Gulkave japanese manual translation project

[Pixelboy]

Hello, retrogaming fans!

 

As many of you know, Opcode Games' next ColecoVision project is Gulkave, and progress is generally going well. However, one aspect that hasn't seen any progress is the translation of the manual of the original SG-1000 game. I was in contact with someone who was supposed to handle it, but in the end nothing got done, so now I have to find someone else.

 

The scans of each page of the japanese manual (as well as the back of the box) can be found here: http://www.opcodegames.com/gulkave_jap/

 

As you can see, each "paragraph" has been enclosed in a red rectangle, and marked with a unique ID number. All I need now is someone to translate the text in each rectangle. I don't know the first thing about japanese, so I'm not sure what kind of effort is required to translate all that material, but a lot of these rectangles contain very short pieces of japanese text, so it can't be all that hard...

 

I have prepared a text file which contains the current state of the translation effort. You can find this text file here. This text file will be updated as progress is made.

 

Once the translation is done, I will use it to prepare the manual for the ColecoVision version's manual. It goes without saying that everyone who gets actively involved in this translation effort will see their names included in the credits, in the finalized english manual.

 

So if you can help, or if you know someone who knows japanese and is willing to help, please let me know!

[Pixelboy]

Hmm... I see finding a translator is going to be a little more difficult than I thought...

 

One option I'm investigating is to use free online translators. So far I've seen at least one translation site that lets you copy and paste japanese characters into their translation textbox, and provides a loose but acceptable english translation. Since I don't really need a precise translation of the japanese Gulkave manual (just something to give me a vague idea of what the text says) this could be a good option, the only problem being to find all the correct characters somewhere on the net and paste them into the translation textbox. There are a LOT of different japanese characters, so it could be quite a job to reconstruct the japanese text in order to have it translated online...