How to translate ds games

Gaming How do you translate DS japanese games to english?

HinaNaru Cutie

Well-Known Member

; I want to know how people do it because allot of them don’t want to translate the games at all. From what I read. ; O ; If anyone knows how to do it than please give me explanation and if you do need a program to do this than please tell me.

Nathan Drake

You need three major things:

1) Tools to extract the text and pictures from the game in question.
2) The actual files in a format that can be read and edited.
3) A complete understanding of the Japanese language.

There are no shortcuts to translating. Either you know the language or you don’t. Either you have the ROM hacking skills necessary or you don’t. You can’t just run the text through something like Google Translate or Bing Translate because neither will return results that actually make sense half the time, and the rest will be incorrectly pieced together or just generally mistranslated.

Now, if you have any skills to bring to the table past «I want this game translated», and especially if you can get some work done even on.

Nathan Drake

Obligations fulfilled, now I depart.

You need three major things:

1) Tools to extract the text and pictures from the game in question.
2) The actual files in a format that can be read and edited.
3) A complete understanding of the Japanese language.

There are no shortcuts to translating. Either you know the language or you don’t. Either you have the ROM hacking skills necessary or you don’t. You can’t just run the text through something like Google Translate or Bing Translate because neither will return results that actually make sense half the time, and the rest will be incorrectly pieced together or just generally mistranslated.

Now, if you have any skills to bring to the table past «I want this game translated», and especially if you can get some work done even on the ROM hacking side of things, you’re always free to try starting up your own project and seeing if you can attract anybody who speaks Japanese who would be willing to help you. I strongly suggest against making a topic saying you simply want a game translated though while having nothing to offer. It will be locked, and nobody wants to jump on a project simply because you want it done. The translator generally will want to have some interest in the title(s) in question as well, so even if you know how to do part, if no translator is interested in the project, you’re just out of luck.

If you would like to start learning Japanese, I recommend starting off this Densetsu’s Japanese beginner tutorial. It’s well put together with other members contributing other great online, free resources to start and advance through learning the Japanese language. I’ll link the tutorial in question below so you can have a look:

Otherwise on the ROM hacking side of things, when I say tools need to be made, I mean programs need to be built basically for every individual game as they tend to all be put together differently. Extracting varies as well as reinsertion based on game limitations, but generally once you can actually get into the files, some more common editing tools can be utilized. All in all, both learning the language and the ROM hacking would be years of practice until you were truly ready to dig into a translation solo, so maybe you should focus on learning one aspect. If you decide on Japanese itself, it will save a lot of work and will save you from depending heavily on others for your own desires.

ROM Hack translate DS games

simonrule

Well-Known Member

DarthNemesis

Well-Known Member

1. Extract all the files using dslazy/dsbuff.
2. Look at different files in a hex editor until you find text (it’s usually Shift-JIS or Unicode encoding, so check for both).
3. Examine the file until you’ve figured out how the game finds each line.
4. Write a program to extract the text from the file and insert replacement text, recalculating any lengths/pointers.

People have already done that for a few games, but there is no common file format for text, so there is no magic tool that works with every game. You generally have to figure out the game’s file format yourself, so it takes dedication and motivation.

simonrule

Well-Known Member

simonrule

Well-Known Member

1. Extract all the files using dslazy/dsbuff.
2. Look at different files in a hex editor until you find text (it’s usually Shift-JIS or Unicode encoding, so check for both).
3. Examine the file until you’ve figured out how the game finds each line.
4. Write a program to extract the text from the file and insert replacement text, recalculating any lengths/pointers.

People have already done that for a few games, but there is no common file format for text, so there is no magic tool that works with every game. You generally have to figure out the game’s file format yourself, so it takes dedication and motivation.

psycoblaster

Divine

1. Extract all the files using dslazy/dsbuff.
2. Look at different files in a hex editor until you find text (it’s usually Shift-JIS or Unicode encoding, so check for both).
3. Examine the file until you’ve figured out how the game finds each line.
4. Write a program to extract the text from the file and insert replacement text, recalculating any lengths/pointers.

