I have a question about localizations and cart memory.

[Tallgeese]

I'm just curious if, as a general rule, the combined total cartridge memory use of Japanese fonts and Japanese scripts is larger than the combined total of English font and script, or vice versa.

I'm asking because there's this argument about some stuff cut out from the localization of MegaMan Battle Network 5. I took a look at the Japanese ROM, which was to fit on a 64mbit cart, and I noted that there was only seven kilobytes of free space left or so. The English version was assigned that same cart size apparently, and some minor stuff was trimmed or cut.

I'm thinking that the erased stuff was a result of cart space limitations, as again, there was only 7 KB of free space left on the cart. I'm curious if I have a good chance of being correct.

[Lord Alpha]

I'm by no means a rom hacker or translator so take the following with a grane of salt.

I believe that the total usage of cart space for the Japanese language and neccasary fonts is much less than that of other Roman languages because in Japanese one character can stand for more than one word

Well, Square did localize FF7's 超究武神覇斬 (chokyuubushinhazan - 'Super Ultimate War God Champion Slash') in a mere "omnislash".

...as an example.

Is this what you mean?

[Gigafreak]

Japanese has a much bigger alphabet + Kanji set, but the actual script should be shorter than Enlglish, because there are generally far fewer letters to a word.

I'm no hacker either, but from what I've heard about text compression in hacking ("This water is cold" has more letters than "Jeez, frigid water" but takes less space because all four words in the former phrase are common), Japanese should be more disk-space friendly than English. Also, possibly because homophones in Japanese are spelled the same, but homophones in English usually aren't.

Then again, Capcom is not known for spectacular translations, so maybe it's just because they're translating noobs; either they didn't know enough English to include the cut things, or they couldn't compress the script enough.
("What a polite young man she was!" -Battle Network 4) ...Never let a noob touch a dev kit.

Anyone able to confirm or refute any of this?

[Tallgeese]

Similar, yes. Thank you both, I'm just hoping for a bit of a deeper explanation now.

[Louis Cypher]

Generally speaking, in my experience the Japanese and English language use approximately the same number of syllables to express any given idea or sentence (Tomato, feel free to correct me on this if I'm wrong!) However, given that in Japanese each character is representative of at least one syllable (whereas in English each letter is representative of a single sound, where multiple letters must be put together to produce a single syllable) the result is that English scripts generally occupy at least twice the number of raw characters as their Japanese counterparts. Depending on how the writer chooses to portray each character's personality quirks which may not be evident in simple Japanese text, the resulting English script can appear even larger.

Do note that this does not necessarily apply to actual physical data space restrictions, especially for newer systems and newer games. If a game stores its text in plain SJIS with support for half-width, 7-bit ASCII, the scripts may well appear approximately the same size, as a single Japanese character would take up twice the amount of actual data space as a single roman letter. And of course, clever programmers can implement various compression techinques to drastically reduce the amount of physical space any set of data occupies.

In menus, however, we're often forced to compensate somehow for the lack of available screenspace, and no matter how much we compress the text it'll always appear the same size on the screen. Variable-width fonts can sometimes help in this respect but are not always a reasonable solution (especially when dealing with 8x8 text); in this case, menu expansion is often attempted, rearrangement of the stuff on the screen can help, sometimes even ASM hacks to display half the number of items/spells/whatever on a line in inventories can be done to increase the number of displaying characters per object.

For what it's worth, you appear to be under the misconception that font size has anything to do with text volume. It does not. Variable-width fonts are prized almost entirely for their cosmetic value and are in very few cases absolutely necessary.

[Tallgeese]

Actually, I was under the impression that:

A: Each character used in the game is stored in something similar in effect to a font file in Windows, and that since Japanese has more characters, such a thing would take up more memory in that language.

B: An English script takes up more memory than a Japanese script as a general rule, compression and all.

Nothing about screen space, heh. I'm having a bit of trouble expressing myself. I'm just wondering if the above are correct, and when combined which takes up more memory.

But anyway, are you saying that an English script uses up similar amounts of memory as a Japanese script?

