He was translating an amount of text roughly equivalent to Ulysses from Japanese to English and they gave him six months to do his job and the madman actually did it. Keep in mind he was PHYSICALLY CONSTRAINED by the limits of the SNES cartridge. The English translation of Final Fantasy 6 is pretty much the moon landing of video games, utterly impossible to do today despite leaps in technology.
And when you realize that localizers are no longer subject to having to use a calculator to figure out how many bits are used when you translate kanji into letters as Woolsey was, it's inexcusable and unforgivable when they do things like reduce entire exchanges of dialogue into "..." "..." "..." as they did in Fire Emblem.
But that's a double edged sword I suppose as they also now have free reign to just insert the full text of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto into every game's readme.txt and it doesn't matter that the game file balloons to 150 GB or more, companies don't seem to care for whatever reason.
they also now have free reign to just insert the full text of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto into every game's readme.txt
It saddens me that I cannot tell if you're joking or if someone actually did this.
Anyway, fun fact: Woolsey did not do the US release of Final Fantasy 4. He was hired BECAUSE of that game's bad English translation, which gave us one infamous funny line and that's about it.
Credit to him for working around those cartridge limitations, though.
They always point to Ted Woolsey, too.
Ted Woolsey had no agenda. His localizations worked in their era.
Ted Woolsey's approach would not work today. We have the Internet. We can easily look up what the Japanese line was.
He was translating an amount of text roughly equivalent to Ulysses from Japanese to English and they gave him six months to do his job and the madman actually did it. Keep in mind he was PHYSICALLY CONSTRAINED by the limits of the SNES cartridge. The English translation of Final Fantasy 6 is pretty much the moon landing of video games, utterly impossible to do today despite leaps in technology.
And when you realize that localizers are no longer subject to having to use a calculator to figure out how many bits are used when you translate kanji into letters as Woolsey was, it's inexcusable and unforgivable when they do things like reduce entire exchanges of dialogue into "..." "..." "..." as they did in Fire Emblem.
But that's a double edged sword I suppose as they also now have free reign to just insert the full text of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto into every game's readme.txt and it doesn't matter that the game file balloons to 150 GB or more, companies don't seem to care for whatever reason.
It saddens me that I cannot tell if you're joking or if someone actually did this.
Anyway, fun fact: Woolsey did not do the US release of Final Fantasy 4. He was hired BECAUSE of that game's bad English translation, which gave us one infamous funny line and that's about it.
Credit to him for working around those cartridge limitations, though.