It was back in the early 90s, a time when there was no internet, no email, no Excel, no text files, no TrueType fonts—nothing of what we have today.
I had to come up with a solution to deliver all the text data to the developer in Hungary (Novotrade), where no one spoke Japanese.
First, I created bitmap images of all the hiragana and katakana characters, as well as commas, periods, exclamation points, question marks, and two types of overstrikes (two dots/circles), something like this:
・・・■■■・・・・・・・・・・
・・・・■■・・■■■・・・・・
■■■■■■■■■■■・・・・・
・■■■■■■■■・・・・・・・
・・・・■■・・・・・・・・・・
・・・・■■・■■・・・・・・・
・・・■■■■■■■■■・・・・
・・■■■■■■■■■■■・・・
・■■・■■・■■・・■■■・・
・■■・■■・■■・・・■■・・
■■・・■■■■・・・・■■■・
■■・・・■■・・・・・■■■・
■■・・■■■■・・・・■■・・
■■■■■・■■・・・■■・・・
・■■■・・・・・・■■・・・・
・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・
I then printed all characters page by page and FAXED nearly 100 pages to the developer, and their artist converted them into nicely shaded Japanese fonts.
Each character was assigned a code based on rules such as:
H for hiragana, K for katakana
01, 02, 03, 04, 05 for vowel rows
A, K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W for consonant columns
d for overstriking dots, c for overstriking circles
sp for space
(Note: I might not remember all the rules perfectly now, lol.)
For example, the phrase "こんにちは" should be converted to something like:
H05K, H05W, H02N, H02T, H01H
The developer sent me all the in-game dialogues via fax. I translated them and assigned each string a number for easy reference, instead of saying something like "the third window of the second dolphin in stage 2."
Now here's the best part: once I finished translating all the dialogues, I typed them into a word processing program (like an early version of WordPad), then converted each letter to its corresponding code, character by character.
I printed all of this out and faxed dozens of pages to the developer, who then had to convert them back into dialogue data.
To my surprise, the system we created was quite robust. There were only a few text-related bugs, mostly caused by my typos.
I still work in game localization. It feels like we were in the stone age compared to today's methods, but I still cherish those moments.