to simply use the new letters they need (and can’t necessarily figure out know how to modify or swap out the alphabet/font, etc.). The VWF should simply be taken care of by Mato’s hack, regardless of any additional characters. It also shouldn’t be any more inefficient, because the game probably doesn’t take any additional time to grab the right character from the alphabet array/contruct/whatever for a slightly extended alphabet. The 80+ characters Mato can add is probably just limited by the way the game’s memory is organized.
Of course, seeing as how I a)Haven’t seen the code myself and b)Am not Mato, I could be wrong in this assessment.
Hello guys! This question may have an obvious answer, but I’m going to go ahead and ask it anyway. Because that’s what people on the internet do, ya’ know? Here it goes dudes. Once my ROM is patched will I be able to transfer this data to a cartridge and be able to play it on my DS? If so, that’d be really fantastic, but of course I’ll settle with an emulator on my laptop. And as for where to find such information? A simple nudge in the right direction would be just fine.
Anonymous, i’m pretty sure it’s in the FAQ.
it’s no btw.
That question is in the FAQ page, so you can find some more details there.
We’re working on a detailed list of emus/flash carts/etc. so at some point we’ll have that up and that will answer your question. Apparently Jeffman recommends something called an “M3 Real”. Hopefully that’s a good enough nudge for you. I haven’t the slightest what it is.
I’m trying to avoid having links to specific places where you can buy this stuff, cause it would make things look even worse should Nintendo decide to throw the books at us. Plus I don’t want to be helping people’s iffy businesses through this project. But hopefully that info alone will be able to get you what you’re looking for.
And hopefully we’ll have that more detailed document before too long.
Oh gosh, sorry. I actually did take a look at the FAQ beforehand and was just looking for some more details, particularly for the DS. Don’t sweat it though, I’ll have myself a good look around on those things called search engines. I’ll check out this “M3 Real” business for sure. Thanks a bunch you guys.
BTW, I know I’m way behind on responding to comments. Blah.
To answer the question about the timestamp weirdness, the blog uses caching now, the site was starting to show signs of slowness because of the traffic it gets, and one slashdot or digg or whatever would’ve killed the little garden gnomes who run the hamster wheel that runs the server.
What this means is that when a page loads, it will look the way it did the last time a change to that page was made. So comments at the very bottom will have weird timestamps until a new comment is made.
Argh blargh 98asdflkj finally finished a giant text block that has text that spans like 5 different chapters. Talk about needing to fully know context 😯
Man, that sounds like a pain, haha
About languages, I say we should start with this as a list, and if there are any translators out there who need letters or punctuation not on the list, they should let Mato know 🙂 But that’s just me:
« » ¡ ¿
À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ à á â ã ä å æ
È É Ê Ë è é ê ë
Ì Í Î Ï ì í î ï
Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø ò ó ô õ ö ø
Ù Ú Û Ü ù ú û ü
ß Ç Ð Ñ Þ Ý Ÿ ç ð ñ þ ý ÿ
——
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TakeThat
Hey Mato? Do you know if this was really worked into the OP dub? 🙂
“It may have not meant to be Take That, but the very first line of the (far better) Funimation One Piece dub was something to the effect of “I’m glad that the nightmare is over.””
Hrm, actually, the more I look at it, I have nearly the same list as the ISO/IEC 8859-15 standard anyhow (you just have to add the weird Š, Ž, & Œ in upper & lower case, and maybe currency symbols, though I don’t think anyone needs a (C) or (R) for anything). Might be worth cramming most of that in there, though I don’t think the mathematical & logical symbols are needed (like ¬ for negation or × and ÷) and I’m pretty sure you don’t need real world currency symbols like £ ¥ or €.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15
Actually, the wikipedia chart is rather convenient. You probably only need the extra letters in orange (pretty much my list with Š, Ž, & Œ in both cases added), as well as the punctuation ¡ ¿ « and » from what I can tell. That should give you good coverage. At least, Wikipedia thinks it covers all of:
* Afrikaans
* Albanian
* Basque
* Breton
* Catalan
* Danish
* Dutch 1
* English 2
* Estonian
* Faroese
* Finnish
* French
* Galician
* German
* Icelandic
* Irish 3
* Italian
* Latin 4
* Luxembourgish 4
* Malay 5
* Norwegian 6
* Occitan
* Portuguese 7
* Rhaeto-Romanic
* Scottish Gaelic
* Spanish
* Swahili
* Swedish
* Tagalog
* Walloon
Notes
1. Commonly supported with nearly complete coverage of the Dutch alphabet, as the missing IJ, ij should always be represented as two-character IJ or ij in electronic form.
2. US and modern British.
3. New orthography.
4. Basic classical orthography.
5. Rumi script.
6. Bokmål and Nynorsk.
7. European and Brazilian.
I’ve been considering helping with a Swedish translation, but Thanius beat me to it. Besides, he probably has more experience/time to work on it anyways. 😛
The main problem with a translation into Latin, as far as I can see, is the translation of certain words into Latin for which there’s no real equivalent. Things like ‘computer’ and ‘television’ (television is a Greek/Latin bastardisation anyway).
That aside, if you do decide to allow for a Latin translation, Mato, I’d love to help out. I’m doing a degree in Classics starting next year, so I’m sure it’d help me too. =P
Well, my fiance speaks Estonian, but I highly doubt she would be up for a translation. And since there are only a handful of people in the world who speak it, it probably won’t be needed anyway.
I’m discovering a whole bunch of different languages in this update! thanks!
