IG: What are your essential skills and tools of the trade?
KH: Aside from having good aim with the bat?
Well, I know this sounds very boring, but I think attention to detail is one of the most important skills when you’re localizing. Every day you’re looking through hundreds and thousands of Excel lines filled with text.
Translators need to make sure they’re translating correctly and that conversation spread out on multiple files are making sense. Editors need to make sure that all text is appearing as they should and find issues that the translator missed as well as personalize each character to create an appealing game world. That takes a lot of nitpicking and care in your work. It’s not an easily defined skill like speaking Japanese, but it’s probably the most crucial.
Also, time management is an important skill. There are many factors involved in localization (translation, editing, voice over recording, QA, master submission process etc) and usually the schedules are so tight that if everyone on the team isn’t handing off their part of the work smoothly, serious, costly delays can happen.
Other odd skills that are super useful are: being able to coax computers and other electronics to function when they’ve died, web design skills, multi-tasking, sarcasm in the face of adversity and surviving electrical shocks. We especially like people that don’t sue us for said electrical shocks.
IG: What's the most challenging and the most fun aspect of your job?
KH: Most challenging…are the schedules. Hands down.
Having to translate, edit, record voice overs and do QA, for titles that have 500,000+ Japanese characters is a tough job.
Having to do all this in 3.5 months is pretty much hell.
While all this is happening, there are also small issues we need to squash like ESRB submissions and taking footage of pertinent content, as well as manual translations and taking screenshots for the manual, creating a walkthrough of the game…so on and so forth.
I myself have not had a full weekend with no work at all in over 2 years. I haven’t embraced my wife in a year. I’ve never seen my own child…
Not that I’m complaining, but it’s definitely not the perks.
But seriously, this job requires passion, stamina and, despite my flippancy, a sincerely dedicated approach.
Onto the fun stuff though.
The most fun aspect of the job is definitely being able to work on games that you yourself actually enjoy playing and then seeing your work appreciated by others who will play it. It’s kind of cool, I’ll admit it.
At XSEED, we first play all of the games that we release beforehand and decide as a company whether we like it enough to publish it. If we had enough fun with it or think it has potential, then we push for the rights to publish it. In some cases we’re given games to publish, but usually we get a real say in what we bring over, and consequently we have a lot of fun working on them.
And when the baby that you slaved over for those hellish 3.5 months of long nights, endless hours in the recording studio, horrible take-out food and sleeping on the meeting room table makes it out the door on time…it’s VERY satisfying. Any fan love for the titles or sales later is just icing on the cake. Our accountant wouldn’t agree with me on that, but that’s just what I like.
IG: Are there many opportunities in this field?
KH: At the moment, localization opportunities are...a bit rare. At least at XSEED.
A lot of people say our games are the niche of the niche and they’re not far off. It’s still not a huge part of the industry and consequently we’re pretty small. Fortunately there are a couple of bigger companies (I’m thinking Atlus, Aksys, NIS, etc) that help widen the opportunity pool, but if you want a job in this field you’re going to have to specialize your resume a bit.
However, for anyone, and I mean ANYONE, if you want it enough you’ll eventually get it. Most of the people in our company came from all kinds of college degrees and previous fields of work that had nothing to do with the industry and landed the job because they were passionate about games and serious about pursuing a career in them. So, I say make your opportunity. Even if there don’t seem to be any easy ways in, you can make it happen.
IG: What's the typical pay range for video game localization experts?
KH: Hard to say since I haven’t researched it, but it ranges from modest to competitive. Everything really depends on your experience, skills, and the size of the company. Generally speaking, interns get breadcrumbs and access to the water cooler, editors get some compensation and the rights to plumb the food cabinet for snacks, translators also get some compensation and a free diet coke every other Thursday and I get the right to abuse them all with the wiffle bat. It’s give and take really.
Now, I know that ‘typical pay range’ is lacking concrete numbers, but I will say that if you have no experience in the industry and if you have no work experience, the salary will be the same range as any entry level job in any industry. So…get brushing up on those Japanese skills!
IG: What advice do you have for those aspiring to get into game localization?
KH: Passion goes a long way. More so than skills, I think.
Bilingual skills, writing skills, management skills, etc, are things you pick up along the way. The most important thing is the passion.
It’s like Jim Koch says in the Sam Adam commercials: “Do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. I don’t feel like I’ve worked for 24 years.” I totally agree.
IG: Thanks, Kenji.
