Over at Square Haven, they have a pretty decent interview with freelance Square localizer Alexander O. Smith, whose "...projects for Square include Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. We touched base with Alex to learn more about his career in the game industry, and his most recent projects adapting Square Enix games for the English-language market."

There's some interesting and sophisticated talk about localizing the uber-cult classic Vagrant Story: "Usually the goal with any game at the beginning is to make it not suck in the time you are given. That said, I think every Japanese game has an inner English game hidden away, and once you start to find it, it sets its own bar and the goal then becomes to meet those expectations, again within the constraints of time available. Vagrant Story was one of those rare projects that was just screaming to be in English from the moment it was made, so the bar, though high, was very clear."

Also, holy crap, we get into some otaku territory with a discussion about Final Fantasy X (mild spoilers here!): "Oh, and one thing I've already seen in print from an interview with Nojima, so I know it's okay to talk about: yes, I specifically went to Nojima ahead of time to discuss the pros and cons of translating Yuna's last line to Tidus from "arigatou" to "I love you." I've actually written a whole article about that decision for a Japanese literary magazine, Subaru, if anyone cares to look it up. I think it's a great example of translating a cultural context, like I mentioned above." [Via Jiji.]