How do they unofficially translate a compiled program from one human language to another?

Question

I have seen that some Japanese games have unofficial fan fade translations in English. I see that the Japanese lines in the program should be changed to English, and any Japanese text in the textures should be changed.

Now I’m wondering which of the tools they use to know where to look for these resources and, possibly, how to change binary and other things and still make the game work?

Answer 1

Typically, this is done using software that can extract and modify resources in an executable file and modify them in place. Depending on the specific application and / or operating system, this approach will allow you, among other things, to change the icons, menus, lines and labels on the user interface controls.

A common utility for this purpose was the Resource Hacker by Angus Johnson. However, it is no longer under active development and has not been released as an open source. Other alternatives include:

• XN Resource Editor
• Resource Hacker FX

For example, in the screenshot below, I use the Resource Hacker to change one of the dialog boxes used by 7-Zip File Manager:

The hex editor of your choice can also be used to make changes to the source binary source code, which is compiled into an executable file. This allows you to make changes to rows that were not placed in the row table for easy modification.

It is worth noting that this is a much more error-prone way to make changes. It is extremely easy to corrupt the binary by overriding the wrong sequence. Generally, you should replace the string with another string of exactly the same length.

And of course, always work on a copy of the original executable!