How are machine translated romhacks made?

[Beavis]

I know the use of AI is frowned upon but I'm curious about how it's done? Are there even any advantages to using ai for a translation romhack compared to doing it the traditional way?

 

[Atma]

As with a lot of things, it depends on how you use AI itself for the project.

You could ask for it to make the patch directly, script included. Entirely possible in some cases depending on how the game files are stored internally, but the quality will be sorely lacking if no proof-reading is done while comparing it to a trustworthy script.

Ideally, you'd want AI to assist you with making the tools that you'd use to insert the game text yourself and then repacking it into the game proper. That way you'd avoid years of learning to code while still guaranteeing that the final script would be something you approved.

 

[JustLooking123]

As far as i know, the hacking part (like extracting and re-inserting the texts of the game) is still done the traditional way... though AI might be used to help creating the necessary tools.
(I'm not sure how useful it might be in that area)

The main part that is done by AI is translating the text.

Actually it's nothing new... using tools such as Google Translate has been pretty common in the translation scene.

In the past, romhackers should have had to find a human translator to take care of translation, while the romhacker would focus on the hacking parts...
However, it wasn't uncommon that either the translator or romhacker would stop working on it, and the project would become dead...

What has changed now is that AI can produce a level of acceptable quality of translation... while the older tools wasn't able to do so.

Thanks to it, the bottleneck of coupling a human translator and a romhacker is lifted.
Romhackers can prepare the translation tools, and provide a bare bone translation using AI, and leave the quality work and polishing to anyone with translation skills who are able to do so.