Editing/Programming a H game.

LWB is expanding operations!
LOL, just half-kidding at this point. AS if right now we have a good interest in translating an eroge. Since there are a good chunk of eroge update in Fakku, i figure i could come here and ask about the editing/programming side of translating an eroge. We have plenty of capable translators so translating itself is not going to be a problem. But like i said before, editing/programming is not the field that we are particularly skillful (i work with CS5 and GIMP damn it not Visual Basic). So........can anyone point us to some tutorials to work? Thanks a lot for anyone who contribute :D Maybe some hackers/programmers can join LWB too? Who knows ;)

G-senjou no Maou has over 42,000 lines of dialogue. That's probably worth more than 840 doujins assuming that there are 50 lines per doujin. And that's just a medium lengthed VN.

Here are few tools to use:-
http://tlwiki.tsukuru.info/index.php?title=Tools
http://haven.parodius.com/formats/

... The best bet to translate VN is to rip the whole script, Machine Translate it using Atlas or Systran with FHC dictionary ( Perfect for Japanese games, so as to avoid mitakes with Kanji, Katakana and the like. )and get crappy Translation. Then get someone to write those lines down properly and Reinsert it back as an English Translation Patch. Harder than it sounds, but less time-taking than directly translating Japanese to English by your staff and then typing everything and inserting it back into the game.

I'd assume all you'd have to do is find the files the GUI uses and replace the Japanese text with English.

Well, there's always the problem of some text overflowing out of the GUI.

I'm actually curious on the technique VN translators use to replicate the original text files, again I would just replace the Japanese text with English.

Ah, found something you guys could use, haven't fully read it myself. It looks like a VN translation guide, complete with tools.
http://vn.i-forge.net/tools/

I could see the problems this could cause.

Have you tried asking other VN communities and forums for help? There are probably a few out there willing to provide tutorials or support with your project.

I said 'crappy', lol. As a person who knows nothing about the Japanese language, I'd do that and later translate it to English. Real English

Crappy Japanese translations = Crappy English
If you don't have "ANY" knowledge about the language, you better not try to do any translations no matter how ambitious you are.

Even I am not qualified to do any translations because of my grammar knowledge.

Do not underestimate translations

Be prepared to have to deal with several different types of game engines. And try to use a Linux system, because i have found that usually helps when dealing with rand file extensions.

This is actually pretty good. A few of the tools are a little outdated but should still work fairly well. I'm not entirely sure what engine you guys are translating from, nor what style you guys are doing [it matters greatly can't stress that enough]. I mean style as in how the translation is to be released, is this going to be a patch or a rehash? The link above won't be of that much help if you are aiming for releasing a english patch, you'd need a install tool that only changes whatever changes you made to a 'key installation'.

However if you are going for a rehash there are lots of ways to go about it. Rehashes are basically remade 'exact' copies of the original material but changed file and installation wise [in some rare cases done in a different engine solely for compatibility] to be more friendly to US computers [MangaGamer does this with their Higarashi releases]. The above link is more in line with this style since from here, it'll be easier to repackage the finished work as a whole.

On the part about replicating the text, most teams usually just change the font to better fit the windows [also adding a extra scroll on the screen] if there is too much to place in. Certain font styles in japanese don't play very well in english [if at all].