[FF7PC-98] The Reunion (OLD THREAD, SAVED FOR POSTERITY)

[DLPB_]

Covarr's grammar check is going well.   Already a lot of niggles being ironed out.

He noticed a mistake with this one, so I have reworded it.
I think it now finally flows well:

Old
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Reeve“We have the damage estimates for Sector 7.”{NEW}“Considering those factories we already set up and all the investments, the damage is estimated at approximately 10 Billion gil…”

New
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Reeve“The damage report for  District 7 has come in.”{NEW}“When considering the industrial  sectors that were present,and  the investments we had made…”{NEW}“…the cost to our company is  expected to be in the region  of 10 billion gil.”

 

[Salk]

Am I the only one irked by "industrial sectors"?

It does not seem really appropriate in the context above. Would you consider changing it to "industrial facilities", considering also that the former translation attempt used "factories" there?

 

[DLPB_]

Am I the only one irked by "industrial sectors"?

It does not seem really appropriate in the context above. Would you consider changing it to "industrial facilities", considering also that the former translation attempt used "factories" there?

I will have to take that up with Luksy, but a factory is not the same thing (if that isn't what it is).  Facilities may work, but I will use whatever is most likely for a man in the position of Reeve, who would come into contact with different terminology to a layman, and according to the Japanese.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/industrial-sector.html

In other news, the Scottish dialect has been completed.  So now the only thing that remains is Covarr's grammar check, and Prince Lex's proof read of the Scottish.

 

[Terid__K]

Just to clarify, this won't be compatible with the Steam version? And if I don't care at all about the graphical enhancements, will I still be able to use the retranslation without those?

I haven't followed this project in a long time, so I don't know if you guys changed anything along the way.

 

[Ver Greeneyes]

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“…in the region  of 10 billion gil.”

I'm more used to 'on the order of', but that may just be a result of the communities I hang out in

Just to clarify, this won't be compatible with the Steam version?

You can convert the Steam version / 2012 re-release to the original. I don't know if there are any intentions of integrating that with Reunion though, or if it will always be separate.

 

[Salk]

I will have to take that up with Luksy, but a factory is not the same thing (if that isn't what it is).  Facilities may work, but I will use whatever is most likely for a man in the position of Reeve, who would come into contact with different terminology to a layman, and according to the Japanese.

Thanks for hearing me out. I trust you guys will choose the best possible translation. Keep it up!

 

[DLPB_]

Just to clarify, this won't be compatible with the Steam version? And if I don't care at all about the graphical enhancements, will I still be able to use the retranslation without those?

I haven't followed this project in a long time, so I don't know if you guys changed anything along the way.

The issue with Steam is you cannot change the exe.  It has protection.  So a full retranslation is rather impossible for the newer versions.  As said above, you will probably need to convert to 1998 game.

also,  "in the region of"  works in the above context and means exactly the same as "approximately".  I didn't change that on purpose, it just sounded more natural as I was writing it. 

 

[Covarr]

The issue with Steam is you cannot change the exe.  It has protection.  So a full retranslation is rather impossible for the newer versions.  As said above, you will probably need to convert to 1998 game.

Are we sure this is the case with the Steam version? I know it was a major part of the SecuROM protection in the S-E store version, but the Steam version has entirely different protection. Steamworks typically does not protect the EXE, but merely prevents modified EXEs from playing in online servers (assuming a dev uses steamworks/vac for their online at all; many use steamworks for DRM and punkbuster for anti-cheat).

I'm gonna look into this, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is significantly less protected than the 2012 version.

 

[DLPB_]

Yeah let me know   Prob not gonna support it anyway to be fair (would mean more work for Luksy and ts for a start), given it can be easily converted with no real losses (well, no real losses if Aali releases his new driver sometime).

 

[Covarr]

That's fine. If there's a way to make it work, I'll figure it out myself if need be

 

[DLPB_]

In other news:

I've created a small tool to rip relevant text out of the game and so forth, so it will be easier for Lex to check entire Cait dialogue.  This leads to some interesting findings about how much dialogue there is in the game without formatting. Note, even with all the precautions I have taken, this will be out by a little.  Only a little though.

Total: 135321 words / 773646 chars / 465 occurrences of the word "Sephiroth"

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Cloud: 14331 (10.57% of total)  Tifa: 8807 (6.50% of total)    Barrett: 8426 (6.22% of total)      Cid: 6066 (4.48% of total)        Aerith: 4850 (3.58% of total)          Cait: 4048 (2.99% of total)             Red: 3958 (2.92% of total)              Yuffie: 3238 (2.39% of total)                 Sephiroth: 2063 (1.52% of total)                   Vincent: 1861 (1.37% of total)                    Total for all chars:  57648 / 135536 (42.53% of total)

So FF7 is around 135,000 words (773000 chars) total when formatting and all the other non dialogue is removed.

 

[luksy]

For reference that's about the same as The Return of the King  :-D

 

[DLPB_]

I didn't expect Cait to be that high up given he was likely shoehorned in like Vincent, but I guess that's more down to the fact Cait does actually get some story aboard the Highwind interwoven with Reeve, and at the Temple. 

The only story Vincent gets is minimal.  Although that isn't a totally bad thing because his character is supposed to be quiet and mysterious.

ps when you remove the duplicate text, ff7 is around 130,000 words.  Still very impressive.

