Japanese translation

[Kinoko]

I'm thinking of doing a Japanese translation for my game once it's done. I've had a bit of a think about it, and I think I can make it work. Only using one Japanese script, I'll have enough characters in a font to make it work. Because of the nature of Japanese writing, (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc), I was thinking of writing the script in romanised Japanese (english letters), then doing a replace on each individual set of letters (ie. "ka" becomes "b", or whatever the equivalent turns out to be) to make the script work with er... whichever 'place' the letter is in the font. (I hope people can understand me here -_-)

I've never dabbled in a translation before, so I don't REALLY know what I'm doing yet, but does anyone see any real problems with this?

[Gilbert]

Shall work, for convenience you may even try making a converter (hehe you can even make it via AGS), which accepts a text file script, do the replacements for you and output it to another text file. Only thing that need to be careful is that you shouldn't accidently replace some non text description portion (if any) of teh file.


(Actually I can even think of an editor which is make in AGS that you can load up a text file to view and type in another box which will display as the Japanese characters visually and export that to another file)

[Kinoko]

Yep, I know I'll have to be careful with the replacing.

I've just thought of something else too. Is there a visual guide or something to exactly what the functional keys to trigger each font "position" is? The one I have (and I believe the original font that comes with AGS) has a lot of blank spaces so I don't know which keys to use for each position.

Oh, also, the manual says SCI fonts have 125 characters available, but looking at the fonts in the editor, I can only see spaces for 100. Do they not all show up or is the limit really 100?

One other question... for this to work, I'd have to have my SCI fonts for the english version, and my SCI fonts for the Japanese version. Can you do this with a translation? Otherwise, I guess I'd have to just make two different versions of the game (which might even be easier, I guess).

[Gilbert]

I've just thought of something else too. Is there a visual guide or something to exactly what the functional keys to trigger each font "position" is? The one I have (and I believe the original font that comes with AGS) has a lot of blank spaces so I don't know which keys to use for each position.

I think the easiest way is to muck up some primitive converter so it will just output the ASCII value of the appropiate characters itself.

Oh, also, the manual says SCI fonts have 125 characters available, but looking at the fonts in the editor, I can only see spaces for 100. Do they not all show up or is the limit really 100?

Actually characters with ASCII value <=127 can be displayed, no need to care about how many were displayed by AGSEdit. You can use Radiant's font editor to view and edit them.

One other question... for this to work, I'd have to have my SCI fonts for the english version, and my SCI fonts for the Japanese version. Can you do this with a translation? Otherwise, I guess I'd have to just make two different versions of the game (which might even be easier, I guess)

Well, since the full set of Japanese alphabets come up to about 100, it's not quite practical to have a full set of Japanese and English alphabets in one SCI font set. Two possible solutions are:
1. Don't use full set of characters, for example, only use Hirakana or only Katakana for all the messages (like some old Famicom games, when they use less font characters to save space).
2. Use another font set for Japanese (I think it can roughly stuff in them with a set of English alphabets of the same case and the numerals), but when your game starts you can set the fonts according to the language used (but can be complicated if you have many different GUI elements with text, etc.).
Just use GetTranslationName (), and check if teh game is currently using a Japanese translation file, change the speech, message, label fonts to the Japanese one.
Check out SetSpeechFont(), SetLabelFont(), etc. (May differ a bit if you use V2.7)

[Kinoko]

I think the easiest way is to muck up some primitive converter so it will just output the ASCII value of the appropiate characters itself.

I have... absolutely no idea how to do that. The thing is that wouldn't solve my problem either. when you look at the SCI fonts, there are blank characters. How do I know what triggers those characters? I'd rather just know which letter they correspond to. Partly because I'm making my own font in SCI studio, and I do this by taking an existing font and going over it character by character.

Well, since the full set of Japanese alphabets come up to about 100, it's not quite practical to have a full set of Japanese and English alphabets in one SCI font set. Two possible solutions are:
1. Don't use full set of characters, for example, only use Hirakana or only Katakana for all the messages (like some old Famicom games, when they use less font characters to save space).

Well, that's what I was planning all along, as I said in my first post ^_-

2. Use another font set for Japanese (I think it can roughly stuff in them with a set of English alphabets of the same case and the numerals), but when your game starts you can set the fonts according to the language used (but can be complicated if you have many different GUI elements with text, etc.).
Just use GetTranslationName (), and check if teh game is currently using a Japanese translation file, change the speech, message, label fonts to the Japanese one.
Check out SetSpeechFont(), SetLabelFont(), etc. (May differ a bit if you use V2.7)

This would work, but... the way my game is set out, this would be a hell of a lot of work. I may just output two different versions of the game.

Thanks for all your help, Gilbot ^_^

[strazer]

How do I know what triggers those characters?

Those characters are special control characters and don't correspond to any letter (line breaks, feeds and so on). Look up any ASCII table on the net to see what they are.
I think you can display them like this:
  Display("%c", 12);
but you can not use them in messages directly.
See also this tracker entry.

[Kinoko]

Those characters are special control characters and don't correspond to any letter (line breaks, feeds and so on). Look up any ASCII table on the net to see what they are.

I'm sorry, you're all being really helpful but I'm still kind of clueless on this. I didn't really understand the significance of the tracker entry.

I think though, that if I can't display the full amount of SCI characters in messages, that I won't be able to do this. I REALLY needed 100 characters minimum (I can do it with 100 exactly, but any less just isn't enough)

[Gilbert]

Actually, Kinoko, I'm interested in this, so I just mucked up a SCI font with Japanese characters.
It doesn't do much apart from it's a font set currently, but I'll try to make a AGS editor that you can directly type in the texts and export them to a text file, (hopefully) can work as translation files.
Since there's a holiday on Monday (Sunday is the Great Budha's birthday), I think I'll have time to work on it.

