Translating older VNs

[Yumejoshi]

Hi! I'm curious about going around translating older visual novels? Sorry if this is a bit of a annoying noob question, but few years ago I came across 'Step -Futari no Kankei wa Ippo Zutsu-', I really liked the game from the info we had (and the cute guys lolol) so a friend & I did some digging and came across a listing of a disc of the game. We bought it and now it's now been collecting dust on my shelf lol. 

We where interested in making some sort of fan translation, but not super sure on going around it. I'm not someone who's super techy but I've played around with Textractor, basic stuff like that, but I was thinking about how do I replace the text in game and such as it's a pretty old game (2006) and I can't seem to figure out what engine it's using and finding information on the game is a bit tough as the company is now defunct too (AMEDEO) so I'm just making the post to kinda get a feeler on what I should do and how I can go about things? Distribution was another issue I was thinking about, as it's basically a defunct game there's not really anywhere to purchase it to put the patch on which then we get into piracy territory (idk if that type of talk is allowed here) but it's not an issue at the moment as there isn't really any progress on the translation in the first place. I'm doing this as a on & off side project for myself as it's always something I've been interested in and wanted to do, so any help is appreciated, thank you! 

I'm also aware of a translation patch of the trial version of the game from 2012 but many people even back then ran into issues with it so I'm not sure about starting off with that as a basis.

[Entai2965]

Here is the publisher AMEDEO on https://vndb.org/p157 and the VN https://vndb.org/v2608. Some of their work is still available for purchase on Getchu.

The go-to tool for translating VNs is crskycode's fork of Garbro. VNDB does not list the engine for that VN, but if you browse around the files with Garbro, that would give you a hint as to what engine it is. Then you could search for software on Github or other places that understands that engine. Garbro is useful for getting information and possibly creating a translation patch.

The alternative to a dedicated patch, and a newer alternative to Textractor is Luna Translator which continues the work done in Textractor. Luna Translator would help layer the translation over or next to the game in real time instead of using a translation patch. Luna Translator says "Pre-translation Supports reading pre-translated files, supports translation caching" so you should be able to extract text, translate it, and have the translation display somehow, but you would have to look through their docs to figure out how exactly.

The translation patch proves it is possible to translate the game. Looking at it might provide hints as to how to unpack/repack it, but you could also go the Lune Translator route instead.

[leticiel_]

Visual arts's subsidiary, then the engine must be RealLive