Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

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Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Shensoul » Mon Apr 02, 2012 11:40 am

This thread is not supposed to be like the other Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subs threads I found here. I am not asking you if there is such a version. I want to know whether or not I am the only one who would like to have such a version and if there is other people out there who would like to work on such a version.

I was experimenting a bit with the modification tools provided by the Shentrad team and I can confirm that they are working for Shenmue 1 as well. I am currently working on a complete guide about "japanizing" the PAL Shenmue.I know how to translate the subtitles in the cinematic scene and the free quest mode. I only don't know how to replace the textures (like the original vending machine) but it seems to me like the user "SpinDash" knows how this can be done (according to this thread: viewtopic.php?t=40268) and so this would not be a huge problem.

For the beginning I would be satisfied to complete the translation of the cinematics of all discs and the texture swapping. After this has been finnished I would start with the free quest stuff and look how far i get. The problem with the free quest subtitles is just that it is too much work. There are possibly tens of thousands of lines to translate.
I am not saying that I (or possibly a group of volunteers) could make a perfect J-dub E-sub version but ending up with an incomplete one would be better for me than nothing.
As you may know there are some French Shenmue fans who translated more than 50% of S2 into French. The project is called version 5 or so. According to this (http://www.shenmuemaster.fr/) it might be possible to make something similar for S1.


PS: I also heard that some "insider" claimed that SEGA will release S1 and S2 remakes via PSN/XBLA. In such a case it may be possible that SEGA implemented a feature for the player to choose between ENG/JAP voices.
I don't believe this until SEGA officially approves it and I don't think that this rumor is true so I don't want this discussion to be affected by this rumor.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Master Kyodai » Mon Apr 02, 2012 3:27 pm

To answer the question - No you are not the only one. It was asked several times before. So i assume at least a few people would "like it".


Personally I don't think it will happen. As you already realized - on the one side it's loads of work due to the thousands of lines of dialogue - on the other side it's not really THAT useful. Even if you don't understand a single word of Japanese you could easily finish the game anyways. And you already know that the barkeeper says "Here's some milk, schoolboy" even if you don't understand a word - simply as when you ask it like this it is probably not that you never played the game before.


We could probably discuss for hours about how much sense it makes to hear Japanese audio and not understand it when there is a perfectly translated English version available and still never agree.

Personally if I was so mad about that I would probably rather look into programming a tool that reads out the English subs from the English version and injects it into the Japanese version files. These french guys have already made all tools necessary to inject subtitles so the work of making a batch app that is "reading out" the English files is probably considerably less work than manually translating thousands of lines of what is to you "Japanese glibberish you don't understand anyways". I'd very kindly talk to the french guys (Sizious, David & co - they are REALLY awesome at manipulating these files and made loads of tools for FREE) and explain your problem and i guess maybe they will help you even more than you think.


Why you wanna edit the textures i really don't know. If the issue is just to replace the textures of the vending machine to read "Coca Cola" instead of "Jet Cola" i suggest you read a bit into wude's posts as he already explained to other people how he's doing that (And clown face ine-san may give a few cheap laughs).
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Shensoul » Wed Apr 04, 2012 1:48 pm

Hello Master Kyodai!

Master Kyodai wrote:...I would probably rather look into programming a tool that reads out the English subs from the English version and injects it into the Japanese version files. These french guys have already made all tools necessary to inject subtitles so the work of making a batch app that is "reading out" the English files is probably considerably less work than manually translating thousands of lines of what is to you "Japanese glibberish you don't understand anyways".


The problem with such a tool is that the number of lines is not always the same. J has sometimes only 1 line where E has 2 etc. The file will get screwed up if it is rebuilt this way and it won't work to generate a valid IDX file AFAIK.

Master Kyodai wrote:Why you wanna edit the textures i really don't know. If the issue is just to replace the textures of the vending machine to read "Coca Cola" instead of "Jet Cola" i suggest you read a bit into wude's posts as he already explained to other people how he's doing that (And clown face ine-san may give a few cheap laughs).


OK, I'll try to find it.

I wrote some PMs today to the people who started the past J/E threads. Maybe there are already people working on such a thing.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Master Kyodai » Thu Apr 05, 2012 7:00 am

Shensoul wrote:Hello Master Kyodai!

Master Kyodai wrote:...I would probably rather look into programming a tool that reads out the English subs from the English version and injects it into the Japanese version files. These french guys have already made all tools necessary to inject subtitles so the work of making a batch app that is "reading out" the English files is probably considerably less work than manually translating thousands of lines of what is to you "Japanese glibberish you don't understand anyways".


