But how do the localization teams work together Kage?GE: Do the French and German teams have access to your English translations by the time that they are localizing so they can work off both the Japanese and the English?

MCKF: Actually, because we’re all doing this simultaneously, they might not have the access. They can all translate from Japanese. I think we must have the best people in the business because not only do they have their own native languages, and are translating from Japanese, but each one of them is fluent in English. All of our communication is done in English so they have three languages, they’re like diplomat level people translating games for Square Enix. They’re translating huge amounts of text, hundreds of thousands of characters within a small amount of time and getting this high quality, I love it.

To answer your question, we all translate at the same time, but we all translate what we want to first. We get our chunk of text and then do what we want to do. So if there’s something that I do first, they can look off the English and Japanese and then go off which one they want or maybe get inspiration from both. They might translate theirs from Japanese but then once the English is done maybe they’ll go back and brush it up. Because the French and German teams are looking at our text, they’ll give a lot of feedback too so they can give us ideas as well. It’s a really close knit team. A lot of games that are outsourced have little communication. Our team is all together, with the Development team. We can make sure things are consistent, we know what’s going on, we know why a dev member wrote a certain character this way and what his motivation is and what he wants us to convey – or what she wants us to convey because a lot of our writers are female. The game industry is very male driven, except for our writing team. Our writing team has a lot of female writers, it’s not that there aren’t any male writers, but compared to the other departments the writing team has  a really good balance.