Talk:Fan translation of video games

Legality
There is still incorrect information in the legality section. It is legal to have a copyrighted ROM provided that you backed it up yourself off of a legitimate cartridge that you own by using a generic EEPROM reader (and not distributing the file or the cartridge to anyone else). Public domain ROMs are also legal as they are, as the name implies, public domain, though I don't believe any as of yet have been translated.
 * This comment should have been added to the bottom. The stuff about PD ROMs is not relevant to this article and the stuff about backing up ROMs being legal is entirely subjective. Fair use rights have had mixed resulted in court especially when it means circumventing copy protection due to the new DMCA laws. Unless someone with legal experience has some solid evidence I don't think it should be added. The fact that it is commonly considered okay to copy games you own is a fandom conceit and not a proven legal fact. --82.38.203.9 01:31, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Fan translation
Fan translation probably began with anime videos and manga comics long before video games were ever part of it. Or at the very least, the anime/manga fan translation communities were getting rolling at about the same time the video-game translations were getting going. I'd ammend the article myself, but I have extremely limited internet access right now. I'll leave it for someone else to hopefully do. . . . Amcaja 14:28, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)

The whole article needs rewriting, badly - the style is consistently poor. I've corrected the blatant misinformation about legality, but I haven't attempted any major edits to the rest. (Anonymous, 28 Sept 2004)

Legal issue and chilling effects.
Anonymous editor, Berne Convention Article 8 may have an unintended chilling effect on free speech and it only serves to forced the video game players to learn the language that the electronic games in question are marketed in and contribute to the increase more and more potential translators, and I am aware of that. Another legal drawback is that the ROM of the original version of the game in question is required to play the translated version. Fan translation started with animes and mangas before the video game era. The fan translation division of the video game community mainly translates Japan-only games that were originally developed for platforms that were discontinued in the United States. I have also quoted Article 8 to clarify what Bern Convention had to say. According to Yu's Behind the Scenes of IRC, it has been believed that "there is a gap between people's opinion and what is written in the law." (Tedius Zanarukando, 10 Oct 2004)

"unintended chilling effects" strikes me as something of a dramatic phrase to use. (satsu, 7 Feb 2005)

Translation scene
I think one thing this article could really do with is a discussion of the translation scene, considering that the relationships between the various people involved do have some bearing on the translations themselves and how they turn out.

FFV first translation?
1997 seems a bit late for the first complete translation patch. Do we have any evidence FFV was the first? (satsu, 7 Feb 2005)
 * Well, I was there (well, not there there, if you know what I mean, but I remember when it was released). It was the first significant work of any sort: there may have been a handful of partial translations released beforehand, but nothing of much note, and certainly nothing complete. Keep in mind that console emulation was in its infancy in 1997: before 1997, there were basically no emulators capable of running a handful of games (and often poorly at that) for any recent system. Nesticle, Snes97 (predecessor of SNES9x) and ZSNES weren't released until that year, remember. If there are any fan translations predating that year, it's highly unlikely that they'd be of console-based games (possibly PC games, but I personally doubt it). – Seancdaug 11:23, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
 * On the MSX system there have been a fair number of big translation projects... I certainly think they were before 1997... Oasis translated a great many games such as SD Snatcher (Konami RPG) and RPGs like Ys I and II, Dragonslayer 6 and XAK I, II and III were also translated. So I have my doubts about this claim. Grauw June 29, 2005 13:40 (UTC)
 * SD Snatcher was translated 03/04/1993 by OASIS. DragonSlayer 6 was translated in 1995. Ys doesn’t tell me a translation year.
 * I just downloaded the FFV patch and the ReadMe file says it was completed in 1998.
 * FFV was hardly the first translation, and it was hardly the first major translation (although it was still major when it was finally finished). Although important because of the groups that were founded as a result (DeJap and StarSoft).  In fact, that section should probably be removed, or at least re-written to focus more on the groups themselves, instead of an individual translation.  --Gamerk2 (talk) 17:04, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
From what I heard Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake will be released in English in the upcoming Metal Gear Soild 3: Subsistence (aka Metal Gear Solid 3.5) on the PS2. Check out the details here: http://ps2.ign.com/articles/615/615392p1.html Hyad 05:43, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
 * The original MSX version has already been translated to English long ago by Takamichi Suzikawa and Maarten ter Huurne... It was published by Fony. Grauw June 29, 2005 13:35 (UTC)

Princess Maker 2
Where should I put Princess Maker 2? Which game category is it? Purple Rose 13:17, 29 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Erm, you shouldn't put it anywhere, because it wasn't fan translated. The English language version floating around is a prototype U.S. localization that was never officially released: sort of like the NES prototype for Earthbound Zero, but NeoDemiForce did go back and tweak that ROM image slightly, whereas the PM2 localization is, AFAIK, untouched. In general, however, PC title translations would probably go in the "other" section. – Seancdaug 20:45, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

What about other English to other languages?
For example, the PC game Starcraft was never released in Korean, so someone made the HanStar fan translation to Korean for the game. They haven't kept up with the recent patch every two weeks, however. -- Myria 18:41, 10 September 2005 (UTC)


 * That's an interesting piece of information. I believe that full support for unicode was added in one of the official patches to Starcraft since this comment.Javiskefka 18:04, 14 July 2007 (UTC)


 * That's right. Most nice titles (like SNES Final Fantasies, Chrono Trigger, etc) were never released in Brazil, and thus were fanssubed into portuguese by voluntary translators. (I think I never saw an *official* snes game in portuguese :/). Many titles for Playstation was translated, too. --189.12.114.88 11:35, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Legal Issues and introduction
I rewrote some of the stuff around KanjiHack and legal issues they faced as it was me who received the legal threat so I wanted to clear up some myths around the issue.