[Tomato]

Gid: That sounds about right, though it really depends on the kind of text, of course, kanji-heavy stuff is crazy, like that omnislash example. But your numbers are pretty good.

Whenever I get asked for a word count quote/price quote for a game translation, I generally calculate using the ratio 2.5 words per Japanese character. I did lots of analysis to get that number, but that should give people a general idea of japanese-to-english script sizes. In terms of actual storage size, uncompressed, a proper English translation would be quite a bit bigger than the Japanese counterpart

Also somebody should make a page about this with screenshot examples, because I run into this question once every month or two

[Nightcrawler]

Actually, I was under the impression that:

A: Each character used in the game is stored in something similar in effect to a font file in Windows, and that since Japanese has more characters, such a thing would take up more memory in that language.

Correct in general. An English font in an SNES only needs your uppercase and lowecaset letters, numbers, and
punctuation/symbols. We're talking maybe 70 characters total.

Japanese games can contain over 1000 Kanji plus a full set of hiragana and katakana. That's way more than any English game.

Old NES games however did not have Kanji, and therefore took up much less space. They could get close to an English font in terms of space, but still take up more.

B: An English script takes up more memory than a Japanese script as a general rule, compression and all.

Nothing about screen space, heh. I'm having a bit of trouble expressing myself. I'm just wondering if the above are correct, and when combined which takes up more memory.

But anyway, are you saying that an English script uses up similar amounts of memory as a Japanese script?

Gideon pretty much got it all for the script. It really depends on how the script is encoded... S-JIS or custom format etc... In most cases, the Japanese script takes up less space. It is however possible that they can take up a similar amount of space.

There's just alot of variables that go into all this. There's no real definitive answer. If I had to give my opinion, I would say more cases than not, all things combined, the Japanese takes up less space than equivalant English.

[Lord Alpha]

@Nightcrawler:

So the Japanese have 3 written languages? (hirgana, takana and kanji)?

Can you provide links/info as to what the differences are and why all three of them are used?

[LobStar]

not really languages, just character sets.
Standard uses are:
Katakana - Used for names/foreign items/etc
Hiragana - Native Japanese words, names, etc
Kanji - Compounds of commonly used words to help identify what you mean when you speak a word. For example, the japanese word for a frog is kaeru, kaerimasu is to return to [location such as home]. You can distinguish between these meaning by using different kanji, even though they are pronounced the same.

Katakana is usally simplistic and stick-like while hiranagan is more elegant and round. Kanji is just complex, you'll know it if you see it .

Want to learn to read Katakana/Hiragana? I wrote a program to teach, but youll need to run it through wine for now:
http://topping.zophar.net
click news, grab the kana teacher.

[Nightcrawler]

@Nightcrawler:

So the Japanese have 3 written languages? (hirgana, takana and kanji)?

Can you provide links/info as to what the differences are and why all three of them are used?

Wikipedia my friend. Look up hiragana/katakana/kanji and you'll find a good deal of info.

[Tallgeese]

Thank you very much gentlemen. At least now I know I'm not talking completely out my ass, hehe.

*Insert THE MORE YOU KNOW image here*

[LobStar]

Thank you very much gentlemen. At least now I know I'm not talking completely out my ass, hehe.

*Insert THE MORE YOU KNOW image here*

[Gigafreak]

not really languages, just character sets.
Standard uses are:
Katakana - Used for names/foreign items/etc
Hiragana - Native Japanese words, names, etc
Kanji - Compounds of commonly used words to help identify what you mean when you speak a word. For example, the japanese word for a frog is kaeru, kaerimasu is to return to [location such as home]. You can distinguish between these meaning by using different kanji, even though they are pronounced the same.

Katakana is usally simplistic and stick-like while hiranagan is more elegant and round. Kanji is just complex, you'll know it if you see it .

Want to learn to read Katakana/Hiragana? I wrote a program to teach, but youll need to run it through wine for now:
http://topping.zophar.net
click news, grab the kana teacher.

Erm, I think you forgot to specify that
1) Katakana and Hirigana are phonetic alphabets: one symbol for one syllable
2) Katakana is also used for sound effects
and
3) Kanji are the "Chinese characters" that each stand for a different word. When combined, they can form compound words; an example would be [Omizu (flood) = O (big) + Mizu (water)].

