Nige Ron Pa - English Translation

[Flavor]

Here's something that sparked a memory for me.

In your dump, you have lines like this.

Code:

0x26A309        [A0 FF EA 24 00]    0x24EAFF    あぁ・・・  [pause] Cマーくん・・・
         ファ・ [pause] Cイ・ [pause] Cト [pause] C!  [pause] Cザマス!

I assume the "[pause] C" sort of things are control codes. In the Cardfighters translation, we had a table of control codes. This might mean that the text system should pause to wait for the reader to press a button. We also saw ones that were almost like printf control codes. Like one might print a number or name in the middle of text.

"You did %d damage to %s." Where the game would fill in %d with a number and %s with a character's name.

That stuff can be very tricky, because the programmer will understand it, but the translator won't. If you want someone to help translate, you need to make sure that these things are properly sorted.

Even further, something like "You did %d damage to %s." might properly translate to "%s received %d damage by you."
Would a translator understand how to properly re-arrange the phrase? Would the text system know? Probably not.

If

Code:

printf("You did %d damage to %s.", damage, name);

became

Code:

printf("%s received %d damage by you.", damage, name);

there would be a problem (maybe even a crash in the game).

The translator needs to know that they can not reorder these control codes.

It requires a very patient/technical translator or an (online) application that enforces the rules. If the translator can go to a web page to see the untranslated strings and translate them, then a programmer would have to review and accept the translations.

In Cardfighters 2, we also had problems with line breaks/widths. The translator would send me his new strings to insert, and I would run the insertion tool. The tool was programmed to know the widths of each character and tell me if any line was too long. Then I would have to re-write chunks of the translation to rephrase things.

I hope this helps.