A peek into the underground world of fan-translated games
A peek into the underground world of fan-translated games:
But then Erbrecht had an idea.
“It was actually one or two days prior when someone joined an EarthBound chatroom claiming to have a leaked copy of the Mother 3 ROM file,” he told Polygon. “I started talking to him and a couple other people from the chatroom, and eventually the idea came up to try making a translation patch. We put out a call for volunteers to help with both the translation and the programming.”
A year slipped by and Nintendo didn’t announce a localization. Erbrecht stews. A country away in Florida, in 2007, FUNimation translator Clyde Mandelin also gives up on waiting for an official version and begins setting wheels in motion to create his own localization.
Both Erbrecht and Mandelin make one thing clear: fan translations are born from passion, from an individual or group’s desire to get a Japanese game into the hands of a non-Japanese-speaking audience — an audience that, for one reason or another, would never get to experience games that get passed up for the official localization treatment. These works are more than passion projects, they are life achievements, good deeds, pro-bono work — projects created by fans purely for fans.
Mandelin — professional translator by day, fan translator by night — is part of the team that created the most well-known English translation for Mother 3. This fan translation was released publicly in October 2008 and has even caught the attention of Nintendo — most notably its American branch’s big guy himself, Reggie Fils-Aime. Mandelin and his group of EarthBound fans — a patchwork of people from different walks of life and different continents — are so deeply entrenched in their love for the Mother series that they even offered Nintendo their translation script for nothing should it make things easier for the company to localize it.
On fan translations of games.
