Translating Serial Experiments Lain, the PlayStation game, into English

To make the game more widely available, because we are a group of Lain-loving fans from around the world!

We need people who can help translate the media files from Japanese to English. You don't even have to know English very well; there are native English speakers who can help proofread the translations. If you can help, this Tutorial for Translators (pdf) will give you a good overview of how to get started.

We also need mature, self-motivated individuals with time, assertiveness, and good communication skills. If you feel you could help promote the project, along with seeking out, communicating with, and managing translators, we could use you.

Please contact us for more information.

The Serial Experiments Lain video game was released for PlayStation on November 26, 1998 by Pioneer LDC, following the successful broadcast of the Serial Experiments Lain anime series in Japan from July to September 1998. Throughout the game, the player unlocks pieces of multimedia information (Lain's therapy sessions, her diary, notes of her therapist, video segments) to discover what happened to Lain. It shares the themes, atmosphere, and protagonist, but not the plot, of the anime. The game is speech-intensive and entirely in Japanese, unfortunately rendering it inaccessible for the many non-Japanese Lain fans. It has already been 10 years since the game was released, so it doesn't seem likely that Pioneer will release a translated version. Thus, to make this game available for a wider audience, we are now working on translating this game into English.

We already have all the technical means to get the media files out of the game for translation and put them back. Our idea is to use the background images displayed during the speech sequences for writing translated text on them.

There is about 5.5 hours of audio in nearly 700 files to translate.

Previous translators have finished most of the video sequences and a few speech sequences, and we are greatly indebted to them. There's still a lot of work ahead.

We still need translators. There is no deadline for applications, and any amount of help will be appreciated. The more people, the sooner we finish the project.

Current translation progress is: 15.39% (52 minutes and 23 seconds out of 340 minutes and 22 seconds).

Toss us an email at contact@psx.lain.pl.

jPSXdec, a new open source PlayStation media decoder/converter written in Java
jPSXdec blog, for more up-to-date information on jPSXdec and the translation project.
Serial Experiments Lain on Wikipedia
Serial Experiments Lain (Game) on Wikipedia