I've been working as a freelance Japanese-English translator for a while now, and I'm finally starting to get some good jobs. I'm now translating all of the text for a major upcoming video game for the PS2 (lots of onscreen dialog and the menus, etc) and I've done some other smaller games as well.
It may sound stupid, but once of the reasons I started studying Japanese years ago was because I wanted to develop video games, and now I'm actually doing it, albeit in a round-about way.
I'm really stoked to see what I wrote appearing in a game...
There's a fair amount of freedom in this too. You can't just translate things the way they are in many cases, since they won't make any sense in English. You've got to make up new versions of jokes or puns etc that will work in English, so there's a lot more creativity in it than you might expect.
Unfortunately I'm bound by a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't say anything about the game itself (maybe after it comes out in the US I can talk about it). But it's kind of amazing to think I'm getting paid for this...
It may sound stupid, but once of the reasons I started studying Japanese years ago was because I wanted to develop video games, and now I'm actually doing it, albeit in a round-about way.
I'm really stoked to see what I wrote appearing in a game...
There's a fair amount of freedom in this too. You can't just translate things the way they are in many cases, since they won't make any sense in English. You've got to make up new versions of jokes or puns etc that will work in English, so there's a lot more creativity in it than you might expect.Unfortunately I'm bound by a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't say anything about the game itself (maybe after it comes out in the US I can talk about it). But it's kind of amazing to think I'm getting paid for this...