LONG FORM DOCUMENTAION
Iron Storm Retranslation: Repairing Working Designs’ Sega Saturn Localization
As I had played the German and Japanese campaigns of
Iron Storm, I had repeatedly run into moments where the briefings were so unclear that I could not make sense of what they were trying to say. They are not all bad, but a substantial number are more or less broken. Since working on
Iron Storm: Operation Files had already given me the tools and reverse engineering needed, I decided to go the extra mile and fix the translation in the base game as well.
I have chosen to call this patch a
retranslation, since that is the established term for a translation patch when an official translation already exists. At the same time, I want to clarify what this patch is and is not.
The best way to think about the patch is to imagine a house renovation. One does not tear everything down and rebuild from scratch; one assesses each element and systematically repairs it to a chosen standard. The standard I set was to repair the WD translation to the level it should have had, rather than replace it with an entirely new script. Each asset type required a different level of intervention depending on how broken it was, ranging from full tool-assisted rework from the Japanese source material to minor fixes where the WD translation was already solid enough.
For all its flaws, the WD script was still written by humans. I did not have the resources or reasons to have the huge 70000 letter script fully retranslated by a human translator, and I did not want to replace it wholesale with something written by a machine. So I have kept the WD script as a base, but refined it heavily using the original Japanese script as the standard.
So this could just as well be called a
translation fix/repair patch rather than a retranslation. However, at the same time, I do not want to undersell the work. There is nothing partial about it. I have combed through every part of the game for issues and errors.
I have not used a English Japanese translator for this patch as I have deemed the various current generation of translation tools sufficient for this specific task. The task is not to produce a primary-source translation from scratch for the first time, but merely to identify informational discrepancies between two versions of the same source. Most of the game also draws on real history, which provides a factual basis for judging errors.
I will go through all major parts of the game and provide examples of the work that has been done.
Patch content documentation
1. The main briefings
This is the game’s main script, roughly 70,000 characters long. It consists of 54 missions, each with four different briefings. The entire script was extracted and processed through several toolchains in order to compare the original Japanese text with the Working Designs translation and identify divergences and errors. Across the script, I corrected hundreds of misspellings, factual errors, and distorted place names, and rewrote subpar language and grammar.
One interesting pattern was that the overall quality of the WD translation varied greatly between the three campaigns. The American campaign was generally better translated and contained relatively few historical inconsistencies or misrepresentations. The Japanese campaign was much less reliable, and the German campaign was by far the worst, often lacking the feeling of being worked on by an attentive professional translator.
I will give a few of the 216 briefing paragraphs as examples to represent the issues in the WD script. In the end less than 70 briefings required no adjustment. The following is from a German victory briefing for the mission to encircle Kiev. It illustrates the combination of factual inaccuracies and clumsy phrasing that ends up obscuring the meaning of the entire passage.
Working Designs
FROM THE SURPRISE ATTACK OF NOVGOROD, ACCESS WAS GAINED TO THE DESNA RIVER AT THE NORTHERN PORT, AND YOUR FORCES HEADED SOUTH. MEANWHILE, THE FIRST ARMORED DIVISION SUCCESSFULLY CROSSED THE DESNA RIVER AND HEADED NORTH, EVENTUALLY JOINING YOUR FORCES.
Comments
- This mission involves two different rivers, the Desna and the Dnieper. The WD translation confuses them, producing a briefing that no longer corresponds to real geography.
- Novgorod is the wrong city. The town actually referred to is around 700 km away from Novgorod and was then called Novgorod-Seversky. (The entire script uses historical place names)
- “Northern port” adds further clumsiness, but in context it simply refers to a river crossing.
- The WD script repeatedly mishandles formation names. Here, “First Armored Division” should in fact be a panzer group, a much larger formation.
Corrected
THE CROSSING OVER THE DESNA RIVER WAS SECURED BY A SURPRISE ATTACK AT NOVGOROD-SEVERSKY. AFTER THIS, YOUR FORCES HEADED SOUTH. MEANWHILE, THE FIRST PANZER GROUP, APPROACHING KIEV FROM THE SOUTH, SUCCESSFULLY CROSSED THE DNIEPER RIVER AND EVENTUALLY JOINED YOUR FORCES.