The problem with such a tool is that the number of lines is not always the same. J has sometimes only 1 line where E has 2 etc. The file will get screwed up if it is rebuilt this way and it won't work to generate a valid IDX file AFAIK.

Master Kyodai wrote:Why you wanna edit the textures i really don't know. If the issue is just to replace the textures of the vending machine to read "Coca Cola" instead of "Jet Cola" i suggest you read a bit into wude's posts as he already explained to other people how he's doing that (And clown face ine-san may give a few cheap laughs).


OK, I'll try to find it.

I wrote some PMs today to the people who started the past J/E threads. Maybe there are already people working on such a thing.




No idea, but maybe it would also work to just inject the original english files and "overwrite" the japanese ones. Never tried that to be honest. However - i guess ANYTHING is easier than translating thousands of dialogues yourself in the end.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Messiah » Sun Apr 08, 2012 6:42 am

I for one, would bloody love this to happen, if you need any help don't hesitate to ask. If there is thousands of dialogue to go through, I'm sure 30 shenmue fans could do 100 bits each. Power to the people!
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Shensoul » Tue Apr 10, 2012 11:36 am

Hello Messiah

Could be OT but such a project could look like this:

First there are vending machine textures in the PAL version (not sure about NTSC-U) which need to be replaced by the original textures to get the real brands like coca cola and fanta. This could be done in 10min per disc if I would know which file has to be moved to which folder from which source.
Wude wrote me a guide how it is supposed to be done and I managed to get the real brands in the selection screen (after throwing in the coins) and the drinking animation. I did not manage to get the real textures in the free quest mode in Shenmue disc 1 (when you are walking near a vending machine it is still the old one with Jet Cola and Bell Woods on it). I hope he knows more about this problem (PM already written).
Maybe there are other details too (the user spindash mentionned in an older thread some kimono girls and some line from yukawa) but I am not informed enough.

Cinematic subs are no problem. There are about 100 folders per disk with about lets say 20 lines to translate (there are subtitles files with only 1 line and there are also dialogs with more than 30 lines). Per day an individual could easily translate 5 of those folders (with enough time and motiviation). So about 1 month per disc for the cinematics sounds quite good.

Then there comes the big issue: the free quest subtitles (folders FREE0x and HUMANS). I would say there is about 10+ times more to translate for all the free quest stuff and it is impossible to do it with only 2 or 3 people. It is just so much work. There could be a compromise for this problem like a partially translated version (all cinematics JAP dub and free quest ENG dub like before) if there are not enough translators and the rest could be done afterwards (maybe the community sees that the project is alive and more and more people would like to help).

In any case I would not start with the free quest stuff.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Master Kyodai » Tue Apr 10, 2012 7:15 pm

I don't think translating that will lead to much. On the one side you will need to make sure that you can display japanese text, i think if you edit text files with japanese text on a normal english windows it will prolly just display glibberish. And then you need to know japanese to translate it properly. I think it will be much more straightforward to take the already translated english version. If it is really impossible to just place the english Free Quest & cinematics files in the japanese version (I think its possible, cant see why it shouldn't) then maybe just do it vice versa and throw the japanese voice files into the english version. Something like this. I think if you really start to translate every line manually you'll not be done before your retirement.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Shensoul » Wed Apr 11, 2012 4:27 pm

Master Kyodai wrote:i think if you edit text files with japanese text on a normal english windows it will prolly just display glibberish.

Yes if I edit the subs with the tools from the Shentrad team and the sub editor displays only trash instead of japanese characters. It seems like Delphi is not able to manage those characters somehow (so it would not be Microsofts fault ).There is a workaround for this by exporting the srf file as xml file and opening it in the webbrowser, sometimes it will display the dialogs in J characters and you can copy paste them into google translator (which will give you a trashy translation most of the time ^^)

Master Kyodai wrote:And then you need to know japanese to translate it properly. I think it will be much more straightforward to take the already translated english version.

Not exactly, I use the original english subtitles as a template. They are not 100% accurate to the Japanese original script but after some time you know the details (like when Nozomi calls him Hazuki-kun instead of Ryo etc.). Of course having a Japanese translator would make this much easier and better.

Master Kyodai wrote:I think it will be much more straightforward to take the already translated english version.

