Before you get too excited: the translation is not done. Sorry! This announcement will cover some good and bad things, but in the end, what's happening is a very good thing for the translation project.
Most of you probably know about our Do It Yourself Devotion announcement in which we declared that we had begun work on our own translation of Mother 3. Most of you probably also realize that a team at Mother3.org was working on the same thing (and had been, since the game was released).
Although we started our own separate team for a lot of reasons, the Mother3.org team has gone through a lot of changes recently. And so, I'm proud to announce that our team (Gideon of Aeon Genesis, demi of Neo Demiforce, and Tomato) has joined forces with Jeffman, sblur, and Doctor Fedora (glescoe) to form a new, unified translation team :D
This new team isn't related to Mother3.org, but at the same time its not the 'Starmen.Net Translation' either. It's simply the Mother 3 Fan Translation -- a group of hackers and translators who love EarthBound and are willing to step in where Nintendo has continuously failed its fans.
The not-so-good news is that the translation isn't nearly as far along as many people seem to believe. sblur has made good progress on the hacking, and many of the 'small things' like item names, descriptions, menus, etc. have been carefully translated by Doctor Fedora. Unfortunately, even with our combined translations, we still haven't made huge amounts of progress on the meat of the translation -- the game dialogue.
We're hoping that this announcement will be a turning point for the project, and that this new team will be able to collaborate and challenge each other to get the work done as quickly and accurately as possible. It will be nice to have one unified translation sometime soon, rather than two different translations in the year 20X6 ;)
As far as news/updates go, we're going to be 'opening up' a lot more and probably posting an occasional screenshot or progress indicator (kinda like sblur and Jeffman have been doing recently), although the amount and nature of information posted will be up to the team. For the time being, all updates will happen here on Starmen.Net. We'll have a small site dedicated to the translation soon.
To help fend off the huge wall of people whose only concern is playing a completed translation, ROFISH helped me throw together a quick mailing list. Drop your name in this hat and you'll get one email when the translation is done. After that you'll never get another email again, and your email will not be given to anyone else.
While we're on the subject, I'd also like to make one thing very clear: our team has agreed that this translation project will come to a full stop if/when we hear that Nintendo has chosen to pursue an official translation of the game. Our only goal is to get MOTHER 3 in the hands of the fans.