 

[ProtoX]

The only story Vincent gets is minimal.  Although that isn't a totally bad thing because his character is supposed to be quiet and mysterious.

Thus Dirge of Cerberus was made. I didn't mind the games story with Deep Ground and more into Vincent's History, its when they decided to have Genesis from the secret ending be put in Crisis Core. In Crisis Core I didn't mind Angel telling Zack that the Buster Sword was passed down to uphold his family's honor and then passed down to Zack due to certain events. But adding Genesis to the story from Dirge of Cerberus secret ending and then adding it to Crisis Core was a bad move on Square Enix's part.

 

[DLPB_]

OK here is my simple FF7TextTool.  What does it do?  Well, it extracts all text from touphScript format files.

It takes a few options.

1. Name filter (For example {CLOUD} will only dump those headed by Cloud).
2. Count Text (Will search the dumped files for this text and report number found).
3. Contains text (Will dump only lines that contain text.  For example ize would dump lines with "Realize")
4. Display format (Will display all formatting like {NEW}.
5. Display titles (Will display map titles)

Place all files (whether in folders or not) into a folder called "IN" in the same place as this program.

If options 1,2,3 are left blank they will be ignored.  To dump ALL text leave 1 and 3 blank.

A report will be given in the command window, and all dumped text will be placed in "output.txt"

 

[Bosque]

Hey DLPB, if you have the time/patience, could you make a simple memory patch to disable exp growth that can be turned on/off, please? I know it isn't exactly a priority, but when the retranslation is released I'd like to play through the game but with Gjoerulv's mod, and I'm going to try and do a low-level run of it.

(or would the retranslation remove the terrible script on Tenko's mod?)

 

[DLPB_]

The mod won't be 100% compatible with Gj's mod until I know he is finished updating it, and then I can provide full compatibility.  As for the EXP thing... have you looked at Otyugh?  That can do a lot of stuff?  Or do you need it to be specific?

As for Tenko's mod... I don't support it at all. Apart from the crap script, it uses Aerith revival which is in clear violation of the original material regardless (and there's no easy way of changing the text, there will be a lot of mismatches).  Menu Overhaul supports it, but it looks like he has included that anyway.

 

[DLPB_]

Alexander O. Smith answers my questions on localising games.

Hi Dan,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Some answers!

> 1. Do you provide localisations in basic text, or do you have to update the files as well?

Back in the day there was a lot of direct updating of files. Once things got organized to the point where loc teams and dev teams could agree on standards, it was much easier for loc to work in excel, and have dev convert that into the code they needed for their compiler. Almost everything on the loc side is handled in excel now across the industry.

Excel is preferable to plain text because you can display original text and translation side-by-side, as well as comments/editing/etc. It's also very useful for generating voice scripts from text, and the filters can be helpful for checking a particular character's lines, etc.

> 2. Do you relocalise the non-dialogue text, such as weapon names?

Sure, though that's at the discretion of the loc team.

> 3. Following on from that, are you asked to keep the "canon" names?

This is also at the discretion of the loc team.

>
> For example, certain things in the series have become "canon" , such as "megalixir" [Last Elixir]
> and certain FF7 things, though mistakes made by Michael Baskett have become "FF7 canon", such as "Mideel" [Midhir]

At different times, different loc teams have been more zealous about fixing earlier translation problems. I think the general rule followed at Square is, if there's an embarrassing error or a "bad" translation necessitated by word length restrictions on older games, those are all free game for updating. If there's a translation that's arguably an error, but works well enough, and is loved by the fan base, those tend to stay. It's not an exact science, obviously, and there's less oversight than you might imagine (though certainly more now than there was). Another instance of 'mistakes' that won't get fixed: Ochu, which is based on a pronunciation of the D&D monster "Otyugh." That won't be fixed because WOTC has a copyright on Otyugh.

> 4. Do you get full cooperation from the original writers?  Part of the issue we had is that sometimes there is no way to work out what the writer desired.  We still can't be 100% sure that Zack is Zax, for example. The only reason we know it is Midhir is because of the internet, and good research into other mythology.

Sometimes, though that usually comes down to who is drinking with whom, or going on cigarette breaks with whom, at the time. There was very little official communication between writers and loc back in the day, so it was all back-channel stuff. Oftentimes, the original wasn't written with anything significant in mind at all, so loc ends up having free reign anyway.

In short, it's chaos, man, chaos!

Alex

I have replied to the above.  I never realised Otyugh was changed because of Copyright I just assumed it was an error.

And a clarification from my side: Ochu was (likely) originally just an error. It hasn't been fixed because of copyright concerns.

 

[luksy]

Being forced to use it on a daily basis, IMO using excel for translation work is possibly the worst ad-hoc standard in translation today. Csv files I can get behind as a storage format seeing as it's trivial to import them in pretty much anything, but using excel directly for editing is clunky and frustrating for anything except simple definitions like names and menus. Once you have more than two or three languages the problem is compounded.

Translation memory software is either horribly designed and convoluted (Wordfast), or horribly designed, convoluted AND ridiculously overpriced (Trados). Other editors are mainly geared towards apps and are just as bad for editing projects with actual conversations and story.

The gaming localization industry really needs some kind of usable standard.

 

[DLPB_]

Yeah, excel was how we first started and it became clear that we would be there til 2050 using that method.