1) There has been much discussion on this. And basically, the clear-cut answer is that it is indeed illegal. We are modifying data from companies' intellectual properties for various reasons. We are then distributing the changed data (even though, we do it in the form of just the data, not the games themselves, to try and be farther away from actual piracy).

2) I think there is a pretty big demand for translations. Go look on the web. Look here, at the AGTP website. Lots of people play these games, and there are many games out there that people still want translated, and more games that will likely never come to English speaking audiences come out everyday.

3) I think it would be nice to have some of us get recognized for the work we've done. Gideon, Nightcrawler, Byuu, D, they've all done professional-quality work that I think deserves that sort of recognition. We put lots of time, blood, sweat, and tears into our work. And we all do it for fun, and for no profit at all.

4) No, I have not. Of course, I have yet to finish a project. The one that is closest to being finished (a translation/re-translation of FFIV Easy-type / FFIV) is from a company that is famous for having written a C&D letter. Though, since I'm not heavily advertising it nor planning on releasing it on the toes of any later FFIV release, I doubt it'll get any attention from SE as a result.

5) See 4.

6) And see 4 again.

7) Yes, I would. I'm personally not good enough to be able to do this sort of thing very quickly, though I can bet that money would be a good motivator for me to get the work done quicker.

8 ) Depends on how much work I and my team would have put into it, I guess. As you said, it would be fair for the company who owns the game to get most of it, but we would still get enough to make it having been worth doing.

9) I would say that it should be as easy as having the translation team send progress reports to the company who makes the game, and have someone from within that company do Quality Control. But, I doubt it would be as simple as that.

Good luck with your paper,

~DS

I think the reason that game companies haven't moved to eliminate the translation hacking scene is twofold:
#1: Political reasons. There is a sense that the culture gap between Japan and the U.S. is inexcusable. There have been statements by industry insiders to that effect. Also, the risk of backlash is real because the people who play games for the story especially have no tolerance for heavy handedness. I still haven't forgotten how SE handed Crimson Echoes, nor will I soon forgive.
#2: Economic reasons. There is a belief that it's not enough to just make money but to involve as many people with a project as possible so long as it can make money. This keeps people employed; swells the employment base itself; and keeps Japanese unemployment low. There is also little interest in old games. Modern games are already long and no one has time to play them all.

Now two reasons that the two don't mix:
#1: business is business. I don't think a lot of people at the bigger companies have a lot of regard for the rom hacking scene, and don't necessarily want to work with people involved in it.
#2: America and Japan have different business cultures. In America, you work with anybody who wants to work with you in good faith. You work to survive. In Japan, you choose who you work with based on your perception of their character. Your survival is assured by the community, but in return you must avoid shaming it. As such, your idea would work great in the U.S... but not necessarily in Japan. A lot of the motivation for translating these games is, I think, rebellion against Japanese values.

1) It's illegal. But the game companies usually have no reason to intervene. Proof of that is simply that after over 800 translations projects we have here on the site there have been only one or two cases where people got into trouble. And those cases didn't get in trouble for the translations themselves but for trying to instant translate brand new games that were scheduled for localizations anyway.

2) I released one complete translation so far and it's still getting downloaded from my website about 350 times every month over two years after it's release. And that's just directly from my site, the translation is available on dozens of websites all across the internet. Unfortunately I don't have any numbers directly from the 2 months following the release, I'd guess most people downloaded it then. I know of about 10.000 downloads for sure from the statistics I have (My own homepage, stats starting from May 2008, unfortunately the release was in March 08 >_<) I can only guess how many people downloaded it in total, maybe 30k? (Btw: The game in question was Dragon Quest Monsters 3, of which  parts 1+2 were released in the US officially, so it's a series with a bit of a following and not a totally obscure title)

But translating that into a number of potential buyers for a XBL or PSN version is IMO possible. Maybe a few hundred to a couple of thousand?

3) Recognition would be nice, publishers always pussyfoot around admitting we even exist. If asked directly they usually say something like "We know about them and we find it awesome people are so dedicated to our stuff" but beyond that they stay quiet. The translation team of Atlus was once interviewed for some podcast and said a bit more, mostly they complained that the fan-translation team of Persona 2 didn't stick to the naming standards they established for the series xD
Generally I think it's a problem that many fan-translators feel they are somehow superior to official localizations and need to retranslate everything released in English to make it "more true" to the original Japanese version. I wouldn't be too friendly with fan translators too if they always told me I'd be incompetent. Fortunately those aren't representative for the whole scene, but I don't know how much of that the professionals notice.

Personally, I'm not interested in working in the industry. Programming is a shitty job I'm currently studying computer science and I hope I can do something different with it, perhaps in the embedded systems design area or if it really comes to programming in the field of graphics and visualization. Programming text boxes is really as boring as one can get. Besides, I doubt our skills (the romhackers and not the Japanese->Eng translators) are really needed in the industry unless they want to translate old games they lost the source code of.

4,5,6) No.

7) In principle, let's say I wouldn't be opposed to licence out my translations so to speak. But I wouldn't actively seek the possibility, the projects were born as fan projects and will be carried out as such. If there are further possibilities that would just be a bonus. Though it would also open a can of worms. Translation projects are rarely if not always group efforts of various people. How should the earnings of such an arrangement be split up? Are the hacker's and the translator's work worth exactly 50:50? What about testers, editors or that one guy that helped out with a decompression routine? It gets really easy to piss of people fast with such a thing.

