Falcom Zwei!! Website Translation!

[NightWolve]

Partial Falcom Zwei!! Website translation provided by Galious/Loek Van Kooten on Feb. 01 2004. This was originally posted on my Retro ISO Gaming Guild forums way back and I accidentally ran into it, so I think it might as well have gotten reuploaded somewhere and not forever lost in the sands of time...

http://www.falcom.co.jp/zwei/feature.html






http://www.falcom.co.jp/zwei/chara.html








http://www.falcom.co.jp/zwei/world.html


















LORE

The Goddesses of Light and Darkness
According to the common faith in Granvallen, there are two goddesses: Aplyes, who presides over the sun and light, and Espina, who presides over the moon and darkness. The two goddessess are envisioned as twins or different sides of the same goddess. Light is not necessarily considered as good, and darkness is not necessarily considered as evil. The goddesses are believed to be inseparable, like the two sides of an object.

Well, I guess that sheds a whole new light on the name of Zwei!!, doesn't it?

The Great Sorcery War
A great war between man and the Prince of Darkness, which broke out more than 1000 years ago. The war was started by the six Demon Lords (fallen angels), who once served the Goddesses of Light and Darkness. It involved other races, like elves and dragons, and ruined the whole land of Granvallen. Near the end of this conflict, which lasted for 500 years, the Noble Sorceress Tiara and the Holy Knight Paradis defeated the Demon Lord Vesper and thus ended the great war.

The Holy Kingdom
An enormous and prosperous magic kingdom, that once ruled this world. The lineage of the royal family of Vallence produced a great number of powerful sorcerers, and as leader of the people, the family commanded the allied forces that battled the demons during the Great Sorcery War. The Great War ended in a victory for the people, but the royal family of Vallence lost their powers when the power of magic suddenly fell into decay. Hence the monarchy was abolished, and in due course of time most of the magic technology was lost. Nowadays the name of the family is still preserved in the name of 'Granvallen'.

The Magic Orbs
The most common form of magic in Granvallen uses special stones, which are called Magic Orbs. The technological standard of this magic reached its pinnacle during the era of the Holy Kingdom, but after the collapse of the kingdom, caused by the magical power's decay, most technology was lost. Since most technology these days is based on mechanic devices, like airplanes, some clergymen and treasure hunters have limited their activities to passing on the legends.

The Six Demon Lords
It is thought that these six lords are fallen angels who disobeyed the goddess they once served. They called an infinite number of demons from ####, laid the whole country of Granvallen waste, and thus started the Great Sorcery War. The Great War ended when one of the Demon Lords, Vesper, was brought down, but the legends do not mention what happened to the remaining five Lords.

That's all there is on the Zwei!! website. Suggestions to improve my English are welcome. I will now wait for the software strings, so that I can start working on the in-game localization.

[SkyeWelse]

Thanks for sharing this. It's fun to see old work on this project. I sure hope that tancient's team releases Zwei I and II one day soon.

-Thomas

[NightWolve]

Well, I never heard back from tancient, so I dunno, I'm gonna just finish the project with some of my new ideas, and leave it open for anyone else to translate as it'll need a human translator to finish off the remaining text that Loek skipped. Just for Zwei!! 1 as I see they got very far with Zwei!! 2 and might actually finish that someday.

My progress: I recently did a fresh extraction of the Japanese text from the main game DLL that I'm pretty confident was done very well, and I batch translated it *all* with Google Translate, Bing Translate, WWJDIC, and YAINDEX, so 4 machine translations as reference will be made available to any human translator should they pursue the project!

Actually, here, check this out, to give you an idea what I'm thinking, only the first 100 strings:

http://www.ysutopia.net/projects/zwei!! ... tions.html <- (The result of programmatic/automated translation of the whole script! If you can let tancient know, if she hasn't already translated the script, I could give her the full output now.)

That should show up for you in Chrome, it's in Unicode. So, ALL of that is stored in a competent database/app combo in Access, 7,439 strings of the game!!! Imagine just how much text you're talking about there!

