dragon quest monsters caravan heart readme - http://www.romhacking.net/translations/1252/

readme.txt

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 Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart                                  
 English translation                                             Copyright 2008
 Released on March 16, 2008        
 The Translation Team 
 http://kaioshin.romhacking.net   
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 1. Project Overview
 2. Instructions
 3. Project History
 4. Instructions
 5. About the Game
 6. Translation Reflections
 7. F.A.Q.
  
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 1. Project Overview
 
 Project Lead:
 KaioShin
 
 Hacking:
 KaioShin
 Kingcom
 
 Translation:
 Tom
 
 Special Thanks to:
 Djinn
 Martin Korth
 
 Beta Testing staff:
 Neil, Crysta, Pennywise, Aerdan, Simpleton, I.S.T., Djinn
 
 Thanks to:
 D, FlashPV, Gemini, labmaster, Nightcrawler,
 psxAuthor , Ryusui, ReBirFh, sunwukong 
 The #ROMHacking.net channel
 
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 2. Introduction

 After almost 2 years of labor, many ups and downs, and more than a
 good dose of stress and frustration, I'm proud to finally present a complete,
 English translation for Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart.
 
 It has been hard work, but it was also a work of dedication and love.
 The whole staff that worked on this project invested hundreds of hours upon
 hours into this game. We are proud of our work and believe that we delivered
 a quality translation that doesn't need to hide behind commercial translations.

 We hope you'll enjoy this excellent game as much as we did. Have fun!
  
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 3. Project History (Timeline)
 
 March    2006    - Project started
 May      2006    - Script dumped
 June     2006    - Tom joins the project
                  - Translation starts
 July     2006    - Script translation completed
 October  2006    - New website
 January  2007    - VWF code working
 December 2007    - Kingcom joins the project
                  - Formatting completed
                  - Script inserted
 January  2008    - Menu hacking completed
                  - Beta testing started
 March    2008    - Project completion
 
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 4. Instructions
 
 The translation is being distributed as an IPS patch. You can apply it to a
 clean ROM image of the game with an IPS patcher like Lunar IPS.
 
 If you're going to play this translation on an emulator, we recommend no$GBA.
 It's the most accurate GBA emulator and tested to work with the translation
 perfectly. You will need a working GBA BIOS image for no$GBA.
 VBA version 1.8.0beta or newer should run the game as well, but it's not
 tested. Earlier versions will have timing problems that might result in
 glitches during the game (for example a flickering world map).
 
 The game has been tested on real GBA hardware too and runs fine. Depending
 on your flashcart you might run into flickering on the world map though. At
 the time of release we haven't investigated the issue too closely yet, but it
 appears to be related to the flash card's speed. The translation has been
 tested and confirmed to work flawlessly with an EZ-Flash V 3in1 Expansion Pack.
 
 DO NOT ask us where to get the ROM or a BIOS image. You will be ignored and/or
 banned from our sites. Obtaining a ROM image without owning the original
 Japanese cartridge is illegal. If you pirate the game to use with our
 translation, the translation team can't be hold responsible for your actions.
 
 DO NOT distribute a pre-patched ROM image. DO NOT distribute our patch without
 this release note file. We worked 2 years on this project, and demand at least
 this much respect for our work. 
 
 DO NOT use our work as a base for any other works (especially new translations)
 without the translation team's consent. You can contact us through the 
 project website and request permission and we'll gladly give it.
 
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 5. About the Game
 
 Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart is the third installment in the well
 known Dragon Quest Monsters series. At the time of this translation's release,
 it's the only game in the Monsters series that didn't  get an official English
 localization.

 Caravan Heart was the very last game published by Enix themselves, right before
 they merged with Squaresoft. It's assumed that the game never saw an English
 release due to the company's restructuring at that time.
 
 Announced in 2002 simultaneously with Dragon Quest VIII, it acts as a sort of
 prequel to Dragon Quest VII. The game follows Prince Kiefer on a grand
 adventure in which he becomes the leader of a caravan. 
  
 Unlike the previous Dragon Quest Monsters games, the game isn't entirely
 focused on monsters alone. The caravan is also filled with several human party
 members, which will aid you in your quest. There are 22 different character
 classes, with completely different abilities. Together with your guard
 monsters, the game offers for a practically endless variety of possible 
 strategies and formations.
 
 The monster breeding of the previous game was reworked into monster
 reformations this time. Instead of breeding new monsters you collect hearts
 of defeated monsters and combine them to reform your monsters into new forms.
 The system offers a great deal of freedom for experimentation and collecting.
  
 With nice graphics and a classical Dragon Quest soundtrack the game offers
 everything a Dragon Quest fan could wish for. Caravan Heart has a lengthy main
 quest that will keep you busy for at least 30-40 hours. After that you'll be
 treated to a whole new quest in which you can easily spend over 200
 hours and more.
 