Therefore there are usually multiple symbols of Katakana or Hirigana in a foreign or native word (respectively) but a Kanji can stand alone as its own word.

It's possible to communicate in written Japanese using only Hirigana or only Kanji, but the former method makes one look uneducated while the latter method takes a lot more memorization. (Kanji-only writing, however, allows a Japanese person to communicate fairly easily with Chinese people.) Thus, written Japanese is often composed of several words spelled in Hirigana, with an occasional Kanji or compound word for clarity and brevity.

[grinvader]

It's possible to communicate in written Japanese using only Hirigana or only Kanji

No. Japanese *require* hiraganas for grammatical structures. Once the context is set, there are only so many stuff you can say in a kanji or two about it, then you usually add a new element in the context, and you need hiras for that.
Full kanji lines are a big hint that what you're reading is chinese, not japanese.

Thus, written Japanese is often composed of several words spelled in Hirigana, with an occasional Kanji or compound word for clarity and brevity.

Depends who the text is targetting.
Kid books, teenager mangas and tao philosophy essays aren't gonna have the same kanji ratio, and the latter may use some really obscure kanjis used less than 0.1% of the time.

[Gigafreak]

It's possible to communicate in written Japanese using only Hirigana or only Kanji

No. Japanese *require* hiraganas for grammatical structures. Once the context is set, there are only so many stuff you can say in a kanji or two about it, then you usually add a new element in the context, and you need hiras for that.

Hrmm. Didn't know that. Makes sense when I think about it, though, since I remember Japanese having word particles that, as you said, have a grammatical role (such as the adjective/noun and possessive modifier "no").

Then again, I only said it was possible for one to communicate that way. I didn't say that one would be particularly well understood, or be able to say much. <.< >.> </Excuse_Pulled_Out_Of_Ass>

Thus, written Japanese is often composed of several words spelled in Hirigana, with an occasional Kanji or compound word for clarity and brevity.

Depends who the text is targetting.
Kid books, teenager mangas and tao philosophy essays aren't gonna have the same kanji ratio, and the latter may use some really obscure kanjis used less than 0.1% of the time.

Naturally. Kid books, when they include Kanji, usually have those Kanji spelled out in Hirigana nearby, because kids don't necessarily know the symbol for "woods" or "dog." More formally written works have more Kanji in them, of gradually increasing obscurity, in a manner similar to the way one uses longer and less commonly known words when composing an essay on such topics as antidisestablishmentarianism or hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia... compared to, say, The Puppy Who Lost Its Way. (I think.)

Damn, that was an unnecessarily long sentence.

...Now that I think about it... Does this mean that Kanji are basically Japan's version of long words?
...And am I even supposed to be capitalizing "Kanji?"

[LobStar]

intepret it how you want, those words spelled in hiragana for the kids are known as furigana (oh god how I LOVE them lol), but for the "big words", you honestly don't think iku
hiragana: いく
kanji compound: 行く
is a "big word" do you? It's used to seperate itself from other portions of the sentence so its easier to read (yeah, weird excuse eh?) especially since japanese words have alot of multiple meanings, it really helps when you use the kanji to identify which meaning you want to use.

[Gigafreak]

Semantics have bit me in the arse...

I meant that Japanese's kanji are similar to big words in English. I did not mean that kanji are big words in Japanese, nor that a hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobic person would have an aversion to kanji.
"Blaze" or "flame" are a bit longer than just "fire," for example, and you wouldn't expect the average four-year-old to know what a "conflagration" is. With Japanese, it takes a few more strokes of a pen or brush to write out the kanji for "bento" (Lunch) than to spell it in hiragana, and the average four-year-old might know the hiragana, but not the kanji. (Please excuse my inability to type kanji or kana; I'm working with an actual book rather than a website kanji dictionary.) Not a very good example, but I tried to find a word that a four-year-old might know how to pronounce (and therefore spell) but might not know the kanji for.

I think I learned more in this conversation than in elementary school...