>Hey Mato you should put yourself in the game saying many translation errors like “Welcome to th :|”
Yup, this.
If you can squeeze it in of course. Would be pretty lulz if you did push through with it.
Hey, Just a quick question. The Earthbound series is known for its humorous plot. Do you think that you will be able to translate all of the jokes without butchering them?
course he can, he’s a genius
regarding Latin… I am kind of curious how modern jokes would be rendered in a language that’s been dead for over a millennium.
So…Am I the only one here who is willing to translate this game to European Portuguese? Am I really the only one? :S
@ Mike:
You dare question Mato? You shall be sent to the pit!!!!!
But seriously, he’s a (well qualified) professional, and he has the certain sense of humor necessary for a game like this (from what I know by reading this blog). If anyone could do the series justice, it would be Mato.
Actually, I’m changing all jokes in the game into random 1980s movie quotes. The tower of love and peace is now known as the “tower of ba-bee rooth?”
Hopefully, by the time the patch is out, I’ll have beaten EarthBound Zero. I just beat Starman Jr. and got the third melody. And without the Franklin Badge! Isn’t that amazing?
lucas’s new name is John Belushi in Animal House
Thank you so much everyone.
Have Some Magic Cake,a few Psi Carmels, Skip sandwich Delux, and Saturn Valley Coffee.
Great Job Mato, Jeffman, and others.
I’m picturing the Pig Army descending on parachutes while the Russian national anthem plays, while the heroes join up against the Pig Army with the rallying cry, “WOLVERINES!!”
I also see Flint behind a chain link fence at night shouting, “Avenge Meeee!”
I see Boney turned into Mr. T.
I pity da foo’
dear lord, Mato, all this text sounds like a nightmare. You OK?
Mato, thanks so much for all the hard work you and the others have put into this.
And after you’ve taken about a year break or so after this, I’d really like to read the Mother 2 novelization. 😛
like others before me, I WANNA PLAY NOW! its okay if its glitchy! PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE?!?!?!
The comments are averaging about 105 a day. :0
Mato, if that last comment was a joke you have proven yourself capable. If not, dear god, if not, you sir… are a monster!
I’m also working on a hack of EarthBound where if you find a magic truffle Ness does the truffle shuffle.
Mato: Was that a Sandlot AND a Goonies reference? You win awesome points.
Actually it was two Goonies references.
This translation is a win.
Here, if any of you guys are bored, you can chew on this.
The answer is obvious, that’s the point. The Japanese version involved a cow and butterflies and the guy had “appendicitis” as a result.
I’m curious what other ideas people might have though. I’m not fond of that English one there, I thought it up in 30 seconds.
Have fun with it!
And yes, the answer is rabies. And if you come talk to this guy later on in the game, he’ll give you hints or eventually tell you the answer… which isn’t what you think it is heh.
Arashi:
Portuguese(BR): To com muita fome
(little line thingy on the o of To)
Oh, do you mean the “^”, so in portuguese stays like:
“Tô com muita fome”
can be written like “Estou com muita fome” too, there are other things important for a portuguese translation like the “Ç” word, for words like “Ação”(action) and more, there´s the “¨” used like in “conseqüência”, the “`”…
Portuguese is beautiful, there´s a lot of freedom in building sentences, but it´s a pain in the ass to learn and a lot of “acentos” and rules…
I think there a few in every state here in Brazil who really know how to speak good “brazilian portuguese” without an error, cannot say about Portugal…
Anyway, keep the good job tomato, don´t do a rushed job.
See Ya!
Like I said the last time I could help for an Italian translation.. I’m Italian after all..
At least I hope there will be an Italian translation and that you will choose someone who DOES know italian XD
looks great, end seems to close.
By the way, I could help translating to German… Well, if I don’t forget about it. My German is quite good, since I’m native, so, yeah =P but I won’t promise anything. And you should get ready with the English one – it’s still unfinished, so we should talk about other translations later, shouldn’t we? =P
Oh, and I’m really thankful that you spent your time over years for this project, and so will every other MOTHER-Fan will be. I don’t think NoA is gonna translate MOTHER3 somewhen, so you’re our last hope in such times. thank you. <3
Possible jokes, they don’t have all the little details like yours. They’d need some little fixing to break it up into a quiz show sound. I may have more later:
A “Bird Flew” to Turkey where a turkey gave him a disease.
What disease did the bird contract?
A man was very “mad” at his “cow”. What disease did he have?
I know that different languages have different alphabets, but why does the game’s alphabet need to stay the same for the different languages? The different translations won’t all be on one patch, right? Let each translation have its own alphabet. Why not? Am I still missing something???
@ Saikyo:
Whoops. Yeah, I’m Brazilian but I’ve got an American dad and I live in Mexico, studying Japanese. English is my first language, whereas Spanish and Portuguese are tied. I SPEAK portuguese much better but can’t really spell it well. Spanish, i’ve got a nasty accent but perfect spelling and such. Meh. I’ve been away from Brazil for too long. Thanks for the tip, though.
The point of my last post was to pretty much say ” My Portuguese is kinda rusty even if it’s a cool language”
His “tuber” was eaten by his sibling, Nancy “Q.”, and he said, “You’ll owe, sis!” Later he got sick. What disease did he get?
Better, since the “ew” sound isn’t repeated:
A “tuber,” owned by Nancy “Q.” was stolen by her brother Jack and buried. When Nancy asked where he hid it, Jack replied, “Low, sis.” Jack later got very sick. What disease did he get?
Jack paid a huge “fee” for an exquisite “fur” coat.
Fever 😀