Tutorial: Translating Items and Enemies

Translating Items and Enemies

This is probably one of the simplest steps! All you have to do is edit:

• enemy_configuration_table.yml
• item_configuration_table.yml

Simple, right!

Enemy Configuration Table

This file contains information about all the enemies. Each enemy is represented by a number value, followed by all their attributes, such as Name, their Vulnerabilities, Item dropped, etc.

For a translation, there are only TWO attributes you need to change for an enemy:

• Name
• Gender

BUT WAIT?! Why would I change an enemy's gender?!

In English, when you use an article to refer to someone or something, you might use something like 'the' or 'a'. Articles in English do not reflect gender. But in other languages, articles can.

If your language DOES reflect gender in an article, then I would change the gender of the enemy to match what an article would indicate. For most enemies that are people, this will likely be the same gender as the individual. But with a lot of the animal, robot, or even abstract enemies, the gender will depend on the NAME. For example, in Portuguese, if I'm referring to a Coil Snake (which is called a Cobra Espiral), the name Cobra Espiral is feminine, and so I set the gender for the Coil Snake to be female. If your language also has neutral reflection in articles or verbs or any other type of word, you can use that as well.

EarthBound supports three gender options:

• male
• female
• neutral

In my translation, since Portuguese doesn't need the neutral form, I used neutral to indicate that the enemy's name is a proper noun. This allows me to provide options in the text to NOT include an article when referring to the enemy.