I'm seriously wanting to translate Naked Plus when it comes out. I've already taught myself how to use Wolf RPG Editor, have come up with a simple way to distribute only the translated files without distributing the whole game (hopefully that means it will stay up on a filehoster awhile longer), and I (MIGHT) even have a way to update the translation to appropriately reapply it to updated revisions of the game (which I can't really test yet since we only have the trial to look at, and I have no intention of translating very much of that). Hopefully unlike Naked Order though, we won't be stuck with just one translated version and then watch additional content (or bug fixes) be released in later versions that we'll be forced to use the inferior machine translations on.
Just one teeny-tiny problem though... I don't know any Japanese AT ALL. No amount of excitement, determination, and willingness to work on the technical side of the translation portion can fix that. I've never wanted to undertake a project like this before though, and I loved the concept of Naked Order so much that I couldn't help but get excited about it.
One of two things could happen here: (1) someone who does know Japanese and English reasonably well but isn't so sure about RPG editors could offer to just receive a bunch of text files that I send them with Japanese dialogue, write in the translation, and then send it back to me for insertion; or (2) someone who knows both the language and how to use the editor could just do it on their own and I probably wouldn't be needed. If we relied on option 2 though, I worry that we could be waiting several months or even a full year before we see a translation (assuming anyone else would be willing to do one in the first place). Since I'm monolingual, I have no idea how difficult/time-consuming it is for someone to translate lines of text from one language to another totally different/unrelated language. (1/2)
So yeah, I guess after more thinking I couldn't come up with much else to say in a (2/2) post, but I would love to see a translated version of Naked Plus and would also be willing to help with it if needed, and also to attempt porting translations from a previous release to an updated one (admittedly this "porting" only involves hashing the game files from both releases, seeing which ones don't match up, and then reinserting only the existing translated lines into the "new" ones again and extracting anything new for translation, it's crude and I might spend an hour doing mind-numbing copying-pasting for most of that time, but it would work and I can listen to music or something while I do it so I don't mind too much). I'm not sure how much of the dialogue in the trial version will be kept or not, so as tempting as it might be to start on that and just carry some of those translations over, I don't know how much of the final release's code will be moved around, some lines might be dropped entirely, it's probably messier attempting that instead of just working on the incremental releases from v1.00 and onwards. Certain releases might be skipped if one release comes out with nothing but bug fixes but the circle announces yet another upcoming release with more content in it, for example.
So... comments? Criticism? Maybe I'm forgetting some obvious reason why this wouldn't work for all I know. And sorry if it sounds like a bunch of rambling, I'm just talking off the top of my head here. But aside from moving the translation to upgraded versions, I know this can work because I did basic translation editing tests and moved stuff over to another computer where everything worked out fine, so I know this can work in terms of distributing the patch and all that.
Anyone interested in trying this a few months from now?
