Tom

the true heroes in japanese>english game localization are the brave souls who quietly toil away on nobunaga's ambition games so that the rest of us don't have to get phds at tokyo university in warring states history in order to have food on our table

i don't know who you are, but you're like the mythical seal holding back some unfathomably terrible, ancient force in a remote location in an rpg and on the behalf of the rest of the industry, i thank you for your sacrifice

I do wonder how loc guys tend to respond when you get a project that seems normal on the surface and then BAM! tons of references to esoteric Buddhism out of freakin’ nowhere

There are at least a handful of us on the freelance side of things that probably fare okay when they have to go deep into the Buddhist weeds without having to scramble to do too much research (a friend of mine in the industry even did the Shikoku Pilgrimage to all 88 temples for real on foot several years ago!), but it is something of a yearly or semi-yearly ritual to have to go do a deep dive into something crucial to a questline or something, even as somebody who studied Japanese Buddhism a decent amount in my undergrad years.

Stuff like that was actually kind of one of the funner parts of getting to translate nearly all of Ghostwire myself. I've never heard anyone actually talk about this feature in the game, but it actually has a really, REALLY extensive glossary that provides a primer on all sorts of facets of Japanese history and culture that players can encounter. We didn't start receiving text for that stuff until maybe halfway, two-thirds of the way through the project, which makes me wonder if somebody at Microsoft correctly suggested to them that a game about Japan that's mostly targeting western players would benefit from having that sort of information readily available. Either way, if you do a side-by-side comparison of the original Japanese text against the English, you'll find that these entries are generally more expansive in English, which I opted to do for a handful of reasons:

1. As I recall, we had functionally unlimited text space for those strings in particular. This was pretty much technically true throughout the entire game, if I'm not mistaken, but obviously only something you can really take advantage of in practice with non-voiced content like, say, UI and glossary text. Because of that, even though I wasn't getting paid any more to write extra material, I could more or less write as much additional material as I saw fit without having to worry about sacrificing any information that was present in the original Japanese.
2. The Japanese source text itself was generally solid as a starting point, but definitely written by a native who could only really make educated guesses about the sort of things that a foreign player likely would or wouldn't know about their country. A straight translation of these entries would've mostly provided very perfunctory, surface level information without necessarily answering any deeper questions that I felt they often invited. Though I could still obviously only spend so much time fleshing out each individual entry, I figured that if this game was going to make an earnest effort to try and be an ambassador for its own country and its heritage, then it was worth fine-tuning the final text so that it would make for a richer and hopefully more elucidating reading experience for its primary audience.
3. Though I often say for convenience that I majored in Japanese in university, I actually did a slightly more specialized track referred to as "Japanese Language and Civilization," which was basically the standard mix of language courses and mostly history, politics, and business/society classes beyond that. (There was an alternate literature track, too, which should be pretty self-explanatory.) So on some level, it was nice to just be able to dive back into a bunch of these subjects that I hadn't really had an opportunity to explore professionally since graduating.

Even with all of that said, I still ended up doing plenty of research and learned a decent amount of stuff while working on that glossary over the course of like a year or so, especially when it came to Japanese ancient history, which I admittedly focused on less academically just because my primary concern was getting my working Japanese fluency up to speed as "quickly" as possible (which is to say, I felt it would be more immediately useful to dedicate my time more towards studying about contemporary Japan since that would be, y'know, where I'd be living and working in like I am now!). I have no idea how many people ever dived into any of those entries and I don't believe Tango ever specifically brought up that extra work when they would contact us about stuff, although they gave us plenty of creative latitude throughout the entire project as a whole and left our work virtually unchanged once I took that direction, which was the only practical endorsement I needed to keep going.

All in all, as much as I wish that sort of extra research and writing was more consistently compensated on projects—and sometimes it actually is, but definitely not always—in hindsight, for as much as that game obviously went through its fair share of change across its development, that material is honestly probably some of my favorite stuff I wrote that made it into the final product, and this was on a game where my editor and I did plenty of fun creative flexing within the actual character dialogue.

Long story short, as long as I'm fairly paid for my time if I decide to put in some extra elbow grease, I often enjoy getting to write less glamorous background material as a change of pace from that dialogue writing that people mostly hire me for, as much as I otherwise obviously love it and will always want that to be the bulk of my bread and butter.