a pretty stupid noobie question..

So, i know this is a freaking stupid question, but i need to know..
In translating Japanese games to English. Can't they just use japanese - english translators? If not may i know the reason?

Online translators can mess words up and mistranslate things.

aaah, but it's possible right?

Like to translate roms for patching? or translating them for playing?

Online translators are pretty much just a word for word translation, they don't take into account grammar differences between the languages (like sentence structure) and actual meanings behind what is said.Test it out yourself, take a paragraph in English and then translate it into a few different languages and then back into English. You will likely be able to decipher what it is saying but likely only because you know the original.Original

The boy went to the store to buy milk. He then shot the clerk and stole all the cash in the cash register. He died in the a gun fight with the twelve police who chased him down the road.

Passed through BabelFish half a dozen times.

The boy buys to the memory milk, it is. As for him then to pull the private secretary, payment desk d' So all those cash were thrown; Sound recording. As for him l' The gun where the police of 12 has been attached it died swaying; It ran under method and went away.

That would be... hard. Especially for those who don't know Japanese attempting to copy Japanese text verbatim. And.. the evil Kanji... >_>

aah, ok then thanks for the explanations

Translating is only half the problem... you need to know where the games store their text scripts, get the particular language you're translating to fit in the text boxes, test play the game itself to see if it's actually working. Then, of course there could always be other problems. Not an easy by any means.

Lol at TirithRR's example.
I guess that is a very good reason not to use translators.
Also, years ago i tried translating roms into Portuguese, and it is a hard thing to do.
You have to make sure that the text has the same number of characters or else you will have problems when playing the game.
Because of this, many times you can't translate word for word, but have to figure out alternate ways of saying the same thing.
It was fun though, just a lot of work.

i suppose you could do that... and then take that translation and use common sense and some good old brain power to try and figure it out.