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 6. Translation Reflections

 I had played and beaten Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart long before I
 encountered Kaioshin's website. When I did, I knew that I had to lend a hand.
 Translating an RPG is a huge task, especially one as big as Dragon Quest.
 There seemed to be a lot of misunderstandings about this game. Most gamers
 didn't even seem to know that the title of the game was Caravan -Heart-, not
 "Caravan Hearts!" (It's a personal pet-peeve of mine!)

 When I offered my help to Kaioshin, I did it under the condition of anonymity.
 Still, I'm just an ordinary fan; I'm not involved with the industry or anything.
 (Sorry, conspiracy theorists!) My name's Tom. I've done other translation work
 under pseudonyms before, but there's no use in hiding under nicknames, really.

 To be perfectly honest, I didn't want to get involved with the "community"
 side of translating. I didn't want to have to answer to anybody, because
 any translation is bound to rub people the wrong way. I really don't like
 the bickering and nitpicking that goes on in the messageboards. I just wanted
 to get this game running in English.

 Doing this proved to be quite a difficult task. You may not realize how
 much text is in this game while you play it, but there are variations on
 practically every line spoken by the members of your caravan (depending
 on their age, gender, and job).  This means translating the same line again
 in 50 different ways... And that's only for one line! Sometimes, this felt
 like a real test of will-power. It's not all fun storyline stuff!

 A lot of sleepless nights went into this one, but fortunately I managed to
 finish it rather quickly. The side effect of translating from midnight to
 3 AM was that there were some pretty embarrassing slip-ups now and then. I have
 to thank the amazing debug team for doing such a great job not letting those
 errors slip through the cracks.

 I also want to address the issue of standardization, though. There have been so
 many changes to the Dragon Quest series throughout the years that everybody has
 a different opinion about what is the "right" way to go about translating it.
 When Dragon Quest was first introduced in America as "Dragon Warrior," it was
 full of medieval "thou hast's" and "would'st thou's"... Then it changed to
 standard American English... And lately it has changed to British English...

 We all saw monster names changed as Drakees became Drackys; Red Slimes became
 She Slimes. (Not in this version, though!) So the question arose - what standard
 should I use for this translation? The answer came from the story of the game itself.
 It blends the old with the new... The translation does the same. Many of the names
 will be familiar to fans of previous English releases from the Dragon Quest Monsters
 games. Certain other elements of the new style can be seen as well... There are also
 some unique terms and  names that haven't been seen before. The dialog is written
 in standard American English.

 I know that some people might be frustrated that they would have translated
 a certain element of the game differently, but this would be the case for
 any translation style. There will always be disagreements, but the bottom line
 is that what seemed to be a lost cause is now finally in English for you to enjoy.

 I hope that you enjoy it.

 7. Frequently Asked Questions
 
 - How did you choose the monster names?
 
 As with every Dragon Quest translation, many people will surely make a great
 fit over monster naming. Since the game was the last by Enix, we wanted it to
 have the feel of a classic Dragon Quest game. The monster names are
 therefore based on the ones used in the first 2 Dragon Quest Monsters games.
 Where names had been very obviously shortened due to space constraints we 
 retranslated them as we saw fit (You will see Bubble Slimes and not a Babbles).
 The names are not open for debate. If they are a big issue for you, end your
 pain by jumping off the next tall bridge.
 
 - The Text Speed Option is broken!
 
 No, it isn't. It doesn't affect the normal dialogs, what it adjusts is the
 speed with which the battle messages scroll automatically. If you set it to
 8, the game will wait for a button press before it shows the next message
 every time
 
 - I found a typo/grammar error.
 
 It happens. The game is huge and full of randomness. We'll never be able to
 test it 100%. We did test it to 99,99%, but we're sorry for the remaining
 0,01% regardless. Send me (KaioShin) a personal message on the
 romhacking.net message board and I'll have it fixed in case there will ever
 be a update to the patch. Make sure you know what you are talking about though.
 
 - Will there be an update patch?
 
 That depends. If a substantial number of problems are found we'll probably
 release an updated patch later on. If there are only 2 or 3 bugs found, we
 won't bother. Given the size of the game and the amount of randomness, I'd
 say it's likely there will be an update some day.
 
 - I found a place were the dialog window wouldn't disappear after the 
   dialog was finished.
 
 Yeah, we know of two places in the game with this error. It's from the original
 game. We didn't fix it, because we didn't want to decipher the whole event code
 just for these two boxes.
 
 - There was some text flickering on the skill selection screen
 
 This can happen, we are unsure about how rare/common this issue really is. Our
 VWF code is too slow in these situations, since the game redraws the whole
 text in VRAM on every single frame. The flickering occurs when the game can't
 finish drawing one frame when the next comes up. We already optimised our VWF
 code extremely well, due to the way the game works we just can't improve it
 anymore. We currently assume this issue is pretty rare.
 When we get a new idea on how to resolve this issue it might be fixed in a
 later revision of the patch.
 
 - Luin's hair changes to black when I enter certain areas

 This glitch is present in the original game.