So the human translator will have all that as reference to start off! I'm already knocking off the items/equipment/inventory Katakana stuff, so I have about 7% of the script translated as a result, leaving less work for a real translator to finish it off, and that's still before I import Loek's work.

Also, this would be all that I've translated so far (items/names/locations so far, etc.) if you're curious: http://www.ysutopia.net/projects/zwei!! ... Zwei!!.htm <-- (zweipet.exe now loads this file at runtime and applies JIT (Just-In-Time) text interception when the Japanese string is about to be printed, printing the English alternative instead if loaded from said file!)

My eventual patch will provide the full CG translation reference (as sampled above), and will patch the Zwei!! executable such that it'll have a runtime script file anyone can edit/translate at will, including to other languages, that's the tentative idea here. We'll see how far I get, though! Ideally, I want the system in place for Felghana, Ys VI, Ys Origin, as well as here. So rebuilding and finishing off previous projects is part of what I'd like to see happen. Little by little over the years, I'll see how it goes.

[flamethrower]

Fun with machine translation. Bing seems like the best one.
So how do you generate such a table? It seems like such a tool would be useful for any JA->EN translation.
Is it possible to convert this table to spreadsheet format (any)? I tried copypasting from that link to Google Sheets and it worked fine.

I think this is a good approach because "game for which easy tool is available (but no translation)" list is pretty short, but not zero I guess.

I'm not sure about where translated text or text+codes will be entered.

I like spreadsheets because it's like a database for the unskilled.
Google Sheets import is quite bad (it messes with your leading spaces) but you can get around this by replacing spaces and replacing back within Google Sheets. Google Sheets export is quite good. I never had a problem. Sometimes it's necessary for users to type special codes in text mode; I usually deal with this by having them type them in {} braces. It means that braces can't be used in text mode, but it's rare to ever need to use them.

[NightWolve]

Hey flame, finally got around to getting it uploaded (it was ready weeks ago). Forget that crappy one I shared, that was automatic from Access. I imported my old VBA code from years past to properly produce tables more to what I wanted, even using CSS to hide the JDIC output and only show it when you mouse over. That really helps. Check it out:

http://heroesoflegend.org/forums/viewto ... 2523#p2523
http://www.ysutopia.net/projects/zwei!! ... onDump.zip

If you can get this to an interested translator or tancients, we can push the project forward... Although, bad news... Check out pages 2, 7, there's some really hefty Japanese text blocks... I can see why it's stalled... :/ It would take some real dedication to plow through all of this damn text even with the help this automated translation dump provides.

P.S. I paged the strings out to 18 pages, give the browser about 10 seconds to fully load a HTML page, then you can scroll up and down easy... Menu'ed links provided to traverse easy enough... If you loaded ALL this text into one page, all browsers will just crap out and not be able to handle it, so paging code was very necessary to produce these properly.

[NightWolve]

Fun with machine translation. Bing seems like the best one. So how do you generate such a table? It seems like such a tool would be useful for any JA->EN translation. Is it possible to convert this table to spreadsheet format (any)? I tried copypasting from that link to Google Sheets and it worked fine.

I think this is a good approach because "game for which easy tool is available (but no translation)" list is pretty short, but not zero I guess.

Heh, I forgot you said this earlier... Making it all universal would be a great trick of long-term planning and take more than one dedicated programmer. Quick'n'dirty way is still a little tough to answer since it was done with VBA code inside an MS Access database. Easiest way to help somebody else do it would be with Microsoft Excel, as you can also code VBA modules within a spreadsheet! Here's a sample snippet for MS Access to do it for BING:

Code: Select all

Dim I&, J&, Max&, Length&
Dim IE As Object
Dim Result$

Set rs = db.OpenRecordset("tblJapTransData", dbOpenDynaset)
rs.MoveLast
rs.MoveFirst
Max = rs.RecordCount

Set IE = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")
' IE.Visible = True ' Sometimes only works when IE is visible
IE.Navigate "http://www.bing.com/translator/?from=ja&to=en"
While IE.ReadyState <> 4
	DoEvents
Wend
Sleep 500
DoEvents
IE.Document.getElementByID("srcText").focus

