Fan Translations
Translations are perhaps the most straightforward and obvious example of making Touhou more attractive and accessible to non-Japanese audiences. While there have been heated discussions about the ethics of fan subtitles for anime, and whether or not these cannibalize official sales of anime overseas, fan translations for Touhou seem to be more easily classifiable as “good” for the franchise. After all, ZUN doesn’t plan to provide official translations for any of his own games. Moreover, fan translations often come in the form of downloadable patches to the games, which require the user to own a copy of the original game anyway in order to use them. ZUN himself stated in a (translated) interview: "as a rule, I would say, 'no touching original stuff!' But on the other hand it [fan-made patches] makes it [Touhou] more accessible to more people. So I guess I’m okay with it. Yea, I know about it, but I won't go out of my way to do something about it."
One popular source of translation patches, thcrap, is a community-made platform that enables independent translators to create downloadable translation patches for official Touhou games. As stated on the website, it follows in the longstanding ROM hacking tradition, in which overseas fans of Japanese games would reverse engineer the games in such a way as to remove the original text and superimpose translated subtitles. (Famous examples include the Mother series, and Final Fantasy V.) thcrap currently features patches in over a dozen languages, in addition to several different dialects (e.g. British vs American English), and even features several translations that take stylistic liberties, like 4Kids English.
brliron, one of the developers on the team behind thcrap, says he thinks “thcrap today has a quite big impact on the Touhou community.” While he didn’t have exact numbers for downloads, he mentioned that other independent patches for the official games currently don’t really exist anymore due to the popularity of thcrap. However, a single English patch that he worked on for Touhou 13.5 - Hopeless Masquerade in the past was downloaded over 30,000 times. CraftyMage, the admin of the fan website Moriya Shrine, also thinks that translations are extremely important, especially for certain fan games in which the text is critical to gameplay. For example, Touhouvania and Devil of Decline are nearly impossible to play without being able to read the text. If we accept the importance of fan games in helping to draw new fans into Touhou (discussed under the Fan Games tab), then it stands to reason that these translations from Japanese into other languages are important as well.
One popular source of translation patches, thcrap, is a community-made platform that enables independent translators to create downloadable translation patches for official Touhou games. As stated on the website, it follows in the longstanding ROM hacking tradition, in which overseas fans of Japanese games would reverse engineer the games in such a way as to remove the original text and superimpose translated subtitles. (Famous examples include the Mother series, and Final Fantasy V.) thcrap currently features patches in over a dozen languages, in addition to several different dialects (e.g. British vs American English), and even features several translations that take stylistic liberties, like 4Kids English.
brliron, one of the developers on the team behind thcrap, says he thinks “thcrap today has a quite big impact on the Touhou community.” While he didn’t have exact numbers for downloads, he mentioned that other independent patches for the official games currently don’t really exist anymore due to the popularity of thcrap. However, a single English patch that he worked on for Touhou 13.5 - Hopeless Masquerade in the past was downloaded over 30,000 times. CraftyMage, the admin of the fan website Moriya Shrine, also thinks that translations are extremely important, especially for certain fan games in which the text is critical to gameplay. For example, Touhouvania and Devil of Decline are nearly impossible to play without being able to read the text. If we accept the importance of fan games in helping to draw new fans into Touhou (discussed under the Fan Games tab), then it stands to reason that these translations from Japanese into other languages are important as well.
The logic-based game Aya Shameimaru: Ace Attorney (inspired by Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney) would be quite difficult to play without understanding the text.
However, once again, it's difficult to argue concretely about the exact impact of translations beyond what I have already detailed here, essentially because it is difficult to tell if someone who plays a translated game would otherwise not have played a game at all. The gameplay of the official Touhou games is quite intuitive—just dodge the bullets—so the player who doesn't understand the text might not understand what's going on story-wise, but can still play the game just fine. Nevertheless, give the large numbers of downloads of Touhou game translation patches, it is clear that overseas players find that these translations do significantly enhance the gameplay experience, thereby making the franchise more attractive to potential overseas fans.