People have already done that for a few games, but there is no common file format for text, so there is no magic tool that works with every game. You generally have to figure out the game’s file format yourself, so it takes dedication and motivation.

simonrule

Well-Known Member

1. Extract all the files using dslazy/dsbuff.
2. Look at different files in a hex editor until you find text (it’s usually Shift-JIS or Unicode encoding, so check for both).
3. Examine the file until you’ve figured out how the game finds each line.
4. Write a program to extract the text from the file and insert replacement text, recalculating any lengths/pointers.

People have already done that for a few games, but there is no common file format for text, so there is no magic tool that works with every game. You generally have to figure out the game’s file format yourself, so it takes dedication and motivation.

luke_c

Big Boss

FAST6191

Techromancer

I dare say you have already been told but:

Remember the useless code you used as a kid 1=A 2=B 3=C and so on?

Same idea here except we use hex.

In reality it can be anything although there are many tricks you can use to find the meaning of the text including but not limited to luck (you have predefinied/common encodings like unicode, shiftJIS or ASCII or a very minor tweak or merging of them).

Corruption and brute force: find the area of memory responsible for displaying text on a screen. Mess with it by either randomising it or filling it with the same string and thus change the on screen display. As you control the changes you can often rapidly work out what is what.

Linguistics; in English the space character is undoubtedly the most common charactern and as such it will likely be the most common character, similarly nearly every word has a vowel in it. Two and three letter words will often be things like «the» «and» «it» «if» «to» and a multitude of other «joining» sorts of works as you should already have the space character, sentences will start with a capital letter but capitals are otherwise somewhat rare in use. The only reason language works is because of patterns like this, a simple Japanese one is that Japanese broadly speaking has three sets of character called hiragana, katakana (collectively known as Kana) and Kanji and they are very much treated as three distinct sets of characters, Kanji are complex looking shapes compared to the others and in simpler games.

Computing knowledge: most character encodings but not all by any means will encode their characters one after the other (go back to the top: A=1 B=2 C=3. same applies in ASCII, unicode and to some extent shiftJIS). You can use a relative search tool to scan the file for instances where the hex is different according to the pattern you tell it, crystaltile2 has one as does «monkey moore».
Work in language knowledge: around 30 base characters multiplied by two for the cases and add 10 for Arabic numbers. Far less than the 256 characters that an 8 bit encoding uses and far less than the 43046721 16 bit encoding allows- meaning a character distribution will likely be focused on certain numbers courtesy of the relative encoding thing I was on about a few lines back.
You can twist this and know the length of a sentence: as well as space you also have fullstop and in computing you will often have end of line characters (usually 00 but it does change), you can search for 00 and then assuming you know how many bits encode each character you can then work sentence length out looking at the game.
Games/characters will often have phrases which get repeated (See final fantasy and «kupo» as a basic example) or have words with nice things to latch onto «noooooooooooooooooooooooo» looks very obvious in code.

I would go in depth and detail the countless other tricks available but it has been covered before in guides written by everyone who as thus far replied to you.
You take

how to translate roms

deathfayt

New Member

Licardo7

Well-Known Member

wrong section buddy. Go to the NDS section and there should be translation or ROM hacking section in there.

Mods can you please move this?

DarkLG

Wow One Shiny Ribbon.

Hehe Moo

You probably have a less chance of getting flamed if you request a translation. but you’ll still get flamed..

Do you know how a game works?

Shabadage

Well-Known Member

Well first, you have to find a direct download of the rom you want to translate, not a torrent, or a rapidshare/megaupload link.

Then head over to babelfish.altavista.com

Select translate a website from Japanese to English

Paste the download link into the box.

Once the rom is downloaded it’s been translated into English!

Hehe Moo

Well first, you have to find a direct download of the rom you want to translate, not a torrent, or a rapidshare/megaupload link.

Then head over to babelfish.altavista.com

Select translate a website from Japanese to English

Paste the download link into the box.

Once the rom is downloaded it’s been translated into English!

Shabadage

Well-Known Member

Well first, you have to find a direct download of the rom you want to translate, not a torrent, or a rapidshare/megaupload link.

Then head over to babelfish.altavista.com

Select translate a website from Japanese to English

Paste the download link into the box.

Once the rom is downloaded it’s been translated into English!

Tutorial [How-to] Force the DS/DSi games language with an AR code

Stremon

Well-Known Member

Since it doesn’t seem possible or easy to modify the Japanese 3DS/DSi to display any other language than Japanese/English for the DS/DSi games, I searched a way to force them to launch in the languages I want.

