PROJECT HISTORY AND BRIEF TRANSLATION NOTES

satsu - 18 April 2011

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1. A Brief History of How This Project Came to Be
2. Translator's Notes
3. Special Thanks

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1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW THIS PROJECT CAME TO BE

It's December 2010 at the time of writing, and the beta test for Hourai High
has just started. Now that the game's being checked by people with fresh eyes,
I feel like I can take a moment to relax for a moment and take some time to
write about the project.

This project is one with several different histories. I think it's fair to say
that the origin of everything was back in 1999, when I was a high school kid
(and a massive weeaboo). I spoke no Japanese and my ROM hacking skills were
minimal - that skill I never really managed to brush up much - but despite
that, I managed to partner up with Akujin on this neat game I'd found.

As I said, it's December 2010 now, so my memory of 1999 isn't so great. If I
recall correctly, though, I'd met Akujin on the RPGd message board in the
context of me posting about Hourai. I remember being amazed at how friendly
and helpful he was - he was very patient with me despite my lack of skills
at the time, very enthusiastic and very capable as both a translator and a
programmer.

Akujin dumped the script himself with a program he'd used for another project,
while I struggled with the substring pointers. These were 16-bit pointers that
would fetch a commonly-used long piece of text to save space in the ROM image.
If it gives you any idea of what a sucky ROM hacker I was, I was hoping to use
these to expand out the text elsewhere in the ROM because I couldn't figure
out any other way to move and expand text. It was a mess.

At any rate, Akujin eventually translated everything in pretty much no time at
all, and I struggled with getting the script inserted. Not too long afterwards,
Akujin suggested teaming up with his friends Wildbill and Taskforce,.

Sure, I said, I could certainly use the help. I felt a bit sad that my
influence in things was diminished even further, but I looked at it objectively
and it was clear that I needed help. Wildbill and Taskforce joined the team,
and I was very pleased and grateful to see the improvements coming in - font
hacks, menu hacks, work on an insertion tool (I'd been struggling with
publicly-available tools) and so on. I was confident that things were moving
in the right direction, and I was keen to improve my skills so I could
contribute more.

Before I knew it, a couple of years had passed. Communication had ceased.
I found myself unable to contact the others, and a bit distressed because
I had lost my copy of the script files, and I'd been unsuccessful in my
attempts to get copies. On top of that, I'd just started university, and
so many things in my life changed - I was a massive weaboo in school, but
I grew up quite quickly once I went to university. With this came a social
life, and coupled with my studies, this left me with a distinct lack of
time to work on Hourai.

2005 came and the Hourai bug bit me again. I set about trying to contact
Akujin again to procure the script files, as the others would not give me
what they had, and they had seemed to ÒretireÓ from the ROM hacking scene.
Akujin was completely unreachable, and after scouring various media that I'd
accumulated over the years, I managed to only find some non-dialogue
translations. 

By this point, however, I'd learnt a great deal of Japanese. I wanted to
see Hourai in English, so I decided that I'd bite the bullet and retranslate
the whole thing myself. I got in touch with Gideon Zhi, and agreed to
translate Lady Stalker's script in exchange for him handling the hacking
on Hourai. This is the point where the history of the project diverges.
Eventually, Wildbill and Taskforce would reappear, carrying on the old work.
Meanwhile, Gideon Zhi and I more or less restarted from a blank slate - I
think the only thing from the original project that went into our version
was the table file. I have, however, included some nods to Akujin's original
translation.

A lot of things happened in between then and the time that things got moving
again in earnest for Hourai. I spent a year in Japan, finished university and
started working as a freelance translator in the games industry. I translated
script files for Energy Breaker, then retranslated or edited the bits I didn't
do. With Gideon Zhi, I translated the Star Fox 2 beta. With the help of Bongo`,
byuu, Gideon Zhi and other kind collaborators, I translated Eternal Filena,
another project that I'd first started back when I was a high-school kid.
There were a variety of other things I worked on as well, in addition to
professional work.

By 2008, I was working full-time translating games. During a long quiet period
at work lasting two or three weeks, I decided that I'd spend my time more
productively and sneaked the script files for Lady Stalker and Hourai High
into the office. I blazed through the Lady Stalker script in a few days, sent
it back, and then got cracking on the Hourai High script. It took about a week
and half. It was an interesting experience, sneakily doing a fan translation
at work. I think that subversiveness kind of shows in the scripts that I
translated, as I felt more open to slipping in jokes and stuff. I wasn't
afraid to rewrite bits to make more sense or be more interesting in English
while remaining faithful to the source material.

Once the first draft was dealt with, there was another gap. I waited for
Gideon Zhi to handle the technical side of things, but I had plenty of
things at work and otherwise to keep my occupied anyway. There were only
a few windows during the course of 2008 and 2009 when enthusiasm, plenty
of free time and other elements all came together to allow me to do some
meaningful ROM hacking work. During these windows of opportunity, I mostly
directed my efforts towards Filena and Energy Breaker. (That's basically
why all of my projects take so long - they often involve windows of
opportunity, enthusiasm, availability of involved parties and so on to
all come together, and sometimes that may not be such a regular occurrence.)

