Someone willing to translate Gulliver Boy ?

[elmer]

Oh wow, that is beautiful, looking like a lush colorful SNES RPG from that era! Yeah, it does have the quality look of Legend of Xanadu II, Anearth Fantasy Stories, etc.

I bought Gulliver Boy ages ago because I wanted to see the HuVideo intro.

Unfortunately, I've never gone much further than that, because I just can't force my way passed the Japanese-barrier.

Gosh, that's some extremely nice art in those screenshots! 

[CDiablo]

I could probably help with the project, though I am in the middle of a few of my own. If anything I can probably find the text in hex and make a table. I was told many arcade card based games can pull the fonts from the super system card, so that may be an issue. PM me if whoever is working on this needs what little help/knowledge I can offer. I could also possibly help a bit with art stuff, but Im not too good at the moment.

[seieienbu]

It's funny, I learn a lot about RPGs that I want to try with these translation threads.  I've never played the game but now I'm going to pick up a copy and give it a go.  I hope a skilled hacker with time on his hands volunteers his services; I wish success to this project.

[shawnji]

I may be mistaken, but I think I recall a conversation with Dave Shadoff where he said he had a small bit of text extracted from it, but it might be worth approachIng him about. 

I had actually wanted to translate this myself at one point before my real life got far too complicated and I became an actual translator in the industrial sector.  Lately I've been trying to leave that kind of work at the office unless it's something I can tackle quickly and without a lot of effort.  It really is a charming game, and it'd be great if more people could play it.  I believe Toei did the animation for it, and I think there's also a Saturn version with much cleaner looking versions of the cutscenes.

I was working on some translations for Dave several years back, but I was never able to fully dedicate the time I needed to, and ended up leaving things at a standstill; which is something I've always felt kind of bad about.  If you want to talk to someone who knows the PC Engine inside and out, there are few people that know as much as he does outside of NightWolve and a handful of others.

[SamIAm]

I had actually wanted to translate this myself at one point before my real life got far too complicated and I became an actual translator in the industrial sector.

Wow, how do you like that?

I did some freelance for a while, and I've been wondering if I should get back into it. My current job at a Japanese company is nice enough, but the number of working days is insane. I'm afraid it may just be a grass-is-always-greener thing, though.

Plus, if I had to translate Japanese for a living, I might feel less inclined to do it as a hobby...and that would be a shame given how many PCE games are ripe for translation.

[shawnji]

I had actually wanted to translate this myself at one point before my real life got far too complicated and I became an actual translator in the industrial sector.

Wow, how do you like that?

I did some freelance for a while, and I've been wondering if I should get back into it. My current job at a Japanese company is nice enough, but the number of working days is insane. I'm afraid it may just be a grass-is-always-greener thing, though.

Plus, if I had to translate Japanese for a living, I might feel less inclined to do it as a hobby...and that would be a shame given how many PCE games are ripe for translation.

Some days I like it, but it can be exhausting on occasion.  Meetings are the hardest part, as it's easy to get a little worn out from trying to interpret simultaneously when the Americans are always interrupting each other and switching topics constantly (which drives the Japanese staff crazy). 

I actually like doing document translations, but with manufacturing there's a lot of short-hand, and sometimes I just have to go to the guy that wrote it and ask what he was really trying to get at.  I'm one of only two American translators at the place where I work right now, and all the others are either Japanese citizens raised in the US, or who have lived most of their lives here.  Even they have trouble parsing through a lot of this stuff.

I think you hit it right on the nose, though.  Doing it as a job really kills your passion for doing it as a hobby unless you have a genuine love for the material you're dealing with at work.  My problem is that manufacturing is horribly boring to me, yet I'm not sure what else I could do with my limited skill set that would pay anywhere near as well as this does, so I keep sticking with it. 

It's too bad I haven't ever gotten around to taking the JLPT, as I could apply to Nintendo or some other similar companies should I manage to pass the N1.  I have tried to apply to a few anime localization companies, as I have some minor editing experience and two years of professional stage acting experience that I think could be relevant, but I haven't had any luck there yet.  The pay would most certainly be less, but I feel like it might be worth it.

I know what you mean about Japanese work hours too.  It's basically the same thing over here.  A lot of the guys come in at 7:00 a.m. and leave at 7:00 p.m. every single day.  I work quite a bit of overtime, but they know that it gets really expensive to pay translators time and a half, so they often try to limit it as much as possible.  When I was working in Japan, though... man, that job nearly killed me with all the unpaid overtime I had to put in.  I don't think I could do that again.  Hats off to you for being able to handle it and do fan translations on the side.

Despite all my complaining, I do still miss living in Japan in a lot of ways.  Outside of work, I really enjoyed my life there, and being back in America has it's own share of problems to deal with.  I have no idea what being a translator / interpreter in Japan would be like.  My impression is that it would be far more demanding, but I really can't say for sure.

[SamIAm]

If you can translate professionally, I'm sure you can pass the JLPT1. Just make sure your jouyou kanji is up to speed. I passed it in 2011, and I remember thinking that I would be embarrassed if my Japanese friends ever found out how easy it really is. When you say 日本語能力検定1級 everybody goes "WHOA!" and assumes you're some kind of wunderkind, but all it really means is that you've got a firm enough grasp on all the fundamentals that you can easily learn a specialty, which is what the JLPT2 ought to be. If they made something as hard as certain English proficiency tests, like the TOEFL iBT, then that would be something I'd be proud of passing.