[Kinoko]

It's a nice looking font! It's missing quite a few characters though ^_^ (I'm sure you were aware).

I'm happy enough to do a seperate version of the game for the Japanese version (so no "translation" needed, as such), and I don't need a single English character in it. I still can't fit all the characters PLUS the grammar characters I need in it unless I have at least 100 characters. It would just be severely lacking and wouldn't look right.

The typing in isn't a problem for me because I'm more than happy to do that all manually, but I just don't wanna do this unless I can have a full set of characters. Games featuring only katakana or hiragana alone are already hard enough to read

[Gilbert]

Nope, as far as I know it contained all the commonly used Hirakana alphabets already, if you're talking about characters like GA, or PO, etc., the 12x character limit is too tight that I couldn't make separate characters for them, all I could do is to make tiny superscripted "2 dots" and "circle" characters (look for them, they're in the font) and append them to the right of KA, or HO, etc.
Anyway, that set I posted was not final, since I had moved the position of some of the characters already (to avoid them clashing with control characters and the like), and I probably need to edit it some more in case there're some vital control characters that I missed.

Actually I had done an Alpha version of an editor (with AGS) already, and it's fully functioning, you can type Romanized Japanese with it and it'll convert them automagically into the appropiate characters and output to a text file, there's even a "TRANSLATION" mode which is used exclusively for AGS translation source files. However, it's currently VERY user-unfriendly and VERY difficult to use, so I'm writing some small document on its usage. I just want people to know what it's REALLY doing before trying it out and exploding into pieces.

[Kinoko]

Well, even without the tenten'd (") and maru'd (o) characters, you're still missing ra, ri, ru, re and ro. It's also , given that I would be using hiragana also as katakana usually functions, a good idea to have small versions of a, i, you, e and o as well, for more authentic sounding foreign/made up words (which RPGs use a lot).

However, like I said, I wouldn't be using any of the roman alphabet in my game, so there are some extra characters there.

I have to say though, and I don't mean to put your method down or anything, but just appending the " and o to the right of characters would look really out of place and weird to me... I'd really need all of them as seperate characters to make them look right.

As it stands, I still wouldn't bother with a Japanese translation if I couldn't have the basic 100 character slots. Not trying to be difficult, I just wouldn't see the point otherwise because it wouldn't look right.

[Totoro]

Kinoko,
we once thought about doing a Japanese translation for Maniac Mansion Deluxe... but the idea was sort of dropped silently because it just turned out to be horrible... first we thought about using just katakana (that's what the nes-version of the original maniac mansion did), but it would also have been much scripting because of the different grammar and structure of sentences like "give hamster to Ed", and last but not least we would have had not only to translate the game into Japanese but also to the aquivalent of each katakana-character on the keyboard, which would mean "chao-language" in our script and only Katakana on the screen. That's basically the sci-font-approach mentioned before.

[Kinoko]

Would using a TTF font make a difference? Or does that still only use a limited number of the characters?

[LucasFan]

We did use TTFs but they are still limited to 256 characters in AGS. So it won't make a difference.

[Gilbert]

you're still missing ra, ri, ru, re and ro.

They're there, ASCII #16-20, check it out with Radiant's editor.

Anyway the editor is here.
MAKE SURE YOU READ README.TXT IN THE WORK FOLDER BEFORE TRYING IT OUT.

It'a actually impossible to cram in both complete sets of Hirakana and Katakana alphabets into a SCI font, even after sacrifying all the English alphabets, and don't forget there are control characters that you shall never use.

However, using TTF is actually a plan (read readme.txt of the editor), since it's at least enough to cram in all two sets of characters (even without the need to append the dotdots and circles) and you don't need to sacrifice the English alphabets and mostly other symbols.

[Kinoko]

Thanks a lot, Gilbot ^_^ I'll check the editor out. So using TTF would be conceivable? I had wanted to make my own font but, well, you gotta do what you gotta do.

EDIT: Or, I guess I could still go with the SCI font idea as long as I only use hiragana (which I was happy to do) now that I know AGS doesn't visually display all the available characters (before I had thought that what you saw in the 'FONT' section was all there was).

I don't know.

[Gilbert]

Yes, using a TTF is completely doable, but like what I wrote in readme.txt, unless I can find some decent (and most importantly, FREE) tool to create the font. We don't actuallyy need a full featured font editor, we only need to find a tool that can rearrange the font entries from a Japanese TTF font, so that all the required symbols are within the first 256 entries.

[Kinoko]

Hmm, I have absolutely no experience with editing TTF fonts so that's completely beyond me. I've heard it's incredibly difficult.

[Gilbert]

Hmmm after some searches all I can find are the M$ FontTools and FontForge.

M$ FontTools seems to be intended for developers, and it's impossible to use unless I have more technical knowledges and patience to read all the docs. (I don't even know if these tools can do what I want).

FontForge was a *nix tool that requires me to install those CYGWIN monsters to run under windows , I'm may try it out later though.

[Kinoko]

Argh! I've been reading the readme, and the editor uses "syo", and "jya" >_< My most hated style of romanisation!

*sigh* Oh well

I'm probably jumping the queue here, not having finished reading yet, but does this font have the Japanese punctuation characters too?

EDIT: Well, I tried loading the editor into AGS v2.6 and it tells me it's not the right version. It's definitely v2.60 but it doesn't like the game data file at all.