Anybody have experience with programming games?

[big_bob002]

There are some good Vita games in Japan that aren't getting localized to other countries. I was wondering how hard it is to translate to English, for instance? I'm pretty sure there are websites that convert language. Wouldn't it be possible to go into the coding and find all the in game text, and copy/paste to the converted language? I don't even care if it's not 100% perfect translation. At that point you don't even need someone to translate. You need someone who speaks English and can read the dialog and clean it up.

[AndroidFox]

No, it wouldn't work, game code is far more complex than that.

[lporiginalg]

AndroidFox is right, unless you somehow had access to the original source code you will spend countless hours just finding all the text. Even if you knew where to look or found all the text there's a big issue with translating it. Just because you "know English" doesn't mean you can fix up all the auto-translated text. You have to understand the whatever files contain text such as dialogue are not written as a movie script. The blocks of text will be completely non-linear therefore you would have to translate it without context, which is not insignificant.

 

You might like a game enough to not mind shoddy auto-translated text like "All of your base are belong to us". But when people spend money on a game these days they have higher expectations than that so for a company to release a game with the dirtiest and cheapest translation available will more than likely result in backlash and scorn.

[BrunoBomb]

It is a complicated process. I have a Japanese game for PSP, Digimon Adventures, and I'm waiting for someone to translate the game, wich is a long process because is all coded. You have to wait until someone translate the game and releases a patch for it.

[Elbender93]

Even if you know how to do it, you can't touch any code on the ps vita unless you hack it and put a custom firmware or similar