I have also collected a few paragraphs from the script that illustrate its broader problems. These are free from factual inaccuracies but include clumsy and incorrect sentence structure, highly questionable word choices, and outright comical misspellings:
· OPERATION SEALION WAS A COMPLETE SUCCESS. THE MONARCHY AND KEY MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT HAVE BEEN FORCED TO FLEE TO CANADA. THEY ARE
ADMONISHING CONTINUED RESISTANCE TO OUR FORCES THROUGHOUT THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH, AND THIS MAY BE A LONG-TERM THREAT TO THE AXIS, BUT HOLDS LITTLE IMMEDIATE DANGER
· (German D-day)DESPITE OPERATING UNDER ENEMY-CONTROLLED AIRSPACE, OUR FORCES ASSEMBLED UNITS AND RUSHED TO THE LANDING AREA
. THOUGH THE ENEMY NAVAL GUNS
INFLICTED GREAT SEVERE ON US, WE MANAGED TO GAIN CONTROL OVER THE MULBERRY PORT WHILE IT WAS YET UNDER CONSTRUCTION.
· (kharkov)THE RUSSIAN FORCE ADVANCED BEYOND THE REACH OF THEIR SUPPLY LINES, WEAKENING THEIR EFFECTIVENESS
AGAINST OUR AFFRONT. THIS
ALLOW US TO FORCE BACK THEIR WEAKENED TROOPS AS WE MOVED TOWARD KHARKOV.
· THE GOAL OF THIS OPERATION IS TO ADVANCE OUR FORCES TO THE MIDWAY AND ALEUTIAN ISLANDS SIMULTANEOUSLY, CAPTURING THE KEY LOCATIONS ON EACH ISLAND. IF THIS IS ACCOMPLISHED QUICKLY, IT WILL PUT US IN AN EXCELLENT DEFENSIVE POSITION WHEN THE ENEMY FLEET ARRIVES TO COUNTERATTACK. IF PRIORITIES MUST BE
DELIMITED, THE MIDWAY ISLANDS ARE THE FIRST PRIORITY.
BONZAI!
Both the original Japanese and the WD script introduce their own peculiarities. There are several locations where the WD version removes content. The Japanese script ends the German world-domination route with a line about the “Aryan people” finally having been liberated, which WD removes. On the other hand, the WD script also softens several descriptions of how badly the United States is defeated in the alternate-history scenarios where Japan wins in the Pacific.
The WD translation further adds cultural clichés to both the German and Japanese campaigns that are not present in the original. The Japanese briefings are littered with phrases such as “BONZAI!,” “KAMPAI!,” “CHIKUSHO!,” “FIGHT FOR THE GLORY OF OUR EMPEROR!,” and “ALL THAT REMAINS FOR US IS HARA-KIRI.” The German campaign, meanwhile, frequently ends with obligatory salutes to the leader, also absent from the Japanese original. By contrast, the American campaign received much more upbeat embellishments such as “GOOD WORK, MEN!” This gives the impression that the WD script was not merely translated, but also selectively recast in tone depending on the faction. This was however clearly an intended addition to the script, which is why I have kept these clichés, as my intention was not to alter the “character” of the script, but correct informational erros and refine the standard of translation and language.
2. The game manual
For this game, the manual is not a nice extra but a necessity, and Working Designs did not translate everything needed to play the game. As a result,
Iron Storm was released in an incomplete state, with important manual assets left untranslated. This has long made the game seem more confusing and forbidding than it really is. It is certainly complex, but much of its reputation for being daunting comes from the lack of documentation rather than from the game itself. I have translated the key game manual assets needed to combat this. The two categories are described below. I translated the charts that are truly necessary. The Japanese manual still contains a great deal of less essential data, but these 15 pages cover what is needed.
I placed the translated manual in the patch archive and also linked to it with a QR code on the game’s loading screen. I did this because these translated manual assets are essential to a proper gameplay experience, so I wanted the patch and the manual to remain inseparably linked. Embedding the QR code was also rather fun. It is robust enough to scan even from my soft 14-inch CRT over a composite signal.
Manual – Campaign overview charts
Western players were never given an overview of the campaign structures. Because of their complexity, it was impossible to plan ahead or navigate the many branches that alter a campaign depending on performance in each map. One would simply end up wherever the game led,
without any sense of direction.
Manual – Unit upgrade tech trees
Western players were also left guessing which units could be upgraded into which later models. On my first playthrough, I had to replay several maps repeatedly just to figure out how to steer my army in the desired direction. There are also dead ends the player has no realistic way of foreseeing, forcing a replay if a suitable save file even exists.
For example, on my first playthrough of the Soviet campaign in
Operation Files, I upgraded all my KV-IC tanks on map 5, Kursk, to the KV-85 rather than the KV-IS because the KV-85 was slightly stronger at the time. Only later did I discover that it had no further upgrades.
3. The unit names
All units have double names, one in 16x16 font, and one in 8x8. Errors were found in both. All 400 or so unit names were retranslated form the Japanese source. Then A total of 56 were found that needed to be repaired in the WD translation. Here are some examples.
