Translating Pokémon Fire Red (technical help?)

[paranvoi]

So in short I've been working on translating Fire Red into Finnish with a small group of people since last July. Script dumping has been difficult for me since day 1 and though I've learned a ton, it's still a huge challenge (this is coming from someone with no experience at all in programming or anything like that). I have a table file already and have managed to dump a tiny bit of text, but there are some obstacles I face that I don't know how to overcome on my own, such as:

1. First and foremost the amount of pointers seems to be astronomical, and they have to be searched for 1 by 1, by hand, which is very tedious. I must be understanding something wrong about pointers because I find it hard to believe that finding them can be this tedious.

2. Sometimes dumped text comes up incomplete. Letters are missing or the text is split up in odd places, such as in this excerpt from a dump of FR menu terms:

//ATUS P[LINE]
//ROBLEM[LINE]
//END[LINE]

Here not only is the "ST" of "STATUS" missing entirely, but there is a line break after the "P" in "PROBLEM" for some reason. How could text like this possibly be edited?

3. Sometimes the text just doesn't dump at all, i.e. the resulting .txt file is totally empty.

4. This is new to me (just learnt about it today while googling) but apparently I can accidentally end up corrupting the file that I am translating if the translated text I insert into the game is longer than the original text, e.g. if a line in the English version of the game is 20 characters long and I insert a line in Finnish that is 30 characters long, I can wind up with huge problems. Is this true?

5. Going by how scizz's Advance Text program is set up, there's a barrier in dialogue boxes that the text cannot cross over. How do prevent crossing this boundary without using Advance Text? Sorry I don't really know how to word that better but maybe someone knows what I'm talking about. Has nothing to do with character limit btw.

The reason I'm asking this here is because in doing a google search for "GBA script dumping" or something similar, this thread on a "Pokemon Black and White translation project" popped up: http://projectpokemon.org/forums/showthread.php?11397-Pokemon-Black-and-White-Translation-Project

I was impressed with how much more easier the thread made the translation process sound than what I've been dealing with since July. I don't mean that the translating must have been easy, but certainly the same problems I'm having can't have been an obstacle in translating B/W. And of course B/W should be more difficult to translate than FR due to it being a generation up, yet I don't seem to be able to advance in any direction with FR.

tl;dr I'm basically asking for help dumping this game's script. Any and all help that I can get, really! Would anyone be willing to point me in the right direction or offer a hand? :smile:

Some pictures just for fun: