The console hums to life; stars fade from black as the first discordant notes of an orchestral score rush their way first through space and into your head.

The camera pans slowly, purposefully around the cockpit. A thousand tiny blinking LED’s reflect in your retina, twinkling and dancing over the ominous rumble of a double bass.

Cut. You’re outside looking in; a futuristic spacecraft hangs in infinite blackness, planets for a backdrop. The go-faster curves excite childhood imaginings. You wonder how many Japanese slaved at how many supercomputers for this moment; how many pixellated atoms make up the scene? The horn section screams a staccato warning as a missile tears past, stars streaking behind, before rudely punching fire into the ship’s hull.

Cut. Inside violins rise, then fall, then rise a little higher as smoke billows around the terrified crew. A central monitor flickers to life and a tall, dark antagonist sneers into holographic existence. One side of his face spits wires through stretched cyborg skin. He turns his head, flashing a dark, fierce glare from eyes a hundred CGI artists worked a hundred hours on just for you to find fear in.

His thin lips curl into a half smile as they whisper: “All your base are belong to us.”

Localisation, the job of transporting and translating every shade and nuance of a videogame’s character, plot and dialogue from one language and culture into others, is the forgotten art in videogame creation. To the uninitiated it’s little more than a kind of simple post-script procedure, stapled on the end of a project long after the champagne and critical acclaim of the home territory release have trailed away; picking up the pieces long after the development team have cleared their desks and moved into pixel pastures new.

But anyone who has cringed at the awkward dialogue reproduced in Konami’s Suikoden 3 or roared with laughter at the witty, culturally inclusive humour of Nintendo’s Paper Mario or Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea will understand the importance of a razor sharp translation. For the rest of the world wanting to sample a Japanese videogame masterpiece or vice-versa, localisation is the bridge that suspends the disbelief: get one consonant wrong and the whole thing can come crashing down, taking the player with it.

At best, a good translation enables us to enthuse, emphasise and emote with the characters we’re interacting with, making the alien recognisable, comfortable and understandable. At worst it turns an otherwise brilliantly realised game world into a soulless, empty shell of confusion and lost potential.

Editor Bill Alexander and translator Yu Namba form the localisation department of Atlus, a company famed for its lovingly crafted Japanese to English translations.

They guide us through a game’s progression in its overseas metamorphosis: “Translators start by incessantly playing through the Japanese game release to familiarise themselves with the mechanics and characters. Commonly used terms such as weapon names and locations are compiled into a list so that they can be used consistently throughout the game.

“Translation of dialogue begins once we have received the text files for the game from the developer. Personality traits of the game’s characters are identified so that they may be consistently and accurately represented in English. After all the planning has been completed, the translators begin on the actual words, which are passed on to an overall editor as they are finished. The text is then re-worded where necessary, and finally, the files are sent back to Japan to be implemented into the game by the programmers”.

Essentially this is how most modern translation teams work. But it wasn’t always this way. Until the mid-nineties Japanese adventure and RPG games were hardly ever ported over to the West. In the main it was arcade titles (and their respective home conversions) that were released. The time and expense required to hire a professional translation team to simply reword a few katakana menu items wasn’t worth it. As a result many companies, in particular the arcade heavyweights such as Namco, Capcom, Konami and SNK, attempted their own in-house in-Japan translations with some extremely varied results (including the infamous Zerowing “All your base” effort).

In the case of RPG and adventure games, where simply pasting text files into the proverbial Babelfish was impossible, translators were hired, or more likely, any English speakers in the company, charged with translation duties, although their work was hardly high priority.

Richard Honeywood, now head of localisation at Square-Enix explains: “I originally started working as an arcade game programmer at Seibu Kaihatsu in 1994, working on Raiden II, Viper Phase I and Senkyu: A Battle with Balls. As I was also the only foreigner in the company, I also translated what little text that appeared in the game and manuals, as well as coordinating all the foreign production and distribution. When I later applied to Squaresoft’s HQ in Tokyo, they didn’t have a localisation department. Although I applied to be a programmer, during the interviews they decided to create a localisation team.”

Unbelievably, Ted Woolsey, the translator that worked on many of Squaresoft’s best-loved 16-bit titles, was given a scant five-week deadline to complete the translation of the seminal Secret of Mana. All while the Japanese version was being written simultaneously. “Most of the five weeks was spent in Tokyo,” he explains. “Everyday I would come into Square’s offices and get to work translating the text that had been written the day before. The time constraints made it an extremely frustrating project and, as I had no team to work with, I had to keep all the disparate content in my head, remembering snippets of conversation from the original files to add to the English version. It was easy to make mistakes but the game design was beautiful and in the end the English translation worked for me”.

This article originally appeared in Edge magazine in 2005. The version presented here is pre-subbed. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.