Over on the Sega Xtreme forums, a user by the name of Murzik recently posted about his efforts in translating the version of Ys 1 in the Falcom Classics I Collection on Saturn.
For a breakdown, Murzik is using machine translation (See, Google Translate) in order to do a first pass translation. Think of it like a proof of concept showing a translation of said game can be done.
Currently, only the Minea town area is translated using this method. Once you explore the game further, many of the people you speak to won’t only speak Japanese, but in garbled text box as well. This is due to the way text in game is encoded.
He explains the reason as follows:
"If you will leave Minea town, any dialogue, any text, any conversation with NPC will cause errors of any sort (because translation used 1 byte encoding with patched routines for script parsing, while rest of game is still untraslated and encoded in 2 byte)"
– Murzik Explaining why this text error occurs (Source)
The creator of the patch would like to incorporate the community into the fan translation process. If you or someone you know would love to contribute to the project, definitely reach out to him on SEGA Xtreme!
Keep in mind, this is an EARLY fan translation, and isn’t expected to represent the final product. What’s there though, is amazing! We are looking forward to seeing the progress on this, and will be featuring this in a bigger extent once it’s completed!
If you would like to follow the project’s progress, or want to reach out to help, definitely follow the SEGA Xtreme thread here:
https://segaxtreme.net/threads/translating-ys-1.25212/
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