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; non-Latin scripts. Accented Latin draws with the accent font (accents: font).

The one rule

Every edit is same-size in place unless you opt into the relayout. Each line has a byte budget; a line over budget is reported and left English - except a name, which moves (or, for a monster, grows its record) when there is room.

Sharing

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

Code

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

Own another disc?

An official European disc's text, or a fan-translated disc's, can be lifted onto the USA disc from your own two discs.

Workflow

1. Your discThe USA image you own.
2. ExportEvery catalogued line to YAML.
3. Working packHolds the game script beside your text - local only, never share.
4. Fill + statsAny text editor; stats dry-runs against the disc.
5. StripDrops the source: text.
6. Shipped packDisc coordinates + your text only: committable.
7. ImportOnto a copy of the disc (plus a PPF).

Only the first and last steps need a disc; everything in between is text editing.

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.

The same loop as a walkthrough, with what each skip message means: the translating guide.

CLI reference

Every subcommand lives under legaia-patcher translate; --help on any of them prints the full flag descriptions. Every disc argument takes a .bin or a .cue.

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. The retail font draws plain letters only; the pack's accents: header decides what happens to a typed accent on import:

One table, legaia_font::latin, holds the byte layout (CP437 / CP850, the bytes the PAL discs use) and the folds; the CLI, the ROM patcher and the workbench all read it. translate import --accents overrides the header; stats and space --pack list every character that will not draw as typed, with its key and index. Cyrillic, Greek and CJK have no glyph and no fold. Reference: pack-format.md § Accents.

Budgets: the same-size rule

A name that outgrows its slot is moved automatically - no option to set. The pause menu, battle and every other screen read names through the executable's pointer tables, and those are the only references to them, so the text can live anywhere in the name pools. A name moves only when the other translations leave a free run long enough for it; otherwise it stays English and is reported (no free run) - shorten it or its neighbours in the same tables. Byte room is not screen room: a list still has its columns, and a very long item name runs into the quantity.

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 - the patcher page's Give translated dialog more room checkbox - 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.

To see the room: legaia-patcher translate space --input DISC.bin [--pack PACK.yaml] reports every name region, monster record, label pool and scene with what uses it, and the translation workbench shows the same numbers in the browser while you edit, with each line's width on screen drawn in the game's font.

Coverage + limits

• Covered: every SCUS name table and the spell / arts descriptions; NPC, cutscene and narration dialogue, picker labels, chest flavour text; overlay UI labels, battle system messages and the battle command chips; enemy names.
• Tight: the overlay label pools and the command chips - a short label can be shorter than English but rarely longer.
• Stays English: lines the conservative segment scanner declines to export. Junk entries it does export (dev-debug strings) are harmless - leave them blank.

Translations from another disc

Sony shipped French, German and Italian discs (SCES_019.44 / .45 / .46), plus Spanish (.47) and an English European release (SCES_017.52). 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. The three measured discs have their name tables pinned; the others are found by search at run time.

Fan translations too. A community translation published as a binary patch (xdelta, PPF) becomes an editable pack the same way: apply the patch to the disc it was made for, then lift from the result with --language naming the language (the disc does not say). A patched USA disc works as well as a patched PAL one. Lines the patch left untouched lift as the underlying disc's text; Japanese discs are not readable this way.

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 or with the patcher page's relayout checkbox.

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