Japanese Localisation

Hi. Has anyone ever localised a game into Japanese? I'm not sure if Unicode supports Japanese characters as there are so many. Perhaps it does?

It's gonna be a hell of big bitmap font right or is there some kind of workaround?

Any info appreciated thanks.

I'm reliably informed that unicode does support Japanese.

How the hell do the Japanese type anyway? The keyboards would have to be massive! Actually I'm aware that they do use normal keyboards and build up characters right?

Beats me. :)

I think they type short sequences of kana (phonetic) characters and then choose an appropriate kanji character. It all seems very cumbersome.

We've done several Japanese localisations over the years. Big bitmap.

Yes you have to type the phonetic of the word, which can be done using the qwerty keyboard or a Japanese keyboard with the phonetic characters individually printed on each key.
As you type autocorrection of kanji pops up which can be auto completed by pressing the numbers keys along the top 1-9 etc. It is a bit cumbersome but you can type fast with practice. It's certainly a lot easier and faster than using a Japanese mobile phone!

Are you trying to translate your Christmas Bonus into Japanese or something? Unless you're making an RPG or text heavy game, if your game doesn't have too much text to translate, what I do is collect all the kanji I have and make a lookup table for what I need, instead of having a 3000~4000 odd large fontmap.

&#12371;&#12435;&#12412;&#12435;&#12431;&#12502;&#12522;&#12540;&#12484;&#12505;&#12452;&#12471;&#12463;&#12290;&#12290;&#12290;&#12290; <~ let's see the forum butcher this up

Pretty much what Enay said, JP can be typed in using standard alphanumeric and their IME control panel (which I just so happen to have installed) will auto-convert it to the current keyboard setting, be it hiragana or katana, with the space bar to convert to a drop-down list of available kanji. Can be a bit cumbersome though, no idea how they live with the direct-input rendition of japanese via a marked keyboard...

Again, as ENAY has mentioned, for a limited-text game, just throw in what you need for the bitmap font regarding kanji, as there's over 2000 of them.....

[EDIT] Hah.

You spelt Blitz basic wrong ;)



and good evening for that matter. Konbonwa? and where's your particle? that's the wrong wa.

Back to the study books young man! Heheh.

Gah - it's about time the Japanese just knuckled down and learnt English. :P

Whoops, forgot the good ol' "ha". ;/
(how do get the small tsu btw, can't recall the key press for it, should get me a proper keyboard someday for that anyhow, one with a mode key so I don't have to use caps+alt/ctrl/shift/etc)

Should really get back into self-teaching/revising me up on the language, only thing that's keeping me (barely) in tune are the Japanese players in FFXI.
(and of course the majority of them type kanji out the wingwang so I can't understand half of them anyways, not to mention self-teaching is nowhere near as interesting as the two semi-private semesters I enrolled in 3 years ago)



They get taught it as a second language iirc. It's just due to the fact Japanese is their native, and according to some multilingual gamers I know, they don't like speaking a language unless they're fairly fluent in it.
(which is the case for me, I'll read, and give simple responses in their language, but that's it)

[EDIT] Thanks Enay, got it.

That site should be more interesting to review on since it actually does use kana, where-as my books somehow still use full romanji after making you learn the syllablaries.
(which kinda defeats the purpose...)

[EDIT2] And yep, playing games in Japanese is good fun, helps build up character recognization, as well as getting my head around figuring katakana better with regards to figuring out what foreign word it's trying to be.
(and as you can see with my error with Blitz up above that I suck at writing my own kata)

Did it with Jak2 already, problem is that Japanese is spoken waaaaaaaay too fast for my mind to keep up/analyze it.
(loved that game for the fact NaughtyDog managed 6 localizations with full voice-overs on a single DVD)

For small tsu, double tap the first character of the symbol you want, in this case bu ri t tsu.

I usually tap T twice, or press Shift and + and then T.
Playing games in Japanese is good fun, but you'll probably find yourself just skim reading all the kanji you don't understand. It's not a good way of learning unfortunately, just good for practice.

