As a proof of concept, I localized two Japanese trading cards from the Fire Emblem Cipher series into English. This series has no official English localization, and unfortunately is no longer producing new cards as of 2020. However, I am a big fan of the art and the characters in the games related to this card series, especially the ones that I chose to edit.

First, you can see a quick video just below about the general process I took. Please enjoy.

Starting Out

Continuing on in more detail, here are the assets that I began this project with. First, the original Japanese cards, and second, textless versions of the cards.

The Process

This project was done entirely in Photoshop. Initially, I made three layers for both projects:

Because the Azura textless card had a logo that couldn’t be covered up with the card frame, I used the content-aware fill to eliminate the text, and then painted over the spots left behind.

I also had to extend the left side of the card to paint over the frame that was left behind on the textless image. The eyedropper, brush, and mixer brush tools were especially helpful for this part of the project. The most challenging yet fun part of this was drawing the left half of the cherry blossom on the upper left.

Here is what the image looks like without the text, and edited:

I translated the text and inserted it on its own layer, moving the letters around to their general places.

Next, had to cover up the Japanese text by taking solid colors from the image and layering them over the characters.

Then, I carefully selected each section of text to decide on fonts, sizes, strokes, and placement. For the Ike card, I also had to create text boxes and layer and place them to match the card frame.

Here are the finished products:

Takeaways

All-in-all, I thought that this project was very eye-opening and a real test of proficiency with Photoshop. I had to think of ways to appeal to English-language readers while staying as loyal to the original assets as possible. Some text had to be moved to accommodate images or shapes that had to be enlarged to moved as well, but overall, I am very satisfied with the layouts of these cards.

As this project was done all by myself, in the future I would enjoy having another person perform a quality check. At the end of this project and looking at my final assets, I can see several aspects that I would change; I would avoid crashing, draw a bit more neatly, and smooth out text backgrounds better where I had to cover up Japanese text.

Still, I am quite pleased with how this project turned out. It was quite the rewarding feeling when the elements all finally came together to form the final finished products.

Here are side-by-side comparisons:

Thank you very much for reading. If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to reach out to me.

If you are curious about other projects of similar nature, please feel free to download and view the following files, which all focus on localizing assets into foreign languages. Please note that the emphasis on these projects was to maintain visual consistency, and that accurate translation was not a priority.

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