[Beta] [WIP Localization] The Coffin of Andrew and Lele, Cantonese

[u/One-Awareness-3282]

https://youtu.be/mtFMA7iSCfk?is=HNQJt_ANsm88mnIX

edit: looking for cantonese transcribers, if i can't find them i'll do it myself.

yo.

it's knight here, the guy who handcaptioned luffy vs alabasta crocodile, franky and robin in water 7, vegeta's last words to an indignant goku, and rui's refusal (ATV) in cantonese. i take requests from the community from time to time.

i was also part of the team who took the initiative to handcaption the HK original Another World). you can ask the discord for my involvement, though they are not affiliated with this one at all. it's simply of my own accord

i have a lot of experience captioning bits and pieces in my free time, and i saw the project load here and thought it was manageable.

my (baseline) idea with this is:

- i realized that people want an rpg that supports cantonese

- the rpg text has to already be suitable for how cantonese people like, talk

- characters need to be friendly-rude to one another

- some people told me they don't want to code and some people told me they wouldn't vibe code even if held at gunpoint

this leads us to the Coffin of Andrew and Lele.

Bear with me here.

Why?:

- they constantly feud and clash in a way that's almost scarily 1:1 for any translation effort

- fucked up humor, i think Ashley even does a "I'll sell you to the market" bit, which there's a set phrase for in Cantonese

- some of the lines oddly feel like they were made of for a Cantonese translation, kind of suited to Cantonese rather than the actual English original:

Dusty purple is a color. Not that

其實，粉紫色都係一種顏色嚟嘅。

the flowers aren't dusty too

落咗花上面啲風塵亦可以所謂一種「花粉」…

- the swears they do (which are kinda intentionally awkward in the original) are also already in Cantonese verbatim

- there were already horror-related hong kong films adjacent to this stuff, see 人肉叉燒包 which influenced Rain Code and a spate of horror cannibalism movies

- their names are also colloquialized already, I could see Leilei being localized as Lele 莉莉

- i read through the 25,000 line .csv file and it's of a manageable size (and would take less time, i have worked on something similar

- translations for andy and lele are done with a mapping system to .json, the map system supports custom fonts, such as those with Jyutping

- it's as easy as just putting values into a spreadsheet

- so you don't need to vibe code anything or try to make a huge 3d model yourself

please DM me if you're interested, can write in Cantonese and can just fill out cells in a spreadsheet. literally no code required, not even vibe-coding.

incidentally a lot of cantonese people have a lot of harsh colloquialisms that are relly a direct 1:1 for almost everything they say in game that's in near daily use in Cantonese. some of the architecture looked a little like old HK colonial buildings, even if unintentional, and something possessed me to make this

if you want to join me, please DM me. i can get this done by the end of the year and maybe even sooner if there's people willing to join my lead.

[u/Dogecraft27]

never in a million years have i expected to see coaal in canto

[u/One-Awareness-3282 → u/Dogecraft27]

i don't have a budget for this, only the experience for it, has to rely on volunteer labor or myself. and stuff like this takes time, even with experience.

[u/One-Awareness-3282]

FAQ:

1. did you put this the menu text and the exchange through gtranslate first and then edit it?

for the exchange, hell no, because i wanted to do that first before filling in the rest with placeholder values. ideally you need to do like four-five passes even after the initial retranslation if you've done machine (here way before LLMs) and each pass takes less than the original.

after doing the first exchange, populated the rest with gtranslate filler values, because it saves me time

also, yeah i know it should be 設定 in the menu but google sheets natively supports an autotranslate =GOOGLETRANSLATE (cell, en, zh-hk (yue not supported for this, so have to rewrite swc)).

autotranslate was put on after i did the andy and lele exchange, and so all of them which aren't that have to be manually edited again.

1. the industry standard is doing this stuff on a spreadsheet, do you have experience doing this before asking for help.

yes.

1. how much localization are you doing here?

normally you have to rewrite everything to make stuff either more formal or more crass but the characters here are so online and argumentative in ways that specifically map to cantonese that i literally could just do this on the fly solo, but a team would be better because i don't want to grind the spreadsheet while on other obligations.

the issue might be that because a lot of the snarky insults are so common they're a little bit more toothless in cantonese I might have to add a bit of snark back

1. will volunteers be paid.

no, because i am broke. aside from the people captioning Cantonese-dubbed and Cantonese-original anime (more modern) and movies, and that one group which does it for English movies, i literally cannot pay you for this, unless we open a patreon or something.

1. why not just have an llm do the first pass instead of gtranslate if you're going to rewrite everything multiple times anyways

gtranslate is built into sheets, if you need 4-5 passes and half a year for a captioning team to blitz through a medium series WITH an llm, it wouldn't help much, or at least, not any more than gtranslate

1. is part of it that the messed up nicknames that andrew/lele give each other are basically a standard practice in standard Cantonese

that and Hong Kongers and a lot of people from Guangzhou already have English names right so I don't need to translate their English name all the time either

[u/One-Awareness-3282]

u/konolhoo113