ROM/ISO hacking

How do you do it? A friend and I were talking about downloading Persona 2: Innocent Sin and copying the translated test into the game and replacing the normal text that way. (I know there's more to it, but it's a start from where others who know the language could pick up.)So the basic question boils down to how and will it be in Japanese?

Translating is harder than you think. Not only is their text.. There's pictures that have words on them!

I copied this from this site.
http://www.romhacking.net/start/#trans

Introduction to Translation Hacking
Translation hacking is simply a specialized form of ROMhacking in general. Translations obviously deal primarily with text editing. I hope you've read and gotten the hang of tables because you'll need to understand them if you ever hope to do a translation. The key difference in doing a translation is the table is in another language! How do we handle that? The same exact way we handle any other table.Every language has some sort of alphabet. It would probably be a good idea to take a few minutes on Google and read a little bit about the language you want to translate from. That's right, the hacker should take some time to get familiar with some basic concepts in the source language even if they aren't actually going to translate the script. You don't need to be able to read anything, but you should know about the alphabet of your language and some other basic things. Google is your friend, don't be afraid to use it!Most console games that people translate are in Japanese. That's also the type of translation I'm most familiar with, so I will use that as an example. However, these concepts can apply to any language. Japanese uses two basic alphabets, Hiragana, and Katakana. You're going to need to know the order of these Japanese alphabets just as you would the English alphabet to make a Japanese table.As long as your game doesn't have a compressed font, you can make life much easier for yourself by editing the Japanese tiles to English alphabet just so you can do some relative searching and get the initial table values started. One new thing introduced with Japanese is double byte table values. Any game that uses Kanji(a third set of Japanese characters) will use two bytes for each entry in the table. This is because there are more than 255 Kanji! In fact, there are a few thousand! Luckily, most games only use a few hundred to about a thousand or so. Also note that tables like this can use BOTH two byte AND one byte values. Two bytes for Kanji and one byte for everything else. So, things can get a little tricky.You should be able to get your feet wet in trying to do a translation with the knowledge we've learned so far and these additional resources.Recommended Translation Resources:
Tables For Dummies - A more detailed table making guide which also covers Japanese table making.
JWPce - A free Japanese word processor. This is the easiest way to view Japanese on your computer.
NJ Star Word Processor - An alternative good Japanese word processor.
Tile Layer Pro - An easy to use multi-format tile editor perfect for beginners.
TaBuLar - A nice handy table generator that can even generate Japanese tables to some extent.

I take no credit for this.

"Translating is harder than you think. "I know. But you don't know how hard I think it is. But those pictures with the letters on them are still not the hardest part because I can upload a font created using an online font thingy and upload to the source file (or whatever they use) and replace the Japanese alphabet. A harder part would be making sure I know where to put the text, seeing as I may see the letters, but not know their meaning. Then the actual learning of byte code. But seeing as I'm going to be a programmer, I'll need to learn that anyway. Plus working in Java requires working in byte code for user input.I know that there's a lot more than I even mentioned, but in the end, hopefully I could find someone else to finish the project anyway. My ignorance of the process is too great to ever fully translate."I copied this from this site."Ooh, thanks. I went to that site but didn't know where that stuff was held. Now I know, and it's a great start.

japanese is a nightmare to translate; one character in japanese could be one character in the western alphabet, however, it could also be a word or even an entire sentence. Context is of the utmost importance; if it is not correctly translated you end up with things like 'All your base are belong to us' ;)

Replying to #5

LOL! Well I'm planing to learn japanese next year!

Replying to #6

I was learning Japanese for a while...but stopped because I didn't have enough free time.
But I think I'll start again..and since Im also planning to become a programmer...
translating games would be a nice way to get a head-startAlso...you'd want to be a bit slow to not realise "All your base are belong to us" is incorrect...
It should obviously be "All your base's is belong to us" ::) ;D

Replying to #7

actually, it should be 'Your entire base belongs to us' or 'We have captured your entire base' :P

Replying to #8

Interesting didint know you peeps were also base attackers, guess I gotta prepare my base for base attack, or mightest will attack your base eh loony......... :P naww..really your base is mine loony, seriously not joking your base is gonna be mine muahahahaha.......... ;D

Replying to #9

not until you find it :P