Aaron

Hello everyone, Aaron here. Being the only person on the team who doesn't know the slightest bit about the Japanese language, it's my job to work on hacking the game to fit our needs. Recently we've been making a lot of progress on the translation patch as a whole, and I'm here to talk about that now.

As many of our fans have noticed, we reached a significant milestone a few days ago: the main story is now 100% translated! Though this is only the initial translation phase, things have been proceeding very smoothly thanks to the tireless efforts of our translators. Congratulations to Ruta for working especially hard in bringing the Story bar to completion!

There has also been a lot of progress made on the hacking front as well; we're able to edit and test the translation in real time using wireless streaming, and we have the beginnings of a custom subtitle system in place. Those who have been following our Twitter account may have noticed that we've released a few screenshots showing off the patch in action.

As a final note I'd like to revise Tempus' previous announcement and let everyone know that we plan on investigating the possibility of a Tales of Graces F PS3 translation patch. With the recent release of the PSGroove exploit, it is now possible to run homebrew on the PlayStation 3. We can't say yet when it will be done, if at all, but I can tell you that we hope to start work on "R3volution" very soon.

Tempus

As of the next hourly update, if everything goes well, we should have a new bar on the right side of the page - 'Menu'. This bar represents all the things we hadn't added into the bars before. This includes items, artes, titles, menu text of all kinds, and other things. Miscellaneous also received a small upgrade, and so its bar will shrink.

Along with the new bars, we've also made several small strides in patching, hacking, and graphics. This includes a new font from PacoChan, the inclusion in game of several tough files which had to have unique properties applied, better patching, the menu images, and a few other small things.

As a final note about Tales of Graces F, we do not intend to halt translation unless the PS3 version is announced for English localization. We're rather sad that Namco has decided upon this course of action, but there isn't much we can do about it. It is impossible to move this translation to the PS3 version, so everyone will just have to be content with the Wii!

Ruta

Hi, I'm Ruta, one of the main translators for the project. I wish I could take credit for the bars moving as much as they have been, but it’s really thanks to Tempus’ new mass-replace tool. I’ll try to clear a few things up on how these bars work, and how the mass-replace works.

Basically, this game breaks up each event into its own separate file. Each file has a set of entries. The number of entries, and how many are translated, are how the progress bars are generated. However, each event file in the same zone starts off with about 5-20 entries that are exactly the same. We translators had been waiting on translating these until we had a mass search and replace tool for entries, which Tempus has now kindly provided. Now that Tempus, I, and others have replaced the majority those repetitive entries, you can expect the progress bars to stabilise. I would like to point out that I feel the current status is more accurate to where the translation stands.

For those of you wondering what each bar covers, story is all voiced events that (mostly) can’t be avoided. Sub-events are events that you get by doing side quests, or unvoiced events. Skits and NPC should be obvious for anyone who has played a Tales game. Miscellaneous covers stuff like names of characters and NPCs, instructions on where to go, action descriptions, and system messages. There is no bar yet to show menu translation, including item and arte names and descriptions, nor do we have skit names reported. Additionally, Tales of Graces has a DS game included, and we haven’t included that on the site yet either. I hope that clears up a few questions and concerns I’ve heard about the bars!

Tempus

Thanks to the tireless and fruitful efforts of Aaron, the progress bars on the right of the screen will now be refreshed hourly. What does this mean? This means that any time you load the site, you can be sure that you're getting the very latest progress report and the very latest info. It also means that for those of you who are so inclinded, you can refresh every hour to see if we've done anything, like some sort of creepy stalker periodically checking the video tapes from the camera attached to the binoculars.

While you shouldn't expect us all to be working every hour of every day, we hope that you'll pop in occasionally and follow our progress. Other ways you can keep in touch include Twitter, the forums, or our Live Chat on IRC, available from the link to the right or at #Graces on irc.freenode.net. In addition to following along, we encourage interested translators or reverse engineers to take a look and lend a hand.

Tempus

The Tales of Graces Fan Translation website is now open for business. For those of you viewing us in Firefox, welcome. For those of you viewing us in Safari or Chrome, enjoy the spiffy animations. For those of you using Internet Explorer, my condolences.

On this site, you'll find information on the progress of the patch, the occasional news post, and a Live Chat feature where you can chat with the developers. The progress bars should be updated fairly frequently, and eventually will be fully automated and up-to-the-minute.

The Tales of Graces Translation patch itself is led by Tempus and Aaron of the Fatal Frame 4 Translation Team. It is planned to use the Riivolution system, and to follow a strict localization policy that adheres to a professional style. We hope that you all look forward to the completion of this patch.