How do I handle text & character editing?

[TheFireRed]

Hi, I'm interested in doing a translation of Link's Awakening but I lack knowledge of romhacking. I hope this tool helps me in my mission! For the time being, I'm working in a text dump.

Since my mother tongue uses some strange characters for non-English speakers, I'd need to edit the sprites and add new characters for the purpose of translating the game.  Can anybody help me? 

[Lin]

I do not believe LALE comes with a sprite editor. But luckily, all of the graphics in Link's Awakening are uncompressed. This means you can use any Gameboy graphics editor, like TLP and paint the graphics to look like you choose. Of course, you'll have to manually search for them but you can find them just by scrolling through the ROM or using a memory viewer to get the tile's raw data and a hex editor to search for it. Since you're just doing a translation, I don't think there is anything fancy you'll need to edit like palette indexes, so you should be good.

[TheFireRed]

I've been trying to change the text and I succeeded. I only need to address the new character by writing its hex code (#80 is á, #81 is é and so on). It seems I cannot extend the dialogues and use more lines per string, can I? If I write something larger than the original, the next string is overwritten.

[Fatories]

Within the text editor there is the text re-pointer (blue arrow at the top). This allows you to change what memory location that game will go to for text. Simply click the blue arrow and then find the pointer of the text you have overwritten. You will have to find a new location in the ROM to point to. There is a lot of free space that can be found using a hex editor (00s), as well as other languages using up space that you could simply overwrite. I do believe you can point to anywhere in the ROM.

Please note this does not transfer the text at that location over to the new location, it simply tells the game where to get the text from. You will have to do that manually.

[TheFireRed]

Thank you very much! Now I'm ready to go!

Here are some screenshots looking good: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9dc3hgkuyux4kka/7MVYLRV5E4