Tutorial: Translating EarthBound

Translating EarthBound

This guide aims to help anyone who would like to translate EarthBound into another language, dialect, or even create an alternative English version of EarthBound by following these steps:

• Translate the main game text
• Translate items and enemies
• Translate and adjust menus
• Translate/Modify game sprites
• Translate/Modify game map tiles
• Modify game fonts
• Export and Modify compressed graphics

If any of that sounds confusing or difficult, don't worry! I'll do my best to describe each process in detail, and I'm available to help anyone who may have any questions about how to translate EarthBound, and there are a ton of great people who can help at the PKHack help thread.

Things to Consider

Before you begin, let me outline some potential problems with translating EarthBound so you can determine whether or not your language will work out.

• This process currently does not support printing text from Right to Left - This could eventually be fixed someday
• This process only allows for up to 128 characters TOTAL, including punctuation and formatting characters - As far as I can tell, 128 characters is the absolute limit in EarthBound, though in theory the game could someday support up to 176, it is probably not a simple process, but I will look into it if someone really needs more than 128 characters

FAQ

Isn't it bad to make a translation of a translation?

• Generally, translating a translation is frowned upon, but there are some things you can do to help avoid falling into the pitfalls of translating a translation. First off, Tomato has written the EXCELLENT guide on how Mother 2 is different from EarthBound at Legends of Localization and I HIGHLY recommend you read that before starting your translation and refer to it during your translation. Beyond this, one thing I did was get a copy of Mother 2 and play over certain portions of the game and slowly translate the text on screen to try and get a feel for the differences between Mother 2 and EarthBound.

Is there a way to translate the text from Mother 2?

• Sort of! But it's a slow process and I honestly wouldn't recommend it, currently. Perhaps, someday, there will be a script dump of Mother 2 for CCScript... one can only dream...

How long will it take to translate EarthBound?

• Translations take time. Good translations take even longer. The EarthBound main text contains somewhere around 75,000 words in English. Unfortunately, pinning down an actual amount of time can be hard. I would recommend snagging about 100 words from the game and translating them at a comfortable pace, making sure to document names of places, people, and take notes on what you're translating. See how long that takes you. Now, from that, find out how many words you're likely to translate in an hour, then divide 75,000 by the number. Then assume you'll probably go a little bit slower than that. Now let's say you can comfortably translate around 300 words per hour while taking notes of the important details, referring to Legends of Localization, and making sure your translation is generally high quality. At that rate, translating EarthBound will take 250 hours. Then add at least half that much time (probably more) to reading over your text to edit, revise, correct, and generally improve the quality of your translation, and you can see why games are not generally translated super fast.
• Beyond the text translation, you'll also need to do some technical things, as well as change several graphics in the game and prepare your game's font. The technical side should actually be pretty straight forward if you follow this guide and ask for help when you need it. I'm also more than willing to put my own personal time into helping edit things if they can show they've made significant progress on translation. CoilSnake and this guide will make this part of the process MUCH faster than most translation patches end up taking.
• Finally, you'll need to test your game. Please, please, PLEASE don't spend all the time translating and hacking EarthBound into your target language just to release it without testing. You'll want to play through your translation at least twice. The first time you should take your time and speak with all the NPCs, find items, encounter enemies, ride the bus around, and generally try to be a completionist with the game to verify as much as you can. Anticipate spending somewhere around 40 - 50 hours on this, and ALWAYS take the time to document every single error, typo, bug, and oddity you find. Then, once you fix everything you found in your first time through, play through again to verify fixes and make sure none of your changes ruined the game. If you are working with several people on your translation, have them play it as well, and have a shared document where you can all write about the problems you find. Second time through should be a little bit quicker, depending on how much you need to check, but I'd still anticipate a good 30 - 40 hours.

Please message me with any suggestions you may have for this guide