I first tried some hacks on the 3DS/DSi, or modified the files of my games by dump and unpacking them, but no solution works well.

So I searched an Action Replay code that allows me to override the firmware language, to force my games to launch in the language I want.
I found a lot of informations given by FAST6191, and thanks to him I was able to find what I was searching for in the memory viewer of the Desmume emulator: the memory address that change the games language.

I checked many games, and it appears they mostly use the same code since they all access the same information in the firmware!

Requirement to use the code:

— A DSi/3DS (obviously)
— A way to launch your games with action replay codes (Action Replay dongle, R4, DSTwo. )
— Games that contain the language you want (only DS/DSi games!!)

Simply use the following AR code with any game you want.

(both codes work, it appears they can be accessed in to memory points)

Just replace XX by your language code, and it should work.
Here are the language codes you can use:
00 = Japanese
01 = English
02 = French
03 = German
04 = Italian
05 = Spanish

Be careful, some games like Castlevania save the language in the first load and keep it, so you might want to setup the AR code before launching it.
Also, obviously the code will only work if the game is launched with the code already actived, it won’t work if you activate it while the game is running.

If you are using a card that supports usrcheat.dat files, I recommend you to use r4cce to add this code. It appears the code is already available inside the usrcheat.dat file, in the «!Codes Placeholder» section, so to use them just copy paste them in your games cheat codes.
I haven’t found a way to add the code to all games at once sadly.

Feel free to tell me if you find a better/more simple way to do it, I am open to any suggestion

ROM Hack How to translate roms?

BudWinston

Active Member

FAST6191

Techromancer

There is no one program or technique. Translating ROMs tends to require gaining some reasonable programming and reverse engineering skills, very doable but still programming/reverse engineering skills.

Beyond that the 3ds is not that well hacked, does not have well developed low level tools, does not have much in the way of debugging and does not have an emulator worth much cop. To that end you would be very much on the bleeding edge of things and that is not a good place to be if you do not know hacking in the first place, if only because you will largely have to develop your own tools and some of the lower level tools in the first place and that takes some fair knowing about what you are doing.

The GBA and DS have plenty of as yet untranslated games and all the downsides above do not exist for them (it is well hacked and documented, there are tools available, debugging is possible and there are very nice emulators available that can also assist in hacking). More on that
http://gbatemp.net/threads/gbatemp-rom-hacking-documentation-project-new-2014-edition-out.73394/
You might want to read up on GBA and DS hacking as the hardware is very similar and so are several of the formats and ways of doing things.

To answer your question though you need the ability to decrypt 3ds games (if you have a 4.5 3ds then fantastic, newer hacks are more troublesome but still doable at some level). The decryption programs will spit out a file that is known in these circles as a XORpad, it is the same size as the ROM it decrypts and is basically a copy of the ROM so people do not share them very much (and dumping teams do not include them either despite it being a good thing to do). Some decrypted games are out there and you might get somoene to share but hey.
You can also use the XORpad to encrypt the ROM again, others, including myself, would say to use so called 0 key encryption. Once that is done you will need a 3ds capable of running such things (so a gateway capable one or possible a CFW one once that gets a bit more developed, not a sky3ds or one of its clones at this stage).

3ds ROMs split down into two forms once you have that XORpad, they are known as the exefs and romfs

exefs houses the game binary which is to say the thing that sits in memory and runs on the CPU. (exefs = executable file system)
the romfs houses the game data (pictures, music, level data, text, video, 3d models, 3d textures. )

Many games will mix and match between the two and you might find text in the contents of the exefs, back on the DS you would have found some executable code muddled in with things (definitely on the GBA) but the DS kind of separates things as a security measure of sorts.
Game data is whatever the programmers cooked up and that can be some very strange stuff indeed. «computing, learn it» is about as narrow as I can make it really if you want to be able to wander in and tackle any game. http://www.romhacking.net/start and the docs I linked a minute ago will cover the stuff more commonly seen.

The exefs is not that well hacked in public yet and still nowhere near what we have for the GBA and DS. The disassembler is the main tool of the trade here. The 3ds has two processors though the ARM11 is likely the dominant one for things you will be doing (you might have seen terms like arm9 homebrew). I do not know what people are using for this.