I think it's fair to say that videogame localisation is a fairly new part of the Japanese to English translation industry. However, it has long been an essential part of the videogame industry. This is because it allows the English-speaking world to enjoy Japanese games, especially those that feature a lot of text. This makes it surprising that in the early nineties when these games were coming to the forefront in the form of JRPGs, this part of a game's development was generally not given the attention it deserved. In an interview on the Player One Podcast, Ted Woolsey (the main translator of Square's JRPGs during the nineties) commented that for Chrono Trigger, 'I was given thirty days to do it, which is not a lot of time. I think there were about 1,300 pages of text and it wasn't contiguous.' Thirty days!!! That's unbelievable! Thankfully, things have changed since the nineties...
