Tex Murphy - The Translation Project

I wrote a post about this in the Support forum, but I got no answer. Maybe I need to rephrase it.

There's no fan base for Tex Murphy games in the territories where the games were not translated. In Spain, a country where adventure games are still quite strong (Runaway 2 is a good example), only Under a Killing Moon got a Spanish version, and then the next installments died a slow death (yes, the fact is nobody played The Pandora Directive!). If a new game were to be made, putting 'A Tex Murphy Game' on the cover would be meaningless for those audiences.

A lot of effort is being made to ensure these games can still be played in XP... but why can't we try to make the Tex Murphy series available to new fans? Providing those 'missing' translations would help expand the community significantly.

Are you willing to help?
Good point. It'd be great if everyone got a chance to play such wonderful games.
Unfortunately I doubt I could be of help. I only know English (looong forgotten the French I learned at school of course). I'm also not sure how you would add subtitles or change the text. I know theres a program for extracting resources from Overseer (dont know aboutothers) but adding subtitles would require I guess further access. Maybe you could ask the anime game fansub community.
Also how would it be distributed? A re-release of any of the games is sadly unlikely right now due to no backing/support. You could however perhaps release some kind of subtitle/translation patch. In which case they'd just ened to obtain a copy and then run the patch. You'd have to do a bit of promoting legwork though tog et the word out. I'm sure I or someone else could setup a simple webpage for it if it came to realisation. I know of a group that does such things actually for visual novels such as this one:
http://planetarian.insani.org/
No idea how they do it though.
(Ruri_Ayanami from the old Tex Murphy ezboard).
"I don't believe in intuition, don't know why... just a feeling." - Tex Murphy
I'll address your points:

LANGUAGES: Obviously, native translators are needed for this. I'm a professional videogame translator so I can handle the Spanish version. If a French translation is needed (I don't know if there's one already), then a French translator should do it.

SUBTITLES: All the CD-ROM era Tex games have full subtitles built in. The only thing you have to do is substituting the original subtitle file in each game with a translated file. My problem is I can't run the game if it detects the files have been modified. The files carrying the bulk of the text are CHARCODE.AP (The Pandora Directive) and CHAR.LS (Overseer). I'll be able to start translating as soon as I find a way to make the program accept modified files.

HOW TO RUN THE TRANSLATION: First you get the game (through eBay or other means), then you copy the translated files in the game install directory. I don't know if a patch will be needed, but it's probably as simple as that.

DISTRIBUTION: Any self-respecting adventure gaming site would accept to host those small translation files. I'm pretty sure the Spanish site hosting the translation file for UAKM will probably welcome any new translations. P2P file-sharing programs are also useful to distribute this kind of files.
Well, I can help translate. I know every language but Greek.

(someone says: "But the games are in English!?!")

Well, it's all Greek to me! :D
Never too late for coffee, never too early for beer.
Is this thread completely forsaken?
No one cares. Too much effort, I guess.

I offered my help two years ago and nobody replied. Since then, I was hired by Nintendo and I've been working steadily there in Animal Crossing (if you played it in Spanish you read my text!) and a few Pokémon titles. I just completed the translation for "Rhythm Paradise" (the European release of "Rhythm Heaven"), and I'm very proud of it.
No, pardon me, I'm Russian myself and I have pretty scarce knowlegde of Spanish :-) And I don't spend that much time playing games these days. However Pandora Directive was my very first computer game so I thought I could give it a go and translate it into Russian. I'm surprised to know that no one actually did it.
Danda, have you at least been able to figure out the way to make the game accept the translated files?
I know very little about how to deal with the files and other technical stuff, or I would have tried to do something myself already. Sorry! :(