TragicSolitude Many thanks for the quick response, it worked to open the files.
As you said the dev's site is gone and as I said in my copied ULMF post it's been bought by someone who's using it for spam and malewhere stuff. (antivirus threw up major warning s about connecting to the site so I used a website viewer to check it)
With hoarding versions of the editor....it's not needed as far as I've experience at least with this game since it doesn't appear to force any changes that break the game as a result of editing with a version far later than the original one....but I'm not going to risk it via using only v1020 so I'm going to use v930 unless there's a good reason for it.
I think I also gave the wrong impression with myself working with someone else as in the past I did have someone who I could ask rarely for translation help and Loneranger69 decided to pick up what I had done when I stopped having the time to work on it however they themselves have now vanished for nearly a year. So I would be doing this all solo.
I would appreciate any help and can attempt to teach others how to translate using this editor since it's rather annoying to just understand what you need to do to copy and paste from the editor. However there is a word to caution to be given here as since you have to replace the original text then you can't so easily reverse or use it to check what the text was originally in all level files so if someone names a weapon Beam Rifle in the shop file but then a collaborator names it Beam Gun in the equip level (yes they are two different files for that which you switch between easily) then it's nearly impossible to tell the mess up until someone painstakingly compares the new files with the old ones.
So I believe collaboration will need a set plan for who is tackling what e.g. someone is doing shop/weapons while another does character's speaking and their names. As if I recall correctly there is a clear distinction between the two in the levels I came across of.
Something I just did right now was start doing work on making global text changes (if I understood loneranger69's explanation correctly) to get hopefully a massive portion of the text done so then it's harder for mess ups to occur. However I only got through 6 character details (one was a massive shop upgrade list I believe) which has taken me over an hour in doing so. (mostly due to copy & pasting and switching between entries rather than translating) So this translation work is a massive time sink as in the past when I had time I would be expecting to spend hours to maybe finish a few characters in a level, a whole level file I think could take about 10 hours minimum as people talking is so much harder to translate than just what is an item due to the length. Luckily some files have no talking so then you just need to translate the enemy tags scavenge stuff and misc things which then could be maybe 4 hours. If I remember right and this is when I had mouse buttons setup for quickly doing CTRL+C and CTRL+V.