Translation Project

Translations

Text translation is dependent on the source of the text. All "server side" game text is translated on the fly, while all static text is shipped with the game files. We'll cover how they're handled below.

Static text

Static text includes all of the game files that are already stored with the game itself. These files are stored in a properietary SQEX format (ETP) and store dialog like:

• Innkeepers
• Tavern NPCs
• All in-game cutscenes
  • Major story
  • Job quests
  • Events
• Churches
• Batoen
• Sugoroku

This is not an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea of what we have access to.

A majority of these files (mostly cutscenes and certain NPCs with dialog) were initially passed through machine translation (DeepL) in order to get an immediate product out there for people to use. Our opinion is that seeing English, even if its broken, is better than not being able to understand it at all. Afterwards, we have volunteers that comb over this machine-translated text and clean it up. As we operate strictly on volunteers, we can't be too picky about how this text gets translated, so the knowledge of Japanese from these volunteers can range from nothing at all to a decent understanding. An effort is always made to re-use existing words and phrases from previous Dragon Quest titles to ensure consistency, but DQX is a big game with lots of content that has also never been seen before. Volunteers are urged to be creative and punny just like the original localizers of previous titles. We view this project as a fan translation project and not a true localization. We're just fans that enjoy the series and have wanted to play this title for a long time.

Other strings like skills, skill descriptions, items, item descriptions, gestures, etc. were all hand translated and have never been automatically passed through machine translation. Because of the limited real estate we have on screen, liberties must be taken to ensure the text fits in various-sized windows.

Server-side text

Server-side text includes all text that comes over the network. This text is not stored locally and we don't have access to this text - it's requested as you encounter the content. Today, there is no effort to crowdsource all of this text (due to the small size of the team), but server side text that you encounter is stored in a local database with both the original text and the machine-translated text. This text generally includes:

• NPC dialog
  • NPCs standing around in town
• Warp portals in town
• Items received through various systems in game
• Quest text
• "Story So Far" text

This also is not an exhaustive list, but a lot of text does fall into this category. DQX is a big game with over 10 years of content, so you can imagine the amount of text that's covered here.

All server-side text is passed through machine translation (either Google Translate or DeepL -- whatever you selected), parsed, cleaned up and written to the screen. As this text has to be sent to a third-party service to be translated, the game waits (or freezes as you have probably observed) while it waits for the text to be returned. As we don't have the text, there isn't really a better option while also keeping the text natively in the game.

Once this text has been translated, it is written to a local database on your computer within the dqxclarity folder. Encountering the same text in-game will re-use that text, saving you character count and extra calls to these third-party translation services.