So the big question

[snooze]

How do you take a document with translated text and turn it into a patch for a visual novel? Does it require knowledge of a computing language? Is it different for every vn?

[Daeyamati]

From what I know, after you rip all the files and edit it, you have to repack it. The steps for making English VN patches just depends on which engine the VN uses.

Unfortunately I can't say anything more since I have no experience in VN translating or hacking... But hopefully someone else here can shed some light on the subject.

[ThatPlayer]

It sounds like you just have a document with text rather than a script dumped from the game.

Depends on the game and the engine. Most scripts will have more than text, there will be commands like changing the sprites/background/music and all that which you'll want to keep.

http://tlwiki.org/in...php?title=Tools has a list of general tools that will get the script from a game and then you'll also have to convert the modified script back into something the game can run.

Probably not the best explanation but I haven't done much of this.

[REtransInternational]

Text insertion difficulty varies with the engine. The more common ones have tools available, but there can be many variants on one basic engine and there are also numerous one-offs that require a custom solution. While text hooking and extraction has some universal tools, there is currently no universal solution for insertion.

It's debatable whether the majority VNs that currently get translated are because they use common engines with tools available, or the other way around.

[Sakimichi]

PSP visual novels are hard to do, as i've heard it really needs experienced hackers. Those who are really good in hex editing and decrypting criware engine.

Only a few of them pops up to volunteer so it's hard to know how they do it. They're pretty secretive with the tools they're using as well as the methods. You can't find any documentation on how to do it.

[zoom909]

Does the document you want to work from preserve the order of the scripts in the game's data files? Or is it more of a document written by someone while they're going through playing the game? Seems like they don't necessarily match. If the VN has a branching plot, it seems like some extra work might be needed to place each line of the translated text exactly where it's supposed to go in the files.

[REtransInternational]

Does the document you want to work from preserve the order of the scripts in the game's data files? Or is it more of a document written by someone while they're going through playing the game? Seems like they don't necessarily match. If the VN has a branching plot, it seems like some extra work might be needed to place each line of the translated text exactly where it's supposed to go in the files.

This is important too. If they preserve separation of each line, then it shouldn't be too hard to do most if not all of this automatically via machine translation: they might not be accurate in translation, but here it's similarity we're after. All we need is for e.g. "He sat under an apple tree" to turn into something like what it would be in Japanese and vice-versa, and be different enough from what "I ate a doughnut" turns into. MT each original line and each translated line, compare with all translated/original lines respectively, choose the closest match for each one. If your translation is just a paragraph aggregate, then you'll need to do some more preprocessing to split things up.