I have no idea. If you translate the amount of hours we work on the projects into average programmer/translator salaries, I think the figure would be much much higher than what the publishers would be willing to pay. On the other hand since the projects would have happened without pay anyway, one can see it as a welcome bonus and be cheap so to speak. A model where one gets a share from each sale would probably best for both the hacker and the publisher. To answer how much that share should be I would need much more information, for example how much of each sale actually goes into the pockets of the publisher and how much marketing costs or how much Microsoft asks of it on XBL. Until you know all the details it's impossible to make a realistic figure.

9) Have their professional staff look over it just like for any other game too. It would be suicide to just trust on the quality and content of the fan translation scene. Who knows how many porn jokes are hidden inside the game that might hunt the publisher later on

Nerd, if you could be more specific it would help me to understand things a bit more.

What has SE done to indicate that attitude?

I'm not doubting you, I am just not in the loop and really want to understand the situation.

Those were all game/level hacking projects though, so there is little relevance to the legality or publisher perception of translation hacking. Let's not mix apples and oranges here.

Not really directly addressing any of the specific "questions", but I guess you might find something in between the lines here, or at least, hopefully, will find some of this somehow relevant/interesting to the subject you're looking into.

From talking with industry peeps who've been handling various types of "incidents" that have occurred (mainly) within fan communities and stuff... and mixing the general picture I feel like I've got through years of experience with LOC QA and such... here are my 2 cents:


Some companies actually have fans handle the slightly more obscure languages (as in anything that's either not the big 3 or big 5), and if my mind isn't playing tricks on me, I believe this is how Valve are currently doing some languages and I forgot which one of the many football manager game series it was, but one of those franchises used to have their fans handle the translations (or maybe they still do).

Curiously enough, Rising Star Games (which is partly owned by Bergsala, Nintendo's Scandinavian distributor, hence making this even more curious and interesting) recently gave their official green flag to a Spanish fan group handling the Spanish translation of Fragile Dreams. Can check their announcement here (don't think the official project site has had any updates, though. At least it didn't last time I checked.) There's a group of Italian fans nagging on their boards about how they should let them do the same too, but it seems like they're getting shot down 'cause they don't appear to be as professional as whomever it is that is currently "blessed" with the Spanish stuff.

Another company worth pointing out is SunSoft. Going by stuff said by Victor Ireland (of Working Designs fame) on the SunSoft boards, it pretty much seems like they might be considering (or actually even are already doing) translations of retro titles that evt. will be released on platforms such as the Wii Virtual Console. And we already also know that various Wii VC releases have had minor adjustments applied to them (most of them being various forms for content censorship or updating of expired advertisement/product placement deals/agreements.)


Anyway, that part aside, the biggest problem is most likely a mixture of reliability (deadlines/quality/availability) and the fact that console games are subjected to many many types of guidelines and wonky testing procedures (both internal and external), all of which takes a considerable amount of time and requires the input of industry professionals who're specialized in the field. To pull it all off,  your "fan team" has to be either able to be held responsible and liable for any potential issues that may occur... or the company who handles the distribution trusts you to the point where they are willing to take the risk of letting outsiders do their stuff. 

Common (big) issues that occurs are:
-Guidelines (All the console manufacturers have various types of dos and don'ts. Some regional and some global.)
-Ratings (You always have a target rating of some sort. You wouldn't want to say something is PG/12+, to then find an exploding Hitler head at the end that you forgot to give the heads up about.)
-Glossaries (Publishers, IP holders and console manufacturers have their own glossaries that have to be used. Specific types of ways you address certain functions, various types of template error messages, official translations for various things, etc.)
-Legal (You don't want to somehow be breaking any laws or accidentally encourage/support stuff you don't really stand for.)

These four often blend together. And somewhere in the system someone has to give a "yay" or "nay" to each one of them. Some of them are done internally at studios/companies and others are done externally (often they also give feedback on any other "observations" they may have made during this "yay/nay" process). The external ones are usually whomsoever is in charge of your target market's ratings board (usually just a pile of media from the game + general game and content descriptions being sent their way for them to evaluate) and whichever is the platform manufacturer for the target platform (so they can give their final yay/nay before you can send stuff off to manufacturing/distribution).

This costs money. You might be able to dodge the internal stuff if you're just really confident in your "fans" (incl. the ratings part), but the last bit that involves the console manufacturer will cost you money. Should they find something they don't like... you'll have to reschedule and pay them for their time, again (+evt. reschedule any evt. manufacturing/distribution plans too.)

And, oh, this mess of a post is now getting one more entry!
-Quality (Some companies have an image they like to preserve. Not all companies feel that all of their products are fit for all regions. Some even feel that releasing certain products in certain regions will reflect badly upon the image the locals already has of.)


At the end of the day, I think it's very likely that it could be pulled off. Problem is just getting the green flag, as it certainly isn't something anyone and everyone could do (+there's also always the issue with rights and recognition for your work when you do translations for stuff.)

For the love of god, would you stop harping about SE? You bring it up every chance you get.