SkyWriter → Skyraider
Vorfort → Fortress
Ulvarin → Wolverine
G.Chaplin → GrafZepln (Graf Zeppelin)
Gunaizena → Gneisenau
Terpittsu → Tirpitz
Daimaraa → Daimler
Charnfrst → Schrnhrst (Scharnhorst)
Miitia → Meteor (Gloster meteor) |
Nasholn → Nashorn
Demark D7 → Demag D7
Bismark → Bismarck
40mmVofors → 40mm Bofors
HanoverAA → Hanomag AA
IAG-10AA → ZiS-10
Pote 631 → Potez 631
MrineIn → MarineInf
RisyuRyuu → Ryujo |
4. Between-turn strategic updates
The Japanese source was extracted and used to identify errors in the WD translation. A few examples are shown below, with the worst offenders being rather corrupted.
| WD translation | correction |
| The 3rd Armored Group arrives from Northern Valestok! Presently, the Soviet army battles within! | The 3rd Panzer Group has arrived from north of Białystok! It is currently engaged in combat with Soviet forces! |
| The 6th Army turns to attack at Boljirovgrad! | The 6th Army advances toward Voroshilovgrad! |
| |
4. Briefing maps
This was one of the largest and most time-consuming parts of the project, and there was enormous variation in how well the Japanese source material had been translated by WD. Overall, the German campaign outside Western Europe, along with the Japanese battles on the Chinese mainland, was by far the worst offenders. This was also one of the weakest parts of the WD release overall: I ended up making corrections to 26 of the game’s 54 maps.
For example, the first mission of the Japanese campaign, called
ASSAULT AT NOMONHAN in WD, uses the Japanese name for the operation. Outside Japan, however, the battle is generally known as
The battle of Khalkhin Gol. Most of the map labels were merely romanized rather than translated. WD left
KOKKYOU as the label for the long dotted line, even though in Japanese it simply means
Border and should have been translated as such.
HARUHA RIVER appears to be an old Japanese rendering carried directly into English, even though the river’s English name is the
Khalkh River.
NOROKOUCHI, as far as I can tell, is meant to mean
Noro Height. In fact the only English word on the map was “River”, the rest was merely romanized Japanese.
The compounded effect of these issues was significant. On my first playthrough, I did not even realize that this was the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. Instead, it became some obscure Japanese battle with enjoyable gameplay but no real context or meaning as part of a wider campaign. Another Japanese campaign map simply left the label for the
East China Sea romanized as something like
Higashishinakai in the middle of all the other English labels.
4. Briefing location names
This was an extremely time-consuming task. These are the 8×8 map names shown under the
Map submenu in the briefings. I went through every one of them, and the process alone amounted to almost two full workdays. The tiny Belarusian rural villages nearly made me give up. Almost all of them had been translated incorrectly, and I had to triangulate their real identities on Google Earth using the in-game map as reference.
Here are a few examples decoded directly from the binaries. There were many more. They are truncated to the in-game string limit of nine characters. There is also one interesting instance of a Russian word, first being blindly transliterated into Japanese by the original developers, then that being transliterated into English by WD, likely without anyone in either dev team knowing its meaning.
| Working designs | Correction |
| BOLESLAV | WROCLAW |
| OVRUCH | SLUTSK |
| GORODOK | GORKI |
| CYUSIE | CHAVUSY |
| KUJINO | GUSINO |
| KURASUNUI | KRASNYI |
| CHSURAWCH | KHISLAVIC |
| KANEVKA | KANIV |
| BACHMAC | BAKHMACH |
| KULENGA | KLIN |
| MMFUKURGN | MAMAYEVKU |
| AKAI10GFC | KOMBINAT |
| RUINOK | MARKET |
| REBEJIN | LEBEDYN |
| PUROIFUKA | PRKHORVKA |
| VIRE | VILLERS-B |
| VIRE | VIRE-NORM |
| NOMHON | NOMONHAN |
| KANEOHE | KAIWI |
| SONGKHLA | SINGORA |
| KOTA BHAR | KROH |
| KWARIRBSU | KUALALPIS |
| HOLLANDIO | HOLLANDIA |
| TRUCK | TRUK |
| CONDE | CONDE E.N |
| CONDE | VIRE |
| CHERUBUL | CHERBOURG |
| SAN LOCK | SAN ROQUE |
5. Mission names
There are a few truly horrific offenders here. The worst is the German mission that should be called
Operation Zitadelle, but which WD rendered as
Operation Tuituidale. That seems to be a case of phonetic drift, though the confusing part is that the phonetic transliteration of the Japanese source does not even say
Zitadelle; it simply says
Kursk.
