Translating a site to Japanese

[Zanter]

Hi, I'm helping to translate a videogame competition site into Japanese. I noticed in the language file, there are a lot of words in their singular and plural [manual, manuals, game, games...]. Should I do anything to make a distinction between these, or do I just go on with using the same words for both forms? [since ゲーム can be either game or games]

Also, would 　これファイルがありません。　equal "This file does not exist."?

Thanks for any help!

[Psy]

Should I do anything to make a distinction between these, or do I just go on with using the same words for both forms? [since ゲーム can be either game or games]

Without any context I can't answer with certainty, but generally you don't have to worry about this.

Also, would 　これファイルがありません。　equal "This file does not exist."

Typically the 404 message on Japanese servers goes like ページが見つかりません, though sometimes there are more polite variations depending on where you look. Your sentence is not grammatically correct seeing as, whenever これ gets put together with any other word, it becomes この. これがありません "this doesn't exist." but このファイルがありません "this file doesn't exist."

Hope that clears things up. Good luck with your project!

[Zanter]

Thanks very much for the answer, and the explanation for この! I always forget about that...haha.
I figure I'll ask a few more questions, since making a strange translation would be rather embarrassing.

For "Go back to the Home Page.", all I can think up is ホームページへ行け。　But something doesn't look right about that [and it only looks like "Go to the Home Page"]. So is there a better translation to use here?

Also for the Login choices
// Login Box
'login_1hour' => '一時間',
'login_1day' => '一日間',
'login_1week' => '一週間',
'login_1month' => '一月間',
'login_forever' => '何時までも',

Are there any mistakes in that?

Again, thanks for any help!

[Jessi]

For "Go back to the homepage", ホームページに戻る is what I see most often. ホームページに行け is kind of like shouting a command

The login choices look okay but I'm not sure about the last one (Login Forever). I'm not sure what would be used in that case いつまでも？ I'll see if I can find out what normally would be used.

[Belton]

Have you looked at the language files for SMF (or phpBB ? )
http://download.simplemachines.org/?languages
http://www.phpbb.com/languages/

With SMF you can compare the string codes in the English and Japanese files to get interface translations for most things you might want to say.
In the phpBB files the English seems to be in the Japanese file itself, making it a bit easier to find stuff perhaps.

login forever is 期間限定無し according to SMF

or you might find that someone has already done a translation for whatever software you're using, or you might consider using one that is already translated and save yourself a lot of work.

(I chose SMF when I set up a BBS for a Japanese teacher, mainly because it had a Japanese translation so she could administer it without dealing with the complexities of computer English jargon. Maybe phpBB didn't have a Japanese translation at that time, I don't exactly remember.)