Localizing Final Fantasy — A Few Interviews
Interviews by: Elmer the PointyHello, everyone. I hope you’re all enjoying Final Fantasy XI. I think they released an expansion recently… something about pants, I dunno.
Thought I’d share a few interviews with you having to do with Square Enix and localization. They center around Alexander O. Smith and Joseph Reeder, two freelance translators who work together as Kajiya Productions. Kajiya (鍛冶屋) means “blacksmith.” 鍛冶師 (ka-ji-shi) will be the name of the class appearing in Final Fantasy XIV.
Read on for the interviews!
This is an overall look at what it is like working as a translator at a company. It touches on all the various cultural differences one must consider and really delves into the details behind localization you might not think about.
All You Need Is SPILL: An Interview With Translator Joseph Reeder
This interview focuses on the translation of a novel, but it has some interesting insight into the translation process. A lot of people forget there’s more than games and comics out there to work on. 
GameSetInterview: ‘Localization Tactics Advance – Kajiya Productions on Translating Final Fantasy’
A nice, meaty interview from PAX ‘09 that explores the road blocks encountered translating in-house, and how the process has evolved at Square Enix over the years. Favorite part was how they had to hack Final Fantasy VIII on Game Sharks just to get their work done.
Don’t blame Square Enix though, a lot of companies can be a little rough on translators. Translating manga, often times I’d been thrown into a series 6 volumes in with no synopsis or character/place names provided. One manga was steeped in Chinese, so I had to research and construct a full English/Japanese/Chinese glossary for the editors.
Point is, it seems like Square Enix has come a long way from the early days, and according to the interviews, Alexander O. Smith had a lot to do with it. Also he sticks up for Ted Woolsey!
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Comments
Comment from Volkai
Time November 12, 2009 at 7:42 am
Thank you for this, I greatly enjoyed these articles. It refreshes my interest in taking part in localization – though that interest remains no less stymied by my failure to learn any meaningful amount of Japanese (which FFXI has unfortunately done extremely little to rectify).
Comment from ringthree
Time November 12, 2009 at 11:50 pm
The reasons that I enjoy Elmer and Corinth and this blog so much is that it seems that they understand that translation is not a science but an art. The reason that many game translations were so poor for so long was that they applied literal translations to the text. The failure is in the understanding of what the words mean in context. Unless and until a translator can understand the context then the text will just be dead words and at best lack interest for the reader and at worst just cause more confusion.
Bravo guys. 
Comment from MogKnight
Time November 14, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Interesting thing to note is that Alexander O. Smith, while doing translations mostly on SE games, also translated the first Phoenix Wright/Gyakuten Saiban game.
Unfortunately, the rest of the series was not translated by Smith and it clearly shows. >.>;
Corinth Reply:
November 14th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
I never played the original version! I enjoyed playing the other ones in English so now I’m curious how different it is.
Corinth Reply:
November 14th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Thanks ringthree! I think of language itself as art. You put together different words to create something. Sometimes it’s a story or an article, and the words you use can either bore a person or move them to tears. I’ll never be a native speaker of Japanese, but I can learn as much as I can. Not just vocabulary, or kanji, but how words are used and what sounds most natural to native speakers. Then, you can take that information and apply it the other way to English, translating the meaning and spirit of the words at the same time. As such, every translator will have a different way of translating an article, a passage, or even a few words. Learning how other respected translators do their work is extremely interesting to me and I really enjoyed reading these articles. Maybe someday I’ll be able to get into the industry as well. Until then, it’s practice practice practice!
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