Come November 2009, I started to direct my efforts towards Hourai. Things
were slow at first; I was pretty busy at work, so I mostly wanted to spend
my free time blowing of steam by playing games rather than working on them.
I'd received an edit pack from Gideon Zhi so that I could edit and insert
the script as I played, allowing me to quickly check changes and fix parts
where I'd got it wrong. I did this while Gideon Zhi worked on the script,
and come October 2010 or so, I'd finished playing through the game and the
hacking had reached an advanced stage. For the next couple of months, I'd
translate small files and bits and pieces that were missed, continue fixing
up the script and answer questions about the game while Gideon Zhi continued
to work industriously on the hacking.

That more or less brings us to this late stage of the project. I'm keen to
see how people receive the finished project, more than ten years after it
all began.

satsu, December 2010

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2. TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

The game is supposed to be quite light-hearted with a dash of weirdness, so
I did my best to preserve that element. While I understand a lot of people
are quite keen on sticking to literal text very closely, it would have killed
the game here. So no, the Musketeers didn't have outrageous French accents in
the original script, and there isn't a reference to Godwin's Law either.

One part of localisation that I find constantly fascinating is naming things.
I didn't go as far as changing the setting, so by and large, I kept the
Japanese names in. There are a few exceptions, of course, which were made
for characterisation or to prevent from creating barriers for a non-Japanese
speaking player. However - not a lot of people in the English-speaking world
know this, but Hourai High the SNES game is a spin-off of Hourai High the
play-by-mail role-playing game. Based on the PBM game were novels, table
RPGs, magazines, a card game, mobile phone games and at least one CD. As
such, I didn't want to go in and start changing around things too much,
so I tried to tread carefully. 

Here are a few interesting odds and sods in no particular order.

White Horse Cafe, Sketchy Soup, etc.
These two places originally had Japanese names, but because the player is
told to go to these places, I gave them easily-recognisable names. We also
translated signs for places where the player is explicitly told to go to.

Side Street
This name came from Akujin's early translation. I liked it and decided to
keep it for the English. It's a more or less literal translation of the
Japanese name.

The Subterra Society
There was a rather decent pun in the Japanese text that took me 10 years
to notice. The original Japanese name is "Kouzan Nosutora", which I took
as "Corzan Nostra", a play on "Cosa Nostra". It turns out I was only halfway
there. "Kouzan" also means "mine", and their emblem is a shovel. They also
live underground. Clearly, this name wasn't getting the translation it
deserved, so I came up with an all-new English name to better reflect the
group.

Great Leader
Japanese: "Soutou". An exotic word for a leader that's generally applied
to the Fuehrer of Nazi Germany. (In Chinese, it just means "president".)
The word "Fuehrer" has a lot of baggage and seemed quite out of place, so
I looked towards North Korea for inspiration here.

Rachael and Beatrice Kanuma
These two are actually named thus in the source text. Beatrice appears in
the novel "Hourai Gakuen no Hatsukoi!" ("The First Love of Hourai High!").
Apparently she has the nickname of "Bad Luck Becky" - it didn't come up in
the game, though, so I slipped in a reference to it myself. I did take the
liberty of changing "Becky" to "Betty", though, since I've never heard of
"Becky" as a short name for "Beatrice". It makes zero difference to anything
in the game, but I thought it'd be a nice touch.
Julia and Isaac's names are untouched as well, but I made them sound them
less silly - originally, they spoke bad Japanese with lots of English words
thrown in. At first, I was trying to retain this, but it didn't turn out very
well at all and I decided the best thing to do was just to try and make them
sound more American. They don't have many lines anyway.

The Adventures of Hourai High: Transfer Student Dramabomb
The game's title screen graphic featured the legend "The Adventure of Hourai
High School", which people unquestioningly stuck with when referring to the
game. I don't think it's such a snappy title and it feels a bit non-native
to me, so I revised it slightly. "Dramabomb", of course, is not a word used
anywhere in the original game, but I needed a word of that many characters
to fit in with the title screen animation. I think it sets the tone for the
game quite nicely.
I made a colossal mistake in consistently mistranslating "Transfer Student"
as "Exchange Student" on the basis of a mistranslation I must have seen about
ten years ago - even once I'd learnt the Japanese, I was so used to the
mistranslation that it didn't occur to me. I finally got around to fixing
this the night before release (title screen included).

Resonator stones
Japanese: "Ouseki". Literal translation. These are ancient OOPArts that gave
players in the table-top RPG special powers. They were jewels with a Chinese
character written on them, and would grant powers based on what was written.
Additionally, the number of strokes that the Chinese character was comprised
of would give an equivalent bonus. For example, a stone with the character
for "wind" would give the player a corresponding power and a +9 bonus, because
the Chinese character for "wind" is made up of nine strokes.

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3. SPECIAL THANKS

+ Akujin - for getting me started
+ RPGd
+ All supporters since 1999
