At last, the English translation patch to the PSP VN "Sora No Woto: Otome no Gojuusou" has been completed. This VN follows the main characters from the Sora No Woto anime for twelve days as they live their lives in the time-telling fortress. It occurs an indetermined amount of time after the events of the anime as their nowadays peaceful lives are shaken up when someone from Rio's past appears just as the city prepares for a festival.

For those who are more interested in the technical background, check out the source code link above for most of the tools we created to translate the VN. You can also expect a blog post on the details behind them in the nearby future.

We hang out in #okaysubs on irc.rizon.net if you'd like to get in touch.

Three years ago, in May 2013, a couple of friends on IRC were thinking about starting their own TL group. During the search for a project, the idea of translating Sora No Woto: Otome no Gojuusou was raised. As most of us liked the source material at the time, we quickly settled on this VN as the first group project.

As this project concerned a PSP VN, the first challenge was making it possible to actually edit the VN. Text hooking was not considered a viable option due to uncertainties around how text is handled internally. Furthermore, using the crude solution of text hooking would not allow the translation to be played on a PSP. We are okaysubs, and that would not be okay. Consequently, we had to reverse-engineer significant parts of the VN. To aid in this process, we recruited a few hackers to the team.

A month later, the hacking had progressed to the point where both images and script data could be decoded and edited. Over the following eight months the translation of the 16523 lines of dialogue was achieved thanks to contributions of multiple translators.

At this point, the translation was still quite crude and it was obvious that the time for editing had come. It was during this step that we realized how seriously we had underestimated how much time this project would take, as it took about 20 months (lots of slacking off included) to finish editing.

We spent the final six months of the project finalizing the details and preparing for release. First, a custom patcher was created to support some of the more complex parts of the patching process that turned out to be necessary for this VN. Second, several mistakes in the building of the translated VN that had been revealed by the completed translation were fixed. Afterwards, we engaged in several months of community-assisted quality checking to find any editing and packing mistakes that had been missed. During the last few weeks, we did a lot of final polishing work like subbing the intro movies and ensuring that the PSP shows the English UI when running the VN.

This brings us to the day of us writing this page to provide a bit of insight into what happened behind the scenes. We hope you'll be able to enjoy the results of our work!