Season 2 - Episode 10/10 Janet Hsu localization director that has worked in the video game industry for almost two decades. Janet chats about the English localization of the Nintendo DS Game Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors by director Kotaro Uchikoshi from Chunshoft. Localization by Aksys Games with translation by Nobara Nakayama and editing b…

Season 2 - Episode 9/10 Wesley O'Donnell is a freelance Japanese to English translator living in Japan. He's worked on a variety of manga and light novels with penchant towards fantasy and comedy. Wesley chats about the amazing characterization and comedy in the English localization of Nindento's Paper Mario and the Origami King. "The kingdom has b…

Season 2 - Episode 8/10 Taylor Drew is a translator, writer, and manga proofreader based in Tokyo. She writes book reviews for her personal blog A Basket of Words and also does interview translations for Febri. Passionate for all things written and everything to do with Northeastern Japan, she chose to talk about the award-winning Tokyo Ueno Statio…

Season 2 - Episode 7/10 Erica Friedman is the Founder of Yuricon and has run the world's oldest and most comprehensive blog on Yuri, Okazu, since 2002. She has edited manga for JManga, Seven Seas and Udon Entertainment, most recently Riyoko Ikeda’s epic historical classic, The Rose of Versailles. Erica is the author of By Your Side: The First 100 Y…

Season 2 - Episode 6/10 Stephen Meyerink is a freelance Japanese to English translator, writer, and author who has worked on video games, books, albums, manga, and more. He is a massive fan of video game music (in terms of both a historical practice and a listener), loves cooking (and eating) all kinds of food except meat loaf, and Final Fantasy. H…

Season 2 - Episode 5/10 Alexander O. Smith—who goes by Alex—is a translator, writer, and photographer living in Kamakura, Japan. As a translator, he's worked on games like Final Fantasy 12, novels in the fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery genres, and manga. He's written for Magic: The Gathering, DeNA mobile games, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and is cu…

Season 2 - Episode 4/10 Keith Spencer is a visual artist and translator based in Kyoto. His artwork has been exhibited in the US, Japan, and Canada, while his translations have appeared in artist books, galleries, and numerous art-related online publications. Keith chose to chat about the novel The Emissary (also known in the USA as The Last Childr…

Season 2 - Episode 3/10 Mercedez (Meru) Clewis (they/their) is a Japanese to English translation and localization editor working primarily with light novels and visual novels, such as Idea Factory’s Cupid Parasite. They’re also a pop culture critic, anime and manga reviewer, and a freelance journalist, contributing to websites like Anime Feminist a…

Season 2 - Episode 2/10 Kaylyn S. Wylie (she/they) is a Japanese to English media localization specialist working primarily with video games. You can see her work most recently in Ender Lilies and Artesnaut. If you’d like to catch what she’s up to, you can find her on Twitter where she gushes about Quagsire, shares her gaming hyperfixations, and fr…

Season 2 - Episode 1/10 Christina Rose is a video game and manga translator who enjoys demystifying the J-E media translation industry and its practices for people new to the field or looking to break in. Final Fantasy XIV is a sci-fi/fantasy MMORPG that has been running in some form or other since 2012, making it nearly ten years old! The most rec…

Season 1 - Episode 10/10 Daniel McCalla is a Japanese to English video game translator and (occasional) editor. During his four years as a freelancer, he worked on titles such as Phantasy Star Online 2, Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Dragon Quest XI S, and Ender Lilies. He now works in-house at Capcom as part of their localization team. In th…

Season 1 - Episode 9/10 Gavin Greene is a freelance localization director, translator, and interpreter specializing in video games. In his ten years in the industry, he's translated more games than he can count (he's better at writing than math), many of them for well-known franchises such as Final Fantasy and the Tales of series. As a localization…

Season 1 - Episode 8/10 Morgan Watchorn is a manga translator for Seven Seas Entertainment. Titles she’s worked on include Who Wants to Marry a Billionaire?, Desire Pandora, and Call to Adventure! Defeating Dungeons with a Skill Board. She chose to talk about the English dub adaptation for the 2005 anime Black Cat, which was translated by Masako Ol…

Season 1 - Episode 7/10 Wesley Bishop is a localization director at video game developer and publisher Capcom. Wes grew up in Indiana in the USA. After earning his degree, he went on to work at the Japan-American Society of Indiana, an NPO dedicated to strengthening the bridges of friendship between the Japan and the USA. Wesley moved to Japan in 2…

Season 1 - Episode 6/10 Nathaniel Hiroshi Thrasher, also known as Rook, is a wildly successful light novel and manga translator who's worked on titles such as Torture Princess, The Eminence in Shadow, Spy Classroom, and High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World. Rook chose to chat about the popular Shonen Jump manga Spy x Family, wri…

Season 1 - Episode 5/10 Andrew Echeverria is a Japanese-to-English media translator with a focus in games. He's been in the industry for half a decade, in which time he has had the opportunity to work on manga, tourism, tech, and games such as Phantasy Star Online 2 and Ender Lilies. He also loves all things horror, especially the more surreal, cer…

Season 1 - Episode 4/10 Liz Bushouse is a Japanese to English video game translator and has worked on titles such as Phantasy Star Online 2, STORY OF SEASONS: Friends of Mineral Town, and Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin. She has a masters degree in translation and loves to talk about translation theory. Liz shares her insight from her excessive research i…

Season 1 - Episode 3/10 Katrina Leonoudakis is a professional translator and localization specialist. In addition to working full-time at SEGA as a project coordinator, she subtitles anime for Funimation and Sentai Filmworks, as well as translates manga for Seven Seas. She has credits on projects like Persona 5 Royal, the Yakuza series, and anime l…

Season 1 - Episode 2/10 Anne Lee is a freelance Japanese to English translator and editor, with credits including Hitorijime My Hero volumes 1-3 and video games such as Giraffe and Annika, and Tokyo Afterschool Summoners. She also writes and podcasts about Japanese pop culture at Chic-Pixel.com in addition to her day job in communications. She's pa…

Season 1 - Episode 1/10 Daniel Morales is a writer, translator and former association professional based in Chicago. He writes the website HowtoJapanese.com and is a regular contributor to the Japan Times Bilingual page. Daniel chose to chat about Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum and …