Misao HD Remaster

The options screen draws every label at size 20, and the volume bar always starts at the same spot. That leaves room for about six characters, which is what BGM, BGS and SE needed. My first try was Música de fondo, Sonidos de fondo and Efectos de sonido, and all three ran under the bars.

Shorter words alone weren't enough, and a font small enough for the long ones was hard to read. So I did both. The labels are short, and the translated string carries the engine's own codes: \f[14] makes the text a bit smaller, and \my[-8] pushes it back up to the middle of the bar, because the smaller size left it sitting low. I found that number by trying values in the game. It's in the glossary now, for the other menus.

Spanish marks gender and English mostly doesn't. “I'm getting a little freaked” is nerviosa or nervioso depending on who says it, and the exported text doesn't tell you. A line only carries @1, which means “show a portrait”, not a name.

The game does know. Its database has a character table, each character owns their portraits, and every message picks a character by number. Once I had the numbers matched to names, I could go through the lines that carry gender and check them against the person saying them.

Yoshino, character 4, was calling herself “nervioso”. It says “nerviosa” now. Aki's lines were already fine, because the game stores two versions of everything the protagonist says, one for the girl and one for the boy.

Some lines show no portrait at all: the event asks for face -2, which means “leave the last one up”. In the altar scene, “I always wanted to be friends with you” is one of those. For those I read the event instead. It checks the variable that holds the player's gender and splits in two, and the first branch is always the girl. That line is in the first branch, so it reads “Siempre quise ser tu amiga”. The boy has his own version a bit further down, worded differently in English too.

Knowing who talks is also how you keep them from all sounding the same. Tohma is rude, Kudoh is formal, Ayaka exaggerates everything.

The game doesn't say GAME OVER. It says DROPPED OUT: the whole thing happens in a school, so dying means leaving school, and every death goes into the Dropout List.

Spanish has to keep that joke and stay neutral at the same time, because Aki can be a boy or a girl, so “expulsado” and “expulsada” are both out. Nouns like “EXPULSIÓN” are neutral but get long on the list screens. The answer was to use a verb: the screen says “DESERTASTE”, which is short, keeps the school idea and says nothing about gender, and the list is “Lista de deserciones”.

The same rule applies to the rest of the game: whenever a line talks about the player, I look for wording with no gender in it, like “Soy tu otro yo” instead of “Soy otra tú”, or a noun like “Resbalón” instead of “Resbalado”. Lines I translated before that rule existed are still being revised.

Part of what you read in the game never shows up in a translation file, because it's painted into the images: the content warning at startup, the word scrawled in blood on the canvas in the art room, the diagram that explains the controls. They're PNGs, so the only way to translate them is to redraw them.

I went through all 579 images to see how much work that actually was. Only three have text worth translating. Two are done. I used the game's own font so they sit where the English did, and the canvas keeps the crooked, rushed strokes, because somebody in the story painted that, it isn't a label.

The decisions I like better are the ones about leaving things alone. The logo is hand-drawn and stays in English, like most logos. The poster on the noticeboard keeps its A, B and C: those letters are the answer to a puzzle, and translating them would break it. The character art, the maps, the effects and the 43 gallery thumbnails have no text at all.

These images also live outside the build, since the patching only regenerates the data files and never touches the art. Each redrawn PNG is kept next to its original in the project, ready for the installer.

There's a short glossary next to the translation files: the Latin American words I settled on, the names that stay in Japanese (Misao, Aki, Tohma, Kurata), the rule about capitalizing only the first word of an item name, and the control codes that must never change. Item names get reused word for word anywhere else they come up, so the Sports Drink you find in one description is the same “Bebida deportiva” in your inventory.