doctorfedora:

First and foremost, you should probably read Tomato’s official MOTHER 3 translation notes, because he is a consummate professional. This also, unfortunately, means that he is often too busy being professional to do write-ups on personal side projects, especially ones that are finished. I myself would love to see notes covering beyond the beginning of the game. On the other hand, his site is still awesome overall. Gotta love stuff like the Super Mario Bros. manual write-up. Fascinating stuff.

So yeah. Please allow me to lay my credentials on the table. I was the translation guy for the now-long-since-defunct mother3.org translation, which got started a good bit before Starmen.net decided to enter the game and essentially blow us the hell out of the water. Long story short, most of our team was frankly not ready for the project, though the hacking talent (Jeffman, if memory serves) turned out to be super awesome at things. I emailed the project leader at the time, volunteering “I’m majoring in Japanese here in college,” with all the linguistic skill level that that level of confidence would imply, and that was essentially enough for the project at the time. It wasn’t an especially fancy group at the time, and they were looking for pretty much any talent that could conceivably help out on basically any level.

Then Starmen.net decided it was long enough after the game’s release to safely dive in, and the projects merged, and Tomato is a way more talented translator than I am, given that he does that kind of thing professionally, like for money, to eat and pay for housing, so I basically took a back seat and watched the thing fall together, which was pretty impressive, though perhaps not so story-worthy overall (“Then the guy who is good at a thing did that thing that he’s good at, well!”). However, Tomato decided to keep a good number of the name translations/localizations¹ that I’d done prior to the merge, which I figured I should probably write about at some point. So that’s this.

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