Your First Peek at Korean Version of Wing Commander 3! (December 7, 2023)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
This week I learned that there was a fully localized South Korean release of Wing Commander 3! Which means you’re all going to have the option to play WC3 in Korean soon. French, German and Japanese are well documented but this one stayed hidden until now. Here's a quick sample!


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Original update published on December 7, 2023
 
Bandit LOAF said:
This week I learned that there was a fully localized South Korean release of Wing Commander 3! Which means you’re all going to have the option to play WC3 in Korean soon. French, German and Japanese are well documented but this one stayed hidden until now. Here's a quick sample!


--
Original update published on December 7, 2023
Click to expand...

Since Japanese and Korean localizations exist, maybe someone out there will make them for Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese separately?
 
I have Korean version of Wing Commander 3. Both the audio and subtitles are in Korean, but strangely, no Korean srt file was found when I opened any of TRE files. I'd like to extract the Korean subtitles, but I'd like to know which file they're in. Any hints?
 
CharmSeul said:
I have Korean version of Wing Commander 3. Both the audio and subtitles are in Korean, but strangely, no Korean srt file was found when I opened any of TRE files. I'd like to extract the Korean subtitles, but I'd like to know which file they're in. Any hints?
Click to expand...

Subtiles in wing commander 3 are baked into the videos themselves. If you technically savvy I can throw you code to extract them or with a copy of the localized version of the game I could extract them for you.
 
Pedro said:
Subtiles in wing commander 3 are baked into the videos themselves. If you technically savvy I can throw you code to extract them or with a copy of the localized version of the game I could extract them for you.
Click to expand...
Oh my goodness! You are a ray of hope!
I wanted to extract Korean subtitles and apply them to an HD Video Pack. However, I couldn't find the subtitles in the TRE or MVE files, which was quite frustrating.
I would be grateful if you could tell me which files to use and how to extract the code.
 
CharmSeul said:
Oh my goodness! You are a ray of hope!
I wanted to extract Korean subtitles and apply them to an HD Video Pack. However, I couldn't find the subtitles in the TRE or MVE files, which was quite frustrating.
I would be grateful if you could tell me which files to use and how to extract the code.
Click to expand...

Ok well it's super simple, once you've extracted the movies with a tool like originator you then manually parse the file. On PC you need to endian swap.

4 bytes TAG(FORM)
4 bytes FileSize
4 bytes TAG(MOVE)

while( Less Than File Size )
4 bytes TAG
4 bytes ChunkSize

if(TAG == TEXT)
Subtitle Is Here
if(TAG == BRNCH)
Beginning of a new branch (on DVD files these are all seperate files so reset time time to zero)
if(TAG == AUDI)
Time += (1.f/15.f) (Original video files run at 15fps)

DataPointer += ChunkSize
end

Easy peasy.
I assume the subtitles do show for you in the Korean version if enabled? Obviously if they aren't there it won't do you much good.
 
Pedro said:
Ok well it's super simple, once you've extracted the movies with a tool like originator you then manually parse the file. On PC you need to endian swap.

4 bytes TAG(FORM)
4 bytes FileSize
4 bytes TAG(MOVE)

while( Less Than File Size )
4 bytes TAG
4 bytes ChunkSize

if(TAG == TEXT)
Subtitle Is Here
if(TAG == BRNCH)
Beginning of a new branch (on DVD files these are all seperate files so reset time time to zero)
if(TAG == AUDI)
Time += (1.f/15.f) (Original video files run at 15fps)

DataPointer += ChunkSize
end

Easy peasy.
I assume the subtitles do show for you in the Korean version if enabled? Obviously if they aren't there it won't do you much good.
Click to expand...

Hello, Pedro.

First, regarding WC3 Korean version, all cutscene audio is recorded in Korean, and the subtitles and all game menus are also displayed in Korean.
So, I have tried extracting subtitles from .mve files with 'wctoolscmd', but only English, German, and French subtitles were extracted, not Korean.
I'm not sure if this is accurate, but I think it's because 'wctoolscmd' doesn't recognize Johab encoding.

I was frustrated, but thanks to your tip, I figured out how to parse it, and the result was successful.

Nowadays, most Korean character encodings are CP949 or UTF-8, but 30 years ago, Johab(cp1361) was used. Assuming that the Korean subtitles in WC3 cutscenes were encoded with 'Johab', I attempted to extract them using Python code, and the result was successful.

Now, I'm happy to be able to enjoy WC3 with Korean subtitles with the Mash's Enhancement Patch and ODVS's HD Video Pack applied.

Thank you. :)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Wonderful! Could you share the extracted subtitles so we can get them added to future enhancement packs?
Click to expand...
Hello, Bandit LOAF.

Here is Korean subtitle zip archive.
I've extracted the subtitles from WC3 Korean version and renamed the files to match the ODVS's HD Video Pack.
Also I made some corrections to the awkward translation, but it may not be perfect.
Anyway, I hope this helps. :)
 

Attachments

Good job!

