>>33031468Actually a lot of it does have to be re-engineered. It's not as simple as just taking all of the text in the game in an Excel spreadsheet and translating it one at a time, though that's how it begins.
Games don't just load text in paragraphs when they need them, they're printed as individual strings and often reference values (player names, NPC names, item names, locations, etc) so that they can be easily changed without having to go and change all your text strings every time you alter the name of something or switch around the order of things in the game.
This means a sentence that ultimately reads "You need to get the Magic Flute from Bagu to open the way to Death Mountain" would essentially be really saying "You need to get the <item001> from <npc002> to open the way to <map003>". This also works to generate generic messages like "You got 10 Rupees!", "You got the Magic Flute!" or "Link took 15 damage!" where the numbers and items can be different.
Problem is Japanese has very different grammar and a very different character set from English. So not only do you need to completely reformat and change the text system just to be able to fit on the screen, but you need to have coding in place to determine if a reference word's value starts with a vowel and whether to put "a" or "an" there among other grammatical things.
When you don't do this stuff and just get monkeys to translate the game off a spreadsheet, you end up with stinted and strange translations that we had on the NES days and of course in the original Pokemon games where text is crammed into tiny boxes, grammatically completely fucked, referenced values are all in caps, etc.
All this and the localizations for most games are on a shoestring budget of like five people.
