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Three years ago, on this day, I translated a beautiful Metal Gear project, into Persian/Farsi!

As a project, for the community of Metal Gear lovers, Alex Camilleri developed a website to tell the story of the saga, gathering all the info you need as a timeline. Thanks to the contributors, this timeline is available in many languages, so I added that of mine myself for my fellow Iranians! Go check it out to see the ultimate power of a true fan!

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I'm happy to share that I started translating the in-game documents of Resident Evil 4 into Persian/Farsi! An important part of my fan project, REdocs! Go check it out!

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Here's another part injected into my Resident Evil fan-site: all main files of the title, Resident Evil 3 Nemesis, translated from English into Persian/Farsi! 63 files so far! Here's the link!

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Following my last post on Tumblr, here's what I want to provide Resident Evil's fans with; a complete fan-site, that now includes the translation of RE2 in-game documents, from English into Persian/Farsi! Here's the link!

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Having played the first Resident Evil, I decided to start translating the whole in-game documents of each title (from English into Persian/Farsi), making them easy to understand to have a clear background of the plot. Here's the link to my fan-site!

Thank you BaziCenter, for allowing me to showcase my work on the forum first!

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Finally, I released the Persian/Farsi fan translation of the game, Ninja Gaiden (NES), and here are some of the experiences I have to share about this work.

Localization Stories

I translated the whole script of the game, including the credits roll and so on, but in each line, I was allowed to put just the original amount of the characters or less (ZWNJ not included), and this was the exact difficulty of the work. So what did I do? I translated everything in a way to not destroy the meaning of the main script and to maintain its true notion. Here you can see the original script in each scene, line by line, along with its translation.

Another problem was that, the language is RTL, but the numbers are all LTR. So for example, in this line...

شیطان به مدت ۷۰۰ سال تو

...I had to write the numbers reversely, in the tool that I created, to solve this problem...

شیطان به مدت ۰۰۷ سال تو

...So the appearance of “۰”, “۰”, and “۷” created “۷۰۰”:

However, there are two parts I couldn’t translate into Persian/Farsi:

(The scenes saying “Act X”)

(The ending scene saying “THE END”)

Also, I translated the name of Ryu’s father, to “Mr. Hayabusa”, to prevent his name from conflicting with that of the modern trilogy.

Technical Stories

I had to reverse the text flow of the game, since our language is written from the right direction of the page, like Arabic. I used this video to help me solve the issue, and used Yandex image translator to translate every Arabic text of the video into my own language.

I created my own tool, named Persia Pack, in which you can define variables, and assign values to them. For example, you can assign “b” to “a” and assign “c” to “b”, so “ab” here means “bc” and so on. I utilized this web application, to inject Persian/Farsi characters as hex values through the emulator, as the tool is compatible with Persian/Farsi characters and recognizes all characters’ forms (including Initial, Medial, Final, and Isolated).

(A glimpse of Persia Pack)

Fun Stories

It all happened when I saw Farid and his bog, Microbaz. “Microbaz” means “Micro Player” in English, and it’s a blog totally dedicated to the Micro Genius Famiclones; the systems that most of us, the gamers of Iran, grew up with. Farid did everything he could to hack ROM’s, translate them, etc, releasing more than just one fan translation and utility on RHDN.

(Captain Tsubasa II, fan translated by Farid)

It became inspirational to me then, making me decide to translate the game, Ninja Gaiden, into my own language, Persian/Farsi.

Farid created every kind of educational work, to expand the little community of romhackers in our country, but making a ROM, RTL’ed, was too hard that even his video didn’t help me at all. So I ended up finding a community in Tunisia, called Eternal Dream Arabization, with Mansour as an active part of the team; he helped me to RTL the game, reverse the text flow of the title, to start the process of translating, thanks to Farid’s documentations. Be sure not to miss Eternal Dream Arabization, as it was a big source of inspiration to me, THE MASTERS OF LOCALIZATION.

Conclusion

These kinds of works mean SPENDING A LOT OF TIME, and since the official devs don’t show any interest in these works, I only recommend doing them as a CULTURAL MOVEMENT, to be part of the unofficial localization scene and grow this little community, to increase the availability of video games.

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Here's a complete translation of the Metal Gear timeline, into Persian/Farsi!