I couldn't find a thread on this, so I made one. (Please note: I'm in no way affiliated with the translation work on this game, I just happened to pick this nickname because I was interested in the game)

The Sega Mega Drive/Genesis RPG Surging Aura has an almost complete French translation done. What's left to do is some debugging and testing, it seems.




Here are some links (in French):

http://terminus.romhack.net/
http://traf.romhack.org/?n=451#news451
http://www.bessab.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3337

The translator has expressed liking to helping out with a possible English translation (but not doing the translation itself), so maybe there will be one, some day.

Yeah: all we need is someone willing to translate Japanese -> English (as I wouldn't trust a French -> English translation, that's too many translators involved), and we're good.

~DS

Hey, translations of translations can be good too. As long as the translator knows what he's doing and has a certain degree of familiarity with the original language, I don't see a problem in him basing his work off someone else's (unless that "someone else" didn't give him permission to do so, but that's a different matter).

But honestly, for the players it iws still better to play a not perfect translation of a translation than not playing it at all.

As a non-japanese player you just have different priorities, and even when butchered a bit it is still worth it.

Actually I would be willing to give it a try if nobody else is steps up to do it  soon. I am not a fluent French speaker, but with some help I could probably make it understandable at least, seeing that the language in the screenshots is rather simple.

It has been many years of requesting this title, but no translator would do it; so no matter how the translation is done I bet many players will be happy to get one.

It reminds me of Secret of Mana; Nintendo sent a German to Japan to work on the German translation, but he did not speak japanese. After a while the japanese managed to get him a badly translated English script to work with, kind of like babelfished afair. With this the game was translated; and eventhough not perfect by any means and in parts made up, what remained for the players was a highly enjoyable and successful game.

It´s better than nothing.

That would be wonderful, and I am glad to see someone like you interested. I hope something comes out of this.

To make it "short" :

• Le Noble Bahamut (translator) replaced all the single 16x16 kanji by double 8x16 latin characters (GFX DTE). A coder can do this quite easily (DTE-optimizing then DTE-drawing with a set of 8x16 latin characters) since the japanese font is large, but LNB had to draw all the characters by himself (using Tile Layer...). That guy is just crazy
• The main script of the game was not compressed at all. The menus were, however. So BahaBulle (ROMhacker) made tools for LNB to translate them.
• There's still a bug with the save/load menu (it's scrambled - we can't use it) and a few things remain untranslated in the battle menu (nothing much)

Although I think its always better to translate directly from Japanese to English, I think unless this is some epic and complex type of story that it would be fine to translate from French to English instead.  There are so many games to translate from Japanese to English and not enough translators to go around so why not take advantage of the fact that the game has been translated into French.

I am fluent in both English and Spanish.

Seeing as to how 95-98% of Spanish translated ROMs are done of the English version of the game, I would love to see this game in Spanish. Its only realistic that a Spanish version would come first since translating the French would not be too hard at all. The only game I know that has been translated From Japanese To Spanish is a translation that I tried to upload on here and was denied. Captain Tsubasa 3 for the SNES 90% fully translated. IF anyone wants it PM me, you have my permission to try and submitt it on here again.