Fan translation of video games
The fan translation practice grew with the rise of video game console emulation in the late 1990s.
The central focus of the fan translation community is historically of Japanese-exclusive computer and video games being made playable in English for the first time, and sometimes of games recently released in Japan that are import-worthy and are unlikely to be officially localized to English-speaking countries.
In Korea, many fan translations of games made by ELF Corporation were produced for DOS PCs, starting around 1996.
Later that summer, a user called Demi announced work on a Final Fantasy V translation and founded Multiple Demiforce.
It was eventually dropped in favor of Final Fantasy II (NES), a more manageable goal at that time.
[4] Notable fan translations include that of Mother 3,[5] Dragon Quest X, Final Fantasy II through VI, Seiken Densetsu 3, Bahamut Lagoon, Takeshi's Challenge, Clock Tower: The First Fear, Radical Dreamers, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon: Another Story, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 and The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light through The Binding Blade as well as New Mystery of the Emblem, For the Frog the Bell Tolls, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix, Front Mission: Gun Hazard, Live A Live, Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love, and Policenauts.
This is probably largely because the electronic games in question are generally not considered commercially viable in the target language, so the translation is rarely seen as a source of lost revenue.
In 2014, publisher Square Enix issued a cease and desist order to Sky, a romhacker who had completed a highly anticipated[8] fan translation of the PSP game Final Fantasy Type 0, soon after they announced an HD version of the game for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
[citation needed] A popular belief in the fan translation community is that distributing only a binary patch, which must be applied to the full, original game, is legal.
There have never been any legal cases involving fan translation issues, and such projects have been relatively widespread over the Internet for years.
In recent years, anime fansubbers have started to attract the attention of some American anime distributors; as of 2004 one manga scanlator has been handed a cease and desist by a Japanese company, but most of this attention has been restricted to polite entreaties asking fan translators to refrain from dealing with licensed material.
[11] In July 2007, RPGamer released an interview they did with Koichiro Sakamoto, a game producer from Square Enix, acknowledging fan translations: "On a similar note, we told Mr. Sakamoto that a fan translation had been done some years ago for Front Mission 1, and asked how he felt about such efforts.
They adopt many roles, acquire and put into practice not only IT skills but also linguistic and sociocultural skills, and maintain interesting conversations online with fellow gamers that lead to meaningful and situated metalinguistic discussions on language chunks and translation strategies.