I do want to say that if you have an actual spreadsheet with the original Korean subtitles alongside your suggested fixes I think that would be helpful for other projects, especially since translation can be a pretty subjective thing at times and there's value in having a version that's 1:1 with the original release.
 
AD said:
Good job!

I do want to say that if you have an actual spreadsheet with the original Korean subtitles alongside your suggested fixes I think that would be helpful for other projects, especially since translation can be a pretty subjective thing at times and there's value in having a version that's 1:1 with the original release.
Click to expand...
I agree.

FYI, There are actually two parts that I've corrected.
I discovered that several subtitles incorrectly translated the English word "Behemoth" into the Korean word "하마." "하마" means hippopotamus. Since "Behemoth" is awkward to translate directly into Korean, I corrected it to "베히모쓰", which is the English pronunciation.

The second part is the following line from Tolwyn's dialogue in sc_112a:
"So the base will be unable to call for help, and by the time the Kilrathi send out a ship to investigate, we shall be pulling up just outside downtown Kilrah."
This line was incorrectly translated as "capturing Kilrah's ship," so I corrected it to reflect the original meaning.

Also I'll try to organize this in a spreadsheet when I have time.
 
CharmSeul said:
I agree.

FYI, There are actually two parts that I've corrected.
I discovered that several subtitles incorrectly translated the English word "Behemoth" into the Korean word "하마." "하마" means hippopotamus. Since "Behemoth" is awkward to translate directly into Korean, I corrected it to "베히모쓰", which is the English pronunciation.

The second part is the following line from Tolwyn's dialogue in sc_112a:
"So the base will be unable to call for help, and by the time the Kilrathi send out a ship to investigate, we shall be pulling up just outside downtown Kilrah."
This line was incorrectly translated as "capturing Kilrah's ship," so I corrected it to reflect the original meaning.

Also I'll try to organize this in a spreadsheet when I have time.
Click to expand...

That's kind of a fascinating translation problem. I can see how it happened though. There's some theories that the biblical "behemoth" from the book of Job was a giant hippo, but it's definitely odd to just straight up 1:1 translate it that way, though to be fair, some Bible translations do just straight up sub in Hippo too.
 
CharmSeul said:
"하마" means hippopotamus. Since "Behemoth" is awkward to translate directly into Korean, I corrected it to "베히모쓰", which is the English pronunciation.
Click to expand...

I'm no linguist but out of curiosity I looked up a couple of Korean Bible translations to see how they handled it. There was one that definitely used the word for hippo 하마 whereas others take a similar path as you approximating the original Hebrew/English using 베헤못
 
AD said:
I'm no linguist but out of curiosity I looked up a couple of Korean Bible translations to see how they handled it. There was one that definitely used the word for hippo 하마 whereas others take a similar path as you approximating the original Hebrew/English using 베헤못
Click to expand...
I am neither a linguist nor a theologian. :)

In fact, translating English pronunciation directly into Korean isn't easy. I looked it up in an English-English dictionary and found that the pronunciation of 'Behemoth' is /bɪˈhiːmɒθ/. While not a perfect translation, it's roughly equivalent to "비히머쓰(뜨)".

I chose "베헤모쓰" because the first "e" in the word is usually pronounced as '에(e)', not '이(i)', and the 'θ' sound is a mixture of '쓰(s)' and '뜨(t)'.

Furthermore, in Korea, the Catholic and Protestant Bibles are translated by different translators. The Catholic Bible pronounces it "브헤못", while the widely used Protestant Bible(New Korean Revised Version, 1998) pronounces it "베헤못", while the Revised New Standard Version(2001) pronounces it "브헤못".

Anyway, there are many different religions in Korea and people don't really care about the pronunciation of 'Behemoth'.
 
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Tangentially related: when the game Battletech was translated into German, the licenser decided to localize all the unit names for some reason. Now there's also a vehicle called the Behemoth whose name was changed, apparently, to Koloss (Colossus). So it's something that seems to be relatively common, although I can't understand why in this case because it's not even an English word to begin with.
 
Bob McDob said:
Tangentially related: when the game Battletech was translated into German, the licenser decided to localize all the unit names for some reason. Now there's also a vehicle called the Behemoth whose name was changed, apparently, to Koloss (Colossus). So it's something that seems to be relatively common, although I can't understand why in this case because it's not even an English word to begin with.
Click to expand...

As far using Behemoth as a descriptor instead of as a proper name, calling something a behemoth in English has more or less the same meaning as Colossus, According to dictionaries the secondary definition of something that is a colossus or that you would say is colossal is "a person or thing of immense size or power" whereas somthething that is behemoth in size is "something of monstrous size, power, or appearance", so if we're just looking at names that have a relatively similar meaning then to a translator the two seem interchangeable, and it's possible Cololssus just sounds better in German
 
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