How do they unofficially translate a compiled program from one human language to another?

I've seen that there are unofficial fanmade English translation patches for several Japanese games. I can see that the Japanese strings in the program have to be modify into English and any Japanese text in the textures have to be modified.

Now, I am wondering what are so开发者_如何学运维me of the tools they use to know where to look for these resources and possibly how to modify the binary and other things and still make the game work?

Generally, this is done using software that can extract and modify resources in an executable file and modify them in place. Depending on the specific application and/or operating system, this approach will allow you to modify icons, menus, strings, and the labels on UI controls, among other things.

A common utility for this purpose was Resource Hacker by Angus Johnson. However, it is no longer under active development, and has not been released as open source. Other alternatives include:

• XN Resource Editor
• Resource Hacker FX

For example, in the screenshot below I am using Resource Hacker to modify one of the dialog boxes used by the 7-Zip File Manager application:

A hexadecimal editor of your choice can also be used to make modifications to the raw, binary source code that is compiled into the executable file. This can allow you to make changes to strings that haven't been placed into a string table for easy modification.

It's worth noting that this is a much more error-prone way of making modifications. It's extremely easy to corrupt the binary by overriding the wrong sequence. Generally, you must replace a string with another string of exactly the same length.

And, of course, always work on a copy of the original executable!