I've since gotten rusty in some areas, but I've started studying on a daily basis again so I can take the test one more time next summer. My goal is to ace it this time, rather than just pass it.

These days I work at a juku, and I'm the first foreigner they ever hired even though it's a big company. Rather than teaching students, my job consists mostly of helping the staff and teaching English to the president of the company. What's weird is that I don't really have a boss (if the president is happy, everything is fine, it seems) and I wind up with big chunks of free time. It's certainly great for doing a little fan-translating or studying or whatever. If I went freelance again, it would be back to "output=salary", so I'm sure I'd miss the lack of pressure.

But man, I'm here six days a week most weeks, and it just sucks. Management is conservative, and they think six-day workweeks made Japan strong in the first place. I'm not here 7-to-7, thank god, but I am working over 60 hours a week. That one day off isn't really satisfying because I don't have fun so much as I just recover.

In addition to a stable salary and some cush time, I have benefits and a bit of prestige where I am. Guys I know would kill for this job. But I don't want to do it until I die or retire.

Making subtitles or dubbing scripts is great work if you can get it. The closest I ever got was subtitling a couple of independent movies for a festival here for very so-so pay. It was a hell of a lot better than translating some dry technical document, or poring over a nice advertisement piece and watching some clueless Japanese editor bake it into something so terrible you don't want your name attached to it.

Well, best of luck to you! And thanks for the reply.

[shubibiman]

I've worked with Dave on a translation project a while Bach already. It was on the Dead of the Brain french translation project. Both parts have been translated but are yet to be inserted. He has been very busy lately so I'm not sure he has time for another project like this.

[reno5]

Vivement un jeux de PCE en français

[Punch]

Video codec has been cracked, so you can easily subtitle this game.

Wait, is there huvideo documentation somewhere? I thought the only person who done something like that was you (Bubblegum Crisis clip) and I don't remember you releasing any kind of documentation or notes about it. Did you?

[Sadler]

Video codec has been cracked, so you can easily subtitle this game.

Wait, is there huvideo documentation somewhere? I thought the only person who done something like that was you (Bubblegum Crisis clip) and I don't remember you releasing any kind of documentation or notes about it. Did you?

Check out this post.

[Punch]

Video codec has been cracked, so you can easily subtitle this game.

Wait, is there huvideo documentation somewhere? I thought the only person who done something like that was you (Bubblegum Crisis clip) and I don't remember you releasing any kind of documentation or notes about it. Did you?

Check out this post.

That's a very simple format all things considered. Thanks.

[dshadoff]

If you can translate professionally, I'm sure you can pass the JLPT1. Just make sure your jouyou kanji is up to speed. I passed it in 2011, and I remember thinking that I would be embarrassed if my Japanese friends ever found out how easy it really is. When you say 日本語能力検定1級 everybody goes "WHOA!" and assumes you're some kind of wunderkind, but all it really means is that you've got a firm enough grasp on all the fundamentals that you can easily learn a specialty, which is what the JLPT2 ought to be. If they made something as hard as certain English proficiency tests, like the TOEFL iBT, then that would be something I'd be proud of passing.

JLPT N2 (previously 2級) is said to be approximately at the level of 中学３年 or 高校１年.
JLPT N1 (previously 1級) is said to be approximately at the level of completing high school.

On the other hand, I've shown N1 study books to Japanese University graduates, and they've looked wide-eyed at it, and openly wondered if they could pass N1...

Personally, I think they've built it that way because of the state of Japanese-language education - which is (IMHO) a real mess, and the materials fall apart about 75% of the way to N2, and start relying too much on the idea that "you must be living here, so you'll encounter half the curriculum through daily life, so we won't cover that", rather than properly putting it into a curriculum.  Which is truly sad, because they put way too much effort into reinventing elementary-level stuff.

I wish I could afford to pick up the language by actually being there and absorbing some of those bits through osmosis as the curriculum tends to expect (but yet not subscribing to the "marry-the-company" ethos).

-Dave

[SamIAm]

I've picked up a few scary-looking grammar books specifically for the N1 which are full of stuff that I don't know and practically never encounter, and Japanese friends have had the same reaction upon looking at them. However, during the actual test, I found that relatively little of that stuff was really in there.

Instead, all you really need to pass the N1 is to be so good at N2 level grammar that there's no challenge to it anymore. In fact, even when some of those scary "N1 Book" grammar bits come up, a person who is really comfortable with N2 level stuff will be able to "feel" what the answer is just by its conjugation or its style.

Vocabulary is similar. If you could take three N2 tests and never encounter a word that you don't know, you'll pass the N1. They just don't put that many really high level words in it. Finally, in terms of kanji, you do need to know the 2000 or so jouyou kanji - no more, no less - but that's not so bad. If you can demolish the N2 with time and energy to spare, and you know your jouyou kanji, you will very likely pass the N1.

To be honest, that "completed high school" ranking is really more like "almost but didn't quite flunk out of a low-level high school". It's just not that hard. There really should be a speaking section in it, too.

I feel you on the way that mid-to-high-level materials assume too much. In my case, I hit a wall because I was stubborn for the longest time about kanji. My grammar was good, and my speaking and listening wasn't bad, but I could only read about 500 kanji in a way that could be described as "well". Finally, I was stuck in a job I hated and living in the middle of nowhere for a year, and that motivated me to get busy on a daily basis and get to 2000. The world kind of opened up after that.

If I could go back in time and tell something to my younger self, it would probably be to study kanji like a maniac at university when I had time, rather than putting it off to after graduation.