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March 10th, 2010 | Hacking, MOTHER 3, Uncommon Knowledge

MOTHER 3 was released in Japan almost four years ago now… and released nowhere else. So fans came together to translate the game into English, French, Spanish, and many other languages. But I don’t think most Western fans know that there’s also been a completely separate project to translate the game into Chinese and that the project is almost nearly complete now.

Here are some screenshots:


If you know Chinese, you can check out more details here. You can also download the latest version from Dec. 25, 2009 here:

According to the site, the progress stands at this:

  • Hacking: 95% done
  • Translation: 100% done
  • Editing: 100% done
  • Art/graphics: 0% done

Having worked on the hacking and translation of the English version, my many hats go off to this team. It’s a LOT of work. And difficult work. So they rock :D

BTW, the game is known there as “地球冒险”, which is something like “Earth Adventure”. I’m fairly certain there’ve never been any official Chinese versions of any of the games in the series, though I did come across this a while back.

I studied Chinese many years ago but it’s almost all forgotten now. I can’t even tell which kind of Chinese this translation uses. Can anyone provide more details?

 

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16 Comments to MOTHER 3 Chinese Translation


Carl said on Mar. 10, 2010

Is there anything about the Chinese language that would make a Chinese hack of Mother 3 more difficult–or even just different in some way–than an English one?

When you guys were finishing up the English translation, you were pretty open about sharing your work and tools with teams interested in translating the game into other languages. I’m wondering why this team went through the trouble of doing everything from scratch when the translation tools were already available. Did they not know about the English translation? Did they just want to do it themselves (a perfectly fine idea, just not how I’d have likely gone about it)?

Mato said on Mar. 10, 2010

The way the game was programmed it would be a lot easier for a Chinese translation to be made from the Japanese ROM, especially without a need for a variable width font (which was probably 75% of all the work for us). The programmers have most of the entire SJIS font set in the ROM already, and the encoding was 16-bit, so it was perfectly set up already for something like Chinese.

Using the English version as a base would’ve probably been a lot more headache, especially moving back to 16-bit and putting all the Chinese characters back into the font set somehow.

floydhead42 said on Mar. 10, 2010

Mato: from my memory, there is only one currently-used written Chinese language (aside from zhuyin fuhao, pinyin, and Xiao’erjing, which are used as teaching tools exclusively), but all of the spoken languages say the characters differently, even though they communicate the same idea. tl;dr: it’s Simplified Chinese characters.

Earthbound_X said on Mar. 10, 2010

Great job! It’s always great when others get to play an awesome game like M3.

lampi said on Mar. 10, 2010

I wonder what’s the thought process behind 硫卡 for Lucas and 弗林特 for Flint. 克劳斯 seems to be the common way to write “Claus”, strangely.

MG said on Mar. 10, 2010

@floydhead42

Traditional Chinese is still used in places such as Taiwan; it’s just that mainland China and most other places use Simplified.

BTW, I am Chinese myself, but I learned Traditional Chinese, so I can’t read too much of this from the screenshots.

Kyoo said on Mar. 10, 2010

this makes me happy. the power of the fans. very powerful

Nooblet said on Mar. 10, 2010

Heh, kinda neat how many langauges Mother 3 is getting into.

kaialone said on Mar. 11, 2010

i think its mandarin.But its kinda hard to read for me as it looks much different when its typed and not written.Makes me wonder how far the german translation is?

Johnwalt said on Mar. 11, 2010

Mother 3 is going international! :D

Mega said on Mar. 11, 2010

Mato
check it out!
the spanish-ish traslation is already done they are just testing the game and then they’ll post it for download
when it comes out ill post a image for you!

Chatetris said on Mar. 11, 2010

Is it mandarin?

Nitsua said on Mar. 12, 2010

I made a short gameplay video of the Chinese Mother 3 translatio. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QQgvWxXvU

Millhouse said on Mar. 14, 2010

This just makes me feel guilty because the German translation has pretty much stalled to a stop

Batandy said on Mar. 15, 2010

ufff and the italian traslation is … dead….

Ricardo said on Apr. 21, 2010

latin american spanish translation is also dead…


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