[edit]
If you want to brush up again on your Japanese, work through this website
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/index.html#contents

It's really good and of course free!

[edit 2]

If you hover your mouse over the kanji it pops up in kana and translation too. Very handy.

Very interesting info thanks people! It's not for converting one of my Bonus games, it's for my new game which has dialogs that pop up with a reasonable amount of text in them. Perhaps even so I could do a minimal char set like ENAY said.

The only thing is, if you let the user enter their name, I guess you have to have the full char set?

Why do you need Japanese in your new game anyway?

It's being localised in several languages and it will also be sold in Japan.

Can just force them to use kana/alphanumeric only for name input, barely any Japanese names use kanji unless they're of a higher status within the community iirc, and most games with limited input (re: DS) just use the kana syllablaries, so I'm assuming it's alright.

You know, this thread gotten me curious now, how the heck does Blitz handle (3d or Max, whichever) non-direct foreign input anyhow?
(some of my games require my IME control panel to hover over the graphical display to see what I'm typing prior to accepting it and sending)

>barely any Japanese names use kanji unless they're of a higher status within the community

This might have been true ten or twelve years ago. Nowadays Kanji is more common. The last time we did a game purely in kana was 1991ish (Solstice II). Since then Kanji has been required, certainly in my experience.

For name entry very few games use kanji, it's usually just katakana and hiragana, but a lot just use English alphabet. Especially in the case of highscore tables. It's still the usual 3 initials. I've only come across 1 game that allowed you to use input your name in kanji.

And yes it is becoming more common and 'cool' to only spell your name phonetically. In Chinese there is no shorthand phonetic pronunciation, however there is a shorthand style of writing which significantly increases writing speed by having fewer strokes. (hand written only)

Sorry we're talking about input. Ignore me.

No, do go on John :) What platform was Solstice II on? A lot of the old handhelds such as the original Gameboy/Gamegear or really low resolution computer screens etc never used Kanji because the screen resolution was never good enough to see enough detail and get enough pixels to display the complexity. Was your game on a hand held?

> You know, this thread gotten me curious now, how
> the heck does Blitz handle (3d or Max, whichever)
> non-direct foreign input anyhow?

Outside of European languages I don't think it's possible. If you copy and paste into the IDE they come up as ?'s and if you try to print them out them come out as squares. You have to write your own text stream I'm afraid.

So you think I can get away with English alphabet for name input but kana or kanji for display text?

Solstice II was SNES (or Super Famicom seeing it was a Japanese title).

Grey, A lot of games seem to allow roman, hiragana & katakana. Just 3 switchable onscreen keyboards.

youch, three keyboards!

> youch, three keyboards!

It's much easier than you think, don't worry about that now though, get your game finished first. :)

yeah it's if I should be writing the text stuff any different so I don't need to rewrite later...oh well, yeah I'll get the game finished and if it's bitchin' I'll ask for more payment :-)

As long as you have your text strings for all your languages in a text file/data lines that can be read in at runtime you'll be fine. You won't need to rewrite anything. Just make a new fontmap (or two) and call a separate draw text function (that does Japanese only) and append that into your code
eg summat like this.

Function RenderFont(language=English)

Select language
case Japanese
DrawJapaneseFont(blah blah,x,y)
default
DrawEnglishFont(blah blah,x,y)
end select

If you're really stuck though, I'll give you some pointers when you need help later, I have lots of Japanese functions for various things. But for now FINISH YOUR GAME ;)

Thanks. I'llfinish the game don't worry, it's my 5th and it's a contract job.

Mind sharing these at one point or another? Wouldn't mind possibly having functions that emulate the IME panel to allow changing input style the standard way.

Perhaps one day I might, for the moment my functions are a bit scrappily intertwined in my game's code and not really useful o anyone, plus after writing a Russian keyboard mapper I have a much better idea of how to how to improve and make a better Japanese one.

What'd be nice would be a:-

string = JapaneseGetKey()

One day when I have a spare moment.