Working In Japanese Game Development

[james]

in boston there was a job fair for english-japanese bilinguals and square noticed that i was also fluent in french. i almost ended up in france working for them localizing stuff into french.

[Hokuto-shinken]

I read this on Why Not Japan:-

http://www.whynotjapan.com/people/16ja.htm

http://www.justin-klein.com/wordpress/

[ttjereth]

A two part Gamasutra series by gaijin developer "JC Barnett" of the late Japanmanship blog.

Working In Japanese Game Development: The Facts


Working In Japanese Game Development: The Other Side Of The Rainbow

It seems to be that most of the "foreigner-friendly" positions at the big Japanese game companies don't to pay very well though.

I interviewed with a few game companies before going freelance and I make more money translating games freelance than I would have if I had gone for any of the positions (translation and localization) I looked at in-house at game companies (including 3 major companies, Sega, Square-Enix and Koei).

On top of that, even freelance, the game-related work I get has the lowest translation rates of any of the work I do

[amdg]

Make your time....

[omae mona]

ttjereth -

You know what you doing.

[Bucky]

As a side note, we worked on a game for Microsoft for the XBox 360. Microsoft hired a well known translator (he translates novels from J to E) and paid him 50 cents per word. The most I have ever been able to charge has been 35 cents per word so the 50 cent price was pretty impressive.

[ttjereth]

As a side note, we worked on a game for Microsoft for the XBox 360. Microsoft hired a well known translator (he translates novels from J to E) and paid him 50 cents per word. The most I have ever been able to charge has been 35 cents per word so the 50 cent price was pretty impressive.

50 is the best I've ever heard of by far.


Most of the big companies who outsource (Sega, now Square-Enix, etc.) that I know of only work through agencies and not direct with translators (which is probably because they tend to have extraordinarily tight deadlines and we end up with an agency coordinating 6 or more translators working on the same project simultaneously) and even in those cases the rate the agency is pulling is usually closer to about 40YPC so what trickles down to the freelancers is significantly less.

[kenchan]

Here is my take on game development, though its in the US.

http://pingmag.jp/2007/09/07/halo-3-game-design/