VariantXYZ
commented
3 years ago Hi, thanks for the interest! Actually, if you want to stop by in the discord, it might be easier. https://discord.gg/4hHxKSX (we're in the medarot_1_translation channel).
...I also don't know who did the CDRomance build, but I'm not sure who uploaded it or how to update it.
So I'll start this off with 'Robottle' and 'Medarot', which was a very explicit decision by our translator. The 4Kids/localized versions had inconsistencies, and so some decisions were made to make it closer to the original than the localization.
To quote our translator directly:
they used robottle as the official spelling up until medarot 7, where they changed it to robattle
it was officially robottle before and appeared that way on merch/game boxes/etc
they could very easily have called it "robatoru" (robattle), but instead they opted for "robotoru" (robottle), i think their reasoning for this is that it sounded sillier i'm frankly disappointed they changed it to robattle, the cowards
anyway, i prefer robottle for the same reason i wanna go with "medarot" and all original translations, IMO it makes the translation much more interesting if we include the original terminology warts and all
the part names in M1 are pretty straightforward, so we're just transcribing the ones that are obviously english and translating the ones that are japanese
Anyway, it's definitely something that we've debated, I think it's fine as-is. It's a 1998 game targeted at kids so Robottle and Medarot end up being a funny little quirk we carried along.
menus are really opaque about how they work
Yep. There's only so much we can do with the limited space. If you recall, in M2 Core (the GBA game), and in the anime, there was the concept of the Medawatch/Medarotch, but in M1 it's just 'Phone'/'Cell'.
character busts were used to show who was talking in each text box.
Actually we added the ability to do character portraits like the WonderSwan version, but there's a lot of manual effort involved in mapping these to text. I did try automating it, but because there are more text boxes in English vs Japanese, it ends up causing some trouble.
You can see it here: https://twitter.com/variantxyz/status/1287296584972005376
Maverynthia
Hello. I'm Giga Otomia, a volunteer proofreader working for TOOR Scans. I saw this build on cdromance and figured I'd try it out, but there are some terms that clearly don't work well in English ("Robottle" instead of "Robattle" for one), and it's next to impossible to tell who is talking when two people are having a conversation. I haven't played past the first cutscene in the school, but I can foresee sound effects being impossible to discern from dialog as well, provided asterisks don't exist in the font.
The job of a proofreader is partially to look for errors in the translator's English, and partially to help determine what exactly needs to be localized. I always wanted to get a better understanding of the GBA Medabots game's mechanics, but the menus are really opaque about how they work, and helping with a project like this would be a good excuse for me to finally learn from people who have a fantastic idea of what they're talking about. Since you've got a whole shonen anime dubbed by 4kids and the four GBA games that are already localized to work off of, even if I'm not the one specifically helping proofread the script, if you've got someone competent, they should be able to properly localize things such that it all meshes nicely with the existing official translations.
For what it's worth, in the GBA game, character busts were used to show who was talking in each text box. I doubt this will be possible in this game, so just adding the Name: "Text" formatting to all dialog (which I would also be willing to do, provided access to the script files) would be a perfectly reasonable substitute.