Translation / language packs

At a glance

What you get

A translated game on your own disc, applied in the browser patcher or with legaia-patcher translate. Composes with every randomizer option.

Covered

Name tables (items, spells, arts, accessory passives, party names), the whole NPC / cutscene / narration dialogue corpus, pause-menu / shop / battle system labels.

Not covered

Text baked into textures; accented and non-Latin scripts (the retail font has no glyphs for them).

The one rule

Every edit is same-size in place. Each line has a byte budget; a line over budget is reported and left English.

Sharing

A pack is safe to publish once its source: text is stripped - what remains is your text keyed by disc coordinates.

Code

crates/patcher/src/translation/; writes go through DiscPatcher (EDC/ECC re-encoded, no LBA moves).

Own a PAL disc?

Its official French / German / Italian text can be lifted onto the USA disc from your own two discs.

Workflow

Every disc argument takes a .bin or a .cue. A partially filled pack is always playable: empty entries stay byte-identical. Import is idempotent and incremental. stats and import summarise skipped entries per reason; --verbose lists every key.

• Commit distributable packs (site/lang/*.yaml) - new authored text plus a coordinate table. A disc-free test fails the build if a tracked pack still carries source:.
• Never commit working packs - they carry the game's script. /translations/ and legaia_*.yaml are gitignored.

The in-browser ROM patcher does the same from a language dropdown (default None): shipped packs, your own pack, a starter export, or a PAL lift - validated against your disc, with a per-section coverage report. Nothing is uploaded.

Two pack shapes

strip drops every source: and context: field and every unfilled entry. The key is a disc coordinate, not text, so a distributable pack carries none of the original script. Its budget is only a hint: import re-measures every target on the disc it patches and rejects anything that does not fit. Same-size is enforced from the disc, never from the pack.

What a pack contains

format: 'legaia-text-pack-v1'
language: 'fr'
game: 'Legend of Legaia (USA) SCUS-94254'
contributors: ['...']
sections:
  items:                          # one list per section, fixed order
  - key: 'scus:str:0x80012260'    # disc coordinate
    context: 'item 0x79'          # human hint, not machine-read
    source: 'Healing Berry'       # US text (working pack only)
    translation: ''               # fill me
    budget: 13                    # max encoded bytes

Dialogue sections are line-granular: the pager packs up to three consecutive segments into one box (MES), so consecutive pack entries are consecutive rows on screen. Translate them as a group, each row inside its own budget.

Text markup + encoding

Game text is plain ASCII plus a few control tokens (dialog font). Keep every token where the source has it.

Encoding reports per-character errors. Smart quotes, dashes, ellipsis and NBSP fold automatically. Accented Latin, Cyrillic and CJK are not encodable - the retail font has no such glyphs, so French or Italian must be written unaccented (Epee, not Épée). Lifting that limit needs a font patch, which is a separate effort.

Budgets: the same-size rule

When a scene still overflows, import rolls back its longest lines one at a time with a per-key diagnostic - shorten those and re-run. The CLI's import --allow-relayout instead grows the scene by whole sectors (an --output image only, never a PPF). Each target is also checked against the pack's source; a mismatch skips the entry rather than writing blind.

Coverage + limits

• Covered: every SCUS name table; NPC, cutscene and narration dialogue, picker labels, chest flavour text; overlay UI labels and battle system messages.
• Tight: the overlay label pools - a short label can be shorter than English but rarely longer.
• No string exists: the in-battle Attack / Arts / Magic / Item ring is icon sprites.
• Stays English: lines the conservative segment scanner declines to export. Junk entries it does export (dev-debug strings) are harmless - leave them blank.

Official PAL translations

Sony shipped French, German and Italian discs (SCES_019.44 / .45 / .46). They are structurally 1:1 with the USA disc, so their text lifts onto USA coordinates id-for-id and line-for-line - from your own two discs, in the browser or on the CLI. The official text is never bundled with this site.

Not all of it fits, because of sector alignment: USA scenes are packed with zero slack, so a longer line overflows. Roughly a third of the dialogue lands in place; the rest is reported, not dropped quietly. import --allow-relayout closes the residual on the CLI.

Text baked into textures

Some UI text is pixels in a texture, not a string. Replacing one means new art at the exact same TIM footprint so the same-size write applies; the ROM patcher's texture replacement makes that possible. The blocker is art, not the pipeline.

AI example packs

Machine-translated packs are starting points only. Prefer community packs, treat any AI-filled pack as a draft to correct, and credit editors in contributors.

How we know

See also