Translating Cotton 2

[nanash1]

If it's not baked into that image, then you can try disabling different layers in an emulator until you get just the text on a black background. That might make it easier to identify the characters.

I extracted this image directly from the game data. There are no different layers. Luckily, some of the text is identical to the one in the manual. Otherwise I'd have had even more problems.

 

[OriginalName]

(snip)

Hey, those are ROUGH to read, huh? I did the same thing, grabbing my manual hoping that it was the same text. I'm dog-sitting some particularly rambunctious, clingy little ones until tomorrow, but as soon as things settle down I'll take a look at it running on a CRT to see if that makes it more legible.

Your inclination is right about Needle. I'm about 70% sure that says 高貴な家柄, "noble family" or "noble lineage". The former is a perfectly good translation.

I was able to read the characters slightly better using a screen grab at 0:38 from this video:

 

[nanash1]

Thanks for the help @OriginalName! I'm also pretty sure "高貴な家柄 " is correct. It fits the blurred pixels and the meaning very well.

I should have the transcript with all the text and my preliminary translation ready by the weekend. I also reworked some of my tools and I'm now able to compress my own images and insert them into their respective MF files. I'm still looking for a good way to typeset bitmap text though. Photoshop only supports TTF like fonts and they look horrible when scaled so low. Even my 16x8 "pixely" TTF font gets distored, because Photoshop doesn't typeset within the pixel grid.

 

[OriginalName]

Thanks for the help @OriginalName! I'm also pretty sure "高貴な家柄 " is correct. It fits the blurred pixels and the meaning very well.

I should have the transcript with all the text and my preliminary translation ready by the weekend. I also reworked some of my tools and I'm now able to compress my own images and insert them into their respective MF files. I'm still looking for a good way to typeset bitmap text though. Photoshop only supports TTF like fonts and they look horrible when scaled so low. Even my 16x8 "pixely" TTF font gets distored, because Photoshop doesn't typeset within the pixel grid.

Okay! Once I'm able to check it out on a CRT I'll double-check some of those kanji, too. Even a native speaker would have to squint and think about those. That was like an astigmatism simulator, haha.

Hm... I know quite a few graphic designers who might know some Photoshop tricks. Let me ask around.

 

[nanash1]

Small update on the status of this project:

It looks like OriginalName won't be able to help after all. He wrote me a while ago that he would finish checking the script by the end of August, but I haven't heard from him since then. However, the wife of a friend of mine studied English and is willing to help me out. She doesn't speak Japanese though, so she won't be able to check my text for translation mistakes. Still, since the Japanese is rather simple and I'm not going for literal translation anyway, I think it's fine.

Meanwhile I cleaned up all the pictures that had text overlayed by hand. This was pretty tedious, but I think the result was worth it. Currently I'm looking for a font that I can use for the attached text. Maybe someone here knows a similar font that I can use?