I think Shenmue is all abut athmosphere and playing the English dub version reduces the athmospheric effect of the game. I know this from Shenmue 2 which I played in Japanese with English subtitles and I liked it much more than Shenmue 1 in this aspect (even if they are in Hong Kong and nobody ever explained why everybody speaks Japanese).

Master Kyodai wrote:If it is really impossible to just place the english Free Quest & cinematics files in the japanese version (I think its possible, cant see why it shouldn't) then maybe just do it vice versa and throw the japanese voice files into the english version. Something like this

Maybe I did not explain it exactly enough, sorry for that. I am using a PAL version as the core and adding the translated japanese containers to it. This means all translated files will be Japanese and all the others will remain as they were on the original PAL version. I made it with some containers and it worked well when I was testing. This means also you only have to translate the subtitles. All the other stuff is already translated as it is already PAL. Of course the vending machine will be "Jet Cola" in such a case because its PAL ...

Master Kyodai wrote:I think if you really start to translate every line manually you'll not be done before your retirement.

That's exactly the problem in all this and I wonder how SEGA did all this translation stuff (and all the original NPC subtitles and audio files, that must have been such a pain in the.... for the developers and it must have been very very time consuming).


I am working on a complete guide for all this J/E stuff with absolutely everything in it (+vending machine etc.) and every time I thought it was ready to be released I always found another thing that should be in it.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Master Kyodai » Thu Apr 12, 2012 5:31 am

Well maybe if you speak absolutely PERFECT japanese AND english maybe you can come up with a better translation than SEGA but imho they REALLY did a good job here. A 100% translation would sometimes sound a bit odd, so eprsonally I am glad they took a bit of freedom while translating, i think it adds much to the dialogues. SEGA had a bunch of full time translators working on it literally all day. I can only guess here but it's probably many thousand hours of translation work that went into it. I am always the local pessimist but when i say i have doubts it will ever be done "from scratch" by fans i think I'm not super unrealistic. Even if YOU speak perfect japanese it will be hard to find other fans that also speak japanese on such a level and also have the time and patience to help you with that.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby ShenmueTree » Thu Apr 12, 2012 11:37 am

Just like to say I'd love a version of Shenmue with English Subtitle and a Japanese audio track.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Messiah » Sat Apr 14, 2012 6:58 pm

Ok, this may sound like a super stupid question but would be nice to get a super simple answer :)

Why can't you just replace the audio files from the English game quest with the Japanese ones?

Surely they are labelled in a similar structure, i.e. all of Ryo's lines 'Ryo1.wav', 'Ryo2.wav' would have a corresponding Japanese equivalent 'xx1.wav', 'xx2.wav'. If we can establish any kind of pattern wouldn't that make matching speech to text a whole lot simpler?

Also, it might not be worth going to loads of trouble to change cinematic audio code. As it's so uninteractive you may as well initiate a video clip of the English game with a Japanese version dub! As silly as this sounds, it may get 95% of what you want achieved with the mere downside of being a prerecorded video that plays instead of the actual cutscene lol.

Anywho, I appreciate it if you have read this far and would appreciate it if you could reply to my pondering 8-[
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Shensoul » Sun Apr 15, 2012 10:28 am

Hello Messiah,

You are not the first person which comes to this kind of idea and it is possible to do this:
http://fileforums.com/showthread.php?t=50423

After injecting the Japanese voices the lip motion data remains as it was. It seems like SEGA made new animations for the English dub and so the injected voice files will be out of sync with the japanese speech.

EDIT: I mentionned a guide in my first post. I'll complete it soon. Wude teached me how to swap the coca cola files. The only thing that is not complete yet in my guide is this Shenhua intro sequence.

EDIT2: I completed the Shenhua intro issue too. The guide will soon be available.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby skaarah » Wed Oct 03, 2012 7:16 pm

Any updates to this? I just started the game I would really prefer japanese with eng subs. I don't know if I can stand the english voice acting for very long.
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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby Ziming » Wed Oct 03, 2012 10:16 pm

skaarah wrote:Any updates to this? I just started the game I would really prefer japanese with eng subs. I don't know if I can stand the english voice acting for very long.


Don't believe anyone is working on it. I've made the Shenmue movie available in Japanese with English subtitles.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vclsytCkjG0[/youtube]

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Re: Shenmue 1 Japanese voices English subtitles (Demand?)

Postby KiBa » Thu Oct 04, 2012 2:29 am

Always thought the bad travel agency girl was incredibly hot.
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