I also heavily edited the introduction, hopefully to everyone's approval, to make it a bit less of one person's opinion and a bit more neutral. --82.38.204.172 21:08, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Someone just added this line in regarding the KanjiHack translation RPG Maker 95: ", because they were distributing the full version of the commercial game, with the protection "cracked", so the user did not need to own a legitimate CD to run the game" I've taken it out again because it's just not true. I did that translation and we only released patches to be applied to the game. We were talking about distributing the software on CD once it was done but it never got out of the planning stage before we went down. This is a common myth about why we shut KanjiHack down. The fact of the matter was someone hostile to the group sent ASCII an e-mail telling them about our translation and they asked us to stop and so we did. We did not distribute pirate software. --82.38.203.9 01:31, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Redone FF5 menu screen
I was the reverse engineer of the FF5 translation, modifying the game code to better work with English. When I did this, I was 15 years old, and not very good of a reverse engineer. I'm much better now. I finally went back and fixed a few things, which can be seen at. I didn't want to put what amounted to an advertisement on the article page so I put it here. -- Myria 05:25, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
 * It looks very nice. Have you released a patch, because it might be worth updating the list if you have. – Seancdaug 15:23, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
 * No, because the translation isn't anywhere near complete. -- Myria 16:59, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

There's one thing that bothers me in the FF5 comparison screenshot... namely, that the names in the Japanese version make no sense. Apparently, a savestate was loaded from the English version with the names in the RAM directly mapping into hiragana. It's a minor issue, but I'd like it if it could have a screenshot that actually had the Japanese names. --Bisqwit 15:50, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Fixed. --Michiel Sikma 19:24, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Citation work
The article has been tagged for not citing any sources. We need to search for citations and source the statements in order to prevent this article from being deleted or challenged. Decimus Tedius Regio Zanarukando 08:50, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I had looked up the dates of the Oasis translations in the translated games themselves (in most of them they show upduring the opening sequence). However, it is difficult to cite sources for it that are online, and also the magazines in which these translations were reviewed are hard to get (although I do have a large number of them at my parent’s house). It would be quite an arduous task to scan through all of them anyway, with fairly little gain. Unfortunately, most of those dates are no longer in the article. A shame they have been removed ( — can’t say I agree with that :/) Grauw (talk) 02:28, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Globalize!
This seriously need some globalization. For example, there are more than 60 Nintendo DS games translated into Chinese (mostly Smiplified Chinese), hundreds of GBA games and hundreds of PS1/2/P games. Also see the comment about Korean above. WP 04:56, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


 * You obviously know more about games that have been translated into Chinese or Korean then I do. As such, why not add the information, yourself? It is generally recommended that you be bold when editing articles. TerraFrost 05:52, 4 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Somebody has inter-wiki linked the comparable Russian article. In wikipedia-fr, there is a mention in Histoire des consoles de jeu vidéo (cinquième génération), but I'm unable to find a unified article like this one.  I just found 한글화 패치 for the corresponding information about Korean fan translation (that article needs some work too, by the way).Javiskefka 17:29, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

RPGe nominated for deletion
the people who first translated final fantasy v are being nominated for deletion. this is insane. voice your opinion at Articles for deletion/RPGe 209.209.214.5 05:54, 7 July 2007 (UTC)
 * the person who translated Seiken Densetsu 3 is up for deletion, as well: Articles for deletion/Neill Corlett 209.209.214.5 17:56, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Dragon Quest III
I was wondering if this should go anywhere on here, since I'm aware that the fan translation project for DQ III (SNES) has been a work-in-progress for around 10 years now. Only recently have I found out that another team has actually taken initiative to try and work on it, but even then, it could be a while. 24.32.22.117 (talk) 12:56, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Cave Story
I think there should be a mention of Cave Story in the article. It is unique because it is the first fan trasnlation to become an official trasnlation. The Wii (WiiWare) version of the game uses the fan trasnlation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Aa2-2004 (talk • contribs) 09:09, 12 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Um, no it doesn't (although you don't probably care, as your comment is dated "2009"). Karjam, AKA KarjamP (talk) 16:13, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Legality, original research
I have removed the sweeping claim that fan translations are "indisputably illegal". I could find no reliable source saying all fan translations are definitely illegal in all jurisdictions. An editor's interpretation of Article 8 of the Berne convention was original research, and insufficient. Article 10 permits different jurisdictions to carve out different fair use exceptions, but I can't add that, because that's original research, too. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 22:52, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

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