Hacker...?

[midorimo]

Do hackers just edit the japanese text with the translated text?

[Okami]

Do hackers just edit the japanese text with the translated text?

 

Hackers extract srcipts from VNs so translators can translate it and when they are done they put that scripts back and create a patch.

 

Sometimes they do the same with images that have text in them.

 

Thats at least a basic of what hackers do, there is sometimes more things that they do but that other things are not for all VNs but just for specific ones or for specific request from translators.

[Narcosis]

Typically, a visual novel translation requires the team to extract the data required for change (most often, scripts and graphics). Most of them are usually compiled within archive(s) (similiar to rar or zip files), with an exception that most of the times the archive format is made either specifically for the vn by the game designers, or works with specific game engines. Those archives are typically encrypted and can't just be opened or unpacked in the same manner we do with rar or zip files.

The task of a hacker is to identify the engine and find a way to "disassemble" the game into base pieces that make it; when translation is done, they need to put everything back together and make it work like it did before. In most situations, it requires reverse engineering to be done in order to understand how the file formats used by the game work and to open (unpack) the game's archives. In certain situations (if the game for example is really big and difficult to work with), hackers often also write additional programs that make the repacking or script extraction easier, or even automate the whole TL'ing process (for example, team only feeds the prepared scripts and program automatically replaces the files and repacks archives).

It works preety much the same with any other game or type of software.

[Decay]

There are also other duties to make sure the game works properly with English text. Some VN engines were never designed to properly handle English text. There is also a  lot of miscellaneous duties, like making sure word wrapping works correctly, sometimes modifying it so you can extend one line into multiple lines without a problem (English takes up more physical space than Japanese), writing simple scripts to ease translation, etc.

 

Official VN "hackers" who work for Mangagamer or JAST have it harder. They have to make sure that the games run in English applocale, which most fan TLs don't worry about (they just tell you to set your system locale to Japanese). Mangagamer's latest release Really Really ended up with a brand new engine written from scratch in Unity just so they could get around that issue, because Navel didn't have the original game's source code. Japanese companies tend to just delete the source code for their old games, for whatever reason. At this point they're no different from any other employed programmer, but it's still basically an extension of a fan patch hacker's duties taken to an extreme.