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What I really wonder is how they translate the local dialects of some places. Did they just do a 'rural' dialect, or wording shift - or did they imitate a specific national speech pattern, like they do with cockney/Irish/Welsh variations in the English.
The regional dialects have been a pretty big part of DQ towns for a while, makes me wonder how well that translates across cultures.
The other big aspect would be the puns. So. Many. Puns. Like several thousand mini-jokes in these games, in every aspect of the game. Do the previous Russian translations get most of that across?
And as for the other parts, the fans translated several of them, including VIII
I guess this is a brilliant idea! But I don't think that this is possible. It requires double efforts from localizators. And there isn't really exotic and well-known russian dialects with interesting pronounciation. Except Ukrainian maybe, but it considered a separate language, and this can offend ukrainians.
Cool that there's a community that wants to give non-English/Japanese-readers a chance to explore those worlds.
Makes sense - but at the least there's going to be SOME vocal variants that kids regularly imitate without offending anyone. Say, farmer speech, dockworker speech, nerd/scientist speech, gangster speech - there's always comedy to having a whole town, including the women and children, speaking entirely in those variants.
Worst case, you can just have them obsessing over a small set of words or spelling alterations that they relate everything to - though it's comedically better if you can relate it to something folks can immediately connect to.
The heart of comedy is making a mental connection with something folks didn't expect would connect as well. Dragon Quest does a good job of setting up a bit of confusion first, then resolving it comedically as you put the pieces together - leaving that out of the translation would be the cruelest cut. Being too 'literal' would also break the ability for the casual audience to get anything out of it - you kind of have to adapt to the national mindset a little to make the jokes work. Even if most of the jokes just make you groan - that's half the fun too!
I don't know Russian, but I'll do a little to help if I can.
Here's the source code for a tool to unpack Unreal Engine 4 files:
https://github.com/panzi/u4pak
When the game is released, I'll try and see if there's files with dialog in them.
If there is, I'll try and edit some text, repack the files, start the game, and see if that changed text appears in the game.
If that works, I'll provide instructions and anyone that wants can write a simple program to automate that process.
It likely won't work for a few reasons - so keep your expectations reasonable - but I'll give it a try, and at least give a little advice when I see how things go.
After that, it's a matter of extracting the text data to a spreadsheet file (perhaps using the LibreOffice SDK dll), perhaps running the text through Google Translate for reference, and then having a final column for the final Russian translation. There will likely be columns for English/German/French/Spanish and possibly Japanese you can use for reference.
Then folks can pass around the spreadsheet, finish the actual translation, and use the reverse of that code to go from the spreadsheet back into whatever file format Square Enix used for their text.
There's likely other stuff like XML control codes or escape sequences for text typing speed, text color and the like that you'd also have to figure out by looking at the other language text. You might also have to figure out how to add a font file. You should make a little guide for translators, in case they want to use those features.
Then, repack the changed text, and test.
You'll likely also encounter lots of little oddities - like menu text that won't fit into the space allowed (use font size codes for that), text that overlaps, things like that.
Again though, there's VERY likely a few extra barriers, like checksums, encryption, and .pak file formats not supported by the encryption tool I linked to yet. If that's the case, then you'll need some folks to figure that out first. You can also send an elaborate and friendly gift package to Square Enix asking them for help proving access to translation tools for community translations.
If you're successful, I'd also recommend opening the process up so other folks can translate the game to their own languages too.
I'll be following the same process myself for seeing if there's an easy way to replace music files, so I'll add a thread with my early findings.
So, this isn't unusual in terms of large company releases. That's why my suggestion is to consider the need for a community translation, since so many folks speak English and it's theoretically just a matter of swapping in translated text.