barleybap

a painting of a man lifting a sylveon by the armpits

Long, firm, tubular body, DEEP blue eyes, really wonderful expression. he is so calm, confident, really in charge here. Big, bouncy ears, perfectly set, a slender, whippy tail, and of course, those smooth, vibrant ribbons. Best in show.

SWORD

My heart asked for it.

Drop something METAL

Probably beyond the scope of this, to be honest! I'm not experienced on the technical side, and while I've figured out where the text is stored and how to modify it, I'm not sure about modifying the game beyond that. But people are welcome to build on my work with things like that if they want!

Fucking cackled at this. Bloody hell.

Bottom surgeon named Mina the Hollower

Why did nobody tell me about this until now? I feel so betrayed.

(Thank you~ <3)

Her scenario is by far the most poorly translated of the three opening scenarios in terms of major mistakes, but I think a lot of her personality still comes through in English despite the bad translation!

I miss the Owl House so much. :( Disney will never be forgiven.

"My only weakness! Dying!" gets me every time.

Also, that's all three of the opening scenarios in a finalised and proofread state now. Happy with all the lines, nothing breaks the game, no typos I could find. First wee landmark for getting this first disc translation into a finished state.

Not going to lie, the chaos gremlin in me is tempted to retain "'V' for victory, sucka!".

There are some references to Japanese culture that I don't think would be familiar to an English-speaking audience (the "earthworms and crickets" line posted elsewhere, for example, is playing with an old Japanese kids' song). And I'll localise those. But a lot of their gags work fine in English.

They're extremely weird little guys in Japanese as well, but while their dialogue is silly, a lot of it isn't really as untranslatable as you'd think based on how incomprehensible they are in English. I think the original translator just got lost in how flowery Liz's dialogue can be.

To be fair, that first one is completely true. They really are so, so cool.

It's not ideal in terms of faithfulness to the original, but it provides the same transition into the flashback that is missing in the English version. And removes the long wait against a white screen.

I figured out how to get it to display with the green text used for character names in English. But green against white looks really ugly. So I just moved the line to be a thought Lilka has in the room right before the transition to white, and removed the line against the white background.

It's why the game seems to hang for so long there in English. It pauses to give the player time to read a line that they can't actually see anymore.

The second one here (with the white background) is interesting because the line actually is translated in the English version and displays correctly. But because they stripped away the black shadow from the English font, you can't see it (it's completely white text on a white background).

No, to be blunt. I'm a translator, not a romhacker. I figured out how to edit the text, but I have no idea how to get at the font. If someone else wants to figure that out they can. But an ugly font is a pretty minor issue compared to an often unreadable script. And I don't really care myself.

It's one of the rougher translations of a major RPG. Further compounded by the fact that the original game is quite ambitious in its ideas and quite flowery in terms of its writing. It's pretty obvious looking at them side by side that the translator was out of their depth Japanese proficiency-wise.

Righto, all set up. I don't remember the game all that well at this point, so going to replay in Japanese as I proofread what I've done / translate what I haven't. <3

I had finished most of the first disc, though I needed to proofread a lot of it and test. I wasn't in a good headspace at the time and I think a lot of it is a bit shit. But going to start chipping away at it again alongside a replay of the game in Japanese, I think. It seems worth finishing.

A screenshot of Wild ARMs 2. Lilka is inside the Millennium Puzzle. Her dialogue is edited to read "A Millennium Puzzle! Just like in YuGiOh!"

Felt sour after all the discourse about AI translation, and wanted to go and do something positive as a mostly retired human translator. So I've decided to resume my dropped Wild ARMs 2 retranslation. Just familiarising myself with the workflow.

(No, I'm not actually putting Yu-Gi-Oh references in)

ngl, at this point the Toxic Dump theme feels like home.

But I don't think people appreciate that translation is itself a creative discipline. And that companies cannibalising translated texts without permission to feed neural networks isn't any less problematic than it is with art or music.

I think it's likely just that all that data was fed in before people were thinking about the ethical issues around using "data" (read: the work of others) in that way. AI art has brought that sharply into focus because the creativity involved in art is more directly perceivable to non-artists.

Right? I mean Google Translate has used neural network translation for like a decade now. What data do people think those neural networks were trained on? Do you really think that all the translators whose work was used in that way were compensated? I find that *extremely* hard to believe.

(Yes, I'm aware that modern Photoshop incorporates Generative AI functionality and is problematic in itself, and that Adobe are a shitshow. I don't literally mean Photoshop itself. I was just running out of characters)