For I = 1 To Max
	Result = rs.Fields("Japanese Text").Value
	IE.Document.getElementByID("destText").innerTEXT = ""
	IE.Document.getElementByID("srcText").innerTEXT = Result
	IE.Document.getElementByID("TranslateButton").Click
	Length = 10
	Do
		DoEvents
		Sleep 375
		Length = Length - 1
	Loop While Len(IE.Document.getElementByID("destText").innerTEXT) = 0 And Length > 0
	If Length > 0 Then
		DoEvents
		Result = IE.Document.getElementByID("destText").innerTEXT
		rs.Edit
		rs.Fields("English CG Text").Value = Result
		rs.Update
	Else
		J = J + 1
		lblSkipped.Caption = "Failed Count: " & J
	End If
	lblStats.Caption = I & "/" & Max
	rs.MoveNext
Next

rs.Close
IE.Quit
Set IE = Nothing

So, to port this code for Excel, you'd have the FOR loop handle every row in a Japanese column, read the Japanese text, pass it to an Internet Explorer application instance (you can control it visible or invisible), and after it's done, a textarea object on the HTML page of BING called "destText" will have the English result, which you would read, and store in the next column designated "English", repeat for every row, etc. You get the idea I think... It's about programmatically controlling a browser, IE needs to be installed of course.

The other way in VBA is using the MSINET ActiveX object to send the HTTP request yourself, get back the HTML results as a string, and parse out the contents. That was the only way I used to do it, but these newer translation sites got difficult and only worked with a real browser running, so remote OLE automation with an IE instance is the only way to get it done programmatically if you have thousands of strings and would like them to be processed within a half hour or so... This is "retro" Microsoft coding/technology-use nowadays, but yeah, that's how I rolled and am admittedly out of date now, heh.

I could port this to an Microsoft Excel sheet if you're really interested some time, set up a Japanese column of say 100 strings, convert the code to automatically BING translate it to the 2nd column and show you how to set up the function to execute it in some way, etc. Have to refresh myself on Excel, but it wouldn't be too much trouble if you really thought it could be useful to you although from the other thread, you may have changed your mind on general usefulness and given the Firefox plugin that you mentioned.

[flamethrower]

I do know GOOGLETRANSLATE() function on Google Sheets.
Do a test run!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
I do not like Google Translate that much.

That VBA code seems relatively straightforward.
I might do it myself since I have access to Excel at work.

Let me share this one of mine. It's exporting data for Google Sheets.
This one is based on a code example written by a Google employee so I don't get full credit for it, unfortunately. Function BulkTSVExport was the only one I wrote.
The function description is: it saves a TSV version of sheets in a workbook to your Google Drive. I bet you can image why that might be useful for projects. You could save either the current sheet or all sheets in the workbook. Obviously, the app needs permission to access your Google Drive when it runs.
http://pastebin.com/39kcftJ4

Google sheets uses "fake Java" as its programming language.
You might have seen it, but some Falcom games (Ys vs Sora no Kiseki was one that I saw) use "fake xml" as a way to put content into the game. The xml is actually read by the game engine; they wrote an xml parser that runs on PSP.

[NightWolve]

Ah, interesting!!! Good to know!!

[ObiKKa]

HG101 (Their site was newly revamped as of last week) made a new retrospective for the first Zwei!! game.
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/zwei/

I think they should upload another page for the sequel some time soon.

[NightWolve]

Yeah, I learned about that from Kurt's HG101 Twitter! I was meaning to read it all when I get a chance. And actually, this is a bit old, it was a pay-only article for Patreon supporters of HG101, but Kurt made it free with the opening of his newly redesigned website. I also noticed he linked to my thread here which surprised me as Kurt considers me persona non grata a bit, heh heh...

[ObiKKa]

You may have noticed this but the remaster of the first Zwei!! game is releasing on various popular digital PC distribution platforms soon. Though that probably won't stop the Revival fan-translation project from proceeding along.

http://comicbook.com/gaming/2017/12/01/ ... adventure/
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2 ... pc/.124728
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/1 ... n-english/
http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2017/7003.html