Guide for helping translate. Discord at https://discord.

gg/3H53guE
The basics:
It's easy to translate era games, you can open any file in any text editor and just
start doing it.
None of us know Japanese, we use machine translators like google translate to get
the meaning of the text.

Just open whatever file you want and look for PRINT statements. You'll find lines
like this:

PRINTFORML %ANAME(対象)%はスラムで売春をしているようだ

Which you can simply edit to look like this:

PRINTFORML %ANAME(対象)% turns to prostitution in the slums.

It's that simple. Most lines are easy to figure out using machine translators. And
if not, you can just skip the line.

String functions:
You can probably guess that "%ANAME(対象)%" inserts the name of the character 対象.
The Japanese text uses %ANAME()% all the time, so you'll always know which
characters are involved in a scene.
In English we also need to check the character's gender and choose between
"he/his/him" or "she/her".
So we also have %HE_SHE()%, %HIM_HER()%, and %HIS_HER()%.
Example: %ANAME(対象)% seems to be selling %HIM_HER(対象)%self in the slums
You don't need to bother with these for a character who you know has a vagina, then
they're always a she.
These functions can be capitalized too.
%HE_SHE(character)% = "he" or "she"
%HE_SHE(character,1)% = "He" or "She"
In general, pairs of percentage signs % % tell the game that you're calling a
function that will be turned into text.
If you ever need to use a percentage sign normally, write it with a backslash in
front like "I agree 100\%"
Brackets {} are also special, they convert a numeric value to text. PRINTFORM {5+5}
will display "10".
So never try to translate anything that's inside percentage signs or brackets.
Rarely you'll also find this sort of thing: \@condition?text if true#text if
false\@
For example, in an event where the player meets someone of the opposite sex , the
game might have a line like:
PRINTFORML %ANAME(MASTER)% sees someone approaching, it's a \@IS_MALE(MASTER)?
pretty woman#handsome man\@.
Leading or trailing spaces in the conditional will be erased, so I write them
without any extra spaces, for clarity.

Recommended software:
Notepad++ is good for text editing. Using cntrl+f and then "find in files" is
extremely useful when translating.
Chiitrans lite is good for getting fast machine translations of text from several
sources.
Chiitrans lite: https://mega.nz/#!qpNAXC7R!hJyxXV3umjbqP7zvxR7-
8kahaGGRrWgN_FhU7g8QBdM
ATLASv14 (dictionary used with chiitrans lite): https://mega.nz/#!zsVgxIbZ!
gAdr3d7n_rjXC-KpmgJv_7A4eRvrryESNcEAWXKljDQ
SmartGit makes it easy to use the git repository if you aren't good with git. But
it still requires some understanding of git. If you can't be bothered then you can
translate individual files and upload them to the thread or discord.
The git repository is here: https://gitgud.io/eragames

A few notes specific to eratohok:

-We've been translating almost everything in the 3rd person present tense. Don't
write "One day a girl visited your room". Write "One day, a girl visits
%ANAME(MASTER)%'s room."
-While you usually only want to touch lines that start with PRINT, there are
exceptions. For example, the options in a CALL ASK_MULTI. If you know it's
displayed on the screen, you can translate it. If you don't know, skip it.
-When the game has something like SELECTCASE RAND:20 and then 20 paragraphs of text
underneath it, you can just translate the first 10 cases and then change it to
RAND:10 for example, so that players will only see the random outcomes that are
translated.
-The game can only display 112 characters on a line. Any more and it will get split
into multiple lines, mid-word, which is hideous.
So stay below that limit and split text into more PRINTFORML statements if
necessary. Notepad++ will tell you text length if you highlight it.
When counting characters note that %ANAME(MASTER)% is a character or two longer
than the biggest character names, and %ANAME(対象)% is a character or two shorter.

The common types of print statements:

PRINT or PRINTFORM prints text, sticking it right after whatever was last printed.
PRINTL or PRINTFORML prints text and then prints a new line afterwards.
PRINTW or PRINTFORMW prints text and a new line, and also requires the player to
click to advance through it.
Example: PRINTFORM A man PRINTFORML walked into a bar, and said: PRINTFORML Ouch.
"A man walked into a bar, and said
Ouch.
"
Print statements without the "FORM" won't read string formatting like %ANAME()%. So
there's basically no reason to use them.
There's also DATAFORM and similar syntax, which basically lets you list a bunch of
lines, only one of which will be randomly chosen.

Merging in new Japanese content for eratohok:

I usually do this on a fairly regular basis, but if I'm not around then the Jap
github is here:
https://github.com/wamekukyouzin/eratohoK
Download their latest version and use KDiff3. Have it compare the previous Japanese
version that was merged, the new Japanese version, and our translated version, as A
B and C. Manually inspect all the differences.
After you do this, make sure the github commit message mentions the name of the
japanese version you just merged in.
Because of this merging process, modded code in the english version should have
clear comments explaining what was changed and why. Otherwise it's hard to know
what to do with them when they're affected by Japanese code changes.
This rule can only be broken for things that are self-contained and whose future
updates we're unliely to care about - for example, a single event, or the
description of a sex act, or the way a particular menu is spaced.