6. Between-mission globe updates
The Japanese equivalents were extracted, translated, and used to identify and correct errors in the WD script. As elsewhere, this included the same mix of misspellings and mistranslations, such as
the Caucasus region being rendered as
the Korkas region in the WD version among many others.
7. Names of individual armies
I extracted the Japanese source here as well. Some names had not been translated at all, but merely romanized, such as
Sensui Fleet, which in Japanese means
Submarine Fleet. Here are a few examples.
| WD | Corrected |
| Harujee Fleet | Halsey Fleet |
| Sensui Fleet | Submarine Fleet |
| Chimoshenko Army | Timoshenko Army |
Kenpov Army
5th Armored Group | Kempf Army
5th Panzer Group |
8. Names of weapons
These were quite well translated by WD. I only made a few alterations.
PI Auto – PIAT
P.SYRTK - PzrShrek (panzershrek)
P.Fast - PzrFaust (panzerfaust)
9. Spinning globe world war intro
Extracted from the Japanese source and reworked. Here, the WD script was overly convoluted and much longer than the original. Rather than prioritizing readability, it added flavor detail that became a burden because of the game scrolls the text vertically as it is being read. The result was text that moved by faster than it could comfortably be read, made worse by the all-caps font. This section also lacked polish, with issues such as the 1930 entry appearing before the 1929 entry.
The text has been tightened to make it more comfortable to read without losing meaningful detail. The space saved was then used to restore information from the Japanese source that WD had omitted. For example, this is the entry for
1919:
WD
-The Treaty of Versailles
is concluded. Among other
things, it imposes
reparations equivalent to
33 billion (1923 US)
dollars on Germany for the
damage imposed upon the
world. Another provision
of the treaty is the
near-complete disarming of
the German forces. |
Reworked
The Treaty of Versailles is signed, ending the First World War. It forces Germany to pay massive war reparations, accept strict limitations on its armed forces, and cede all of its colonies. |
10. Settings menu and in game action menus
I have applied the interface improvements I developed for
Operation Files here as well. For example, the game originally had two different menu nodes both labeled
Units, even though they led to different menus. One opened
Research, while the other opened
Forces, which made the interface needlessly confusing. These inconsistencies have been corrected. The item labeled
Map has been renamed
Mission, and the command used to end a turn, originally labeled
Done, has been changed to
Turn. This was necessary because there is already another
Done command used to end a unit’s action, adding confusion.
With regards to the settings menu, entries were repositioned on screen to eliminate the glitching present in the WD release. Minor corrections were also made, such as changing
Cursor speed to
Mouse speed,
Input to
Controls, and similar adjustments.
12. Notifications and error messages
Several confusing in-game notifications have been clarified. These were a very confusing and irritating part of iron storm. These problems seem to stem from WD translating the messages in isolation without considering how they were actually used in-game. For example, when two weakened units are merged and one reaches full strength, the WD game displays the message
OPPONENTS UNITS ARE AT MAXIMUM. In context, however, the opponent’s units have nothing to do with what is happening. The message should simply indicate that merging the two weakened units has produced one at full strength.
Another instance was the message shown when the auto repair setting is turned on. It causes the game to cycle through all units and repair them before giving control to the player. In case of insufficient funds, the message
OPERATION INCOMPLETE was shown, indicating that the automatic operation of repair was incomplete, but likely many read this as an irritating reminder of one not completing the goals of the military operation, that appeared for an unknown reason each turn.
13. Graphics
I had little reason to alter the graphics, with one exception: the Japanese flag. Because the game was developed in Japan, it uses the contemporary Japanese flag rather than the imperial rising sun flag. However, all other flags in the game are period-correct, including the German and Chinese ones, so the Japanese flag always stood out to me as inconsistent to the game universe.
I therefore decided to correct it. Although the flags appear to use separate 4bpp palettes, they in fact share an 8bpp palette. For consistency, I also changed most of the other Japanese flags in the game to the rising sun design. However, for the smallest ones, around 11 to 19 pixels wide in 4bpp, there was simply not enough resolution or color depth to render the rays properly, all my attempts came out unusable, so in those cases I had to leave the original flag unchanged.
14. Cheats
Bo Bayles contributed an addition to the release. Independently of my work, he had been searching for cheats for the game and will publish them on his blog, which I will link here. He discovered a hidden cheat page that can be activated through the settings menu. At my request, he also located the bytes controlling the default settings of said cheat page, which allowed us to repurpose the shoulder buttons and add quick access to options that would otherwise require entering the settings menu. The left trigger now toggles fog of war (sight), and the right toggles the visual hex grid on and off. I had originally hoped to use this system to toggle 3D animations on and off in Iron Storm: Operation Files, but that proved unworkable for several reasons.
You can find his work at Rings of Saturn -
Rings of Saturn | Bo | Substack
