Richard Honeywood

Richard Mark Honeywood is an Australian video game localization director and professional English/Japanese translator. He grew up in Australia and moved to Japan after graduating with degrees in computer science and Japanese from the University of Sydney. Honeywood initially worked for several Japanese video game developers as a programmer, but transitioned to localization after joining Square in 1997. He is credited with founding the company's localization department, which has been praised for its high-quality translations. During his tenure at Square (later Square Enix), Honeywood expanded the team's role from text translation to becoming a partner of the development team, creating localized text and graphics and ensuring that the video game code supported multiple languages easily. In 2007, Honeywood left Square Enix for Blizzard Entertainment, where he served as the global localization manager for World of Warcraft until November 2010. He then moved to be the translation director for Level-5.

Biography Honeywood grew up in Australia and showed an early interest in computers, programming his own games on Commodore 64 and VIC-20. He spent time in Japan as a high school foreign exchange student in Gifu. He taught himself basic Japanese by looking up characters he did not know from Dragon Quest II and shōnen manga in a dictionary. He began his career as a game programmer at Rise Corporation, a subsidiary of Seibu Kaihatsu, working on arcade games and the PlayStation port of Raiden called The Raiden Project (1995). Honeywood and some members of this development team left Rise to form Digital Eden, a new company that worked on a number of Nintendo 64DD games in collaboration with HAL Laboratory. When it became clear that the 64DD's protracted development would render their efforts meaningless, Digital Eden agreed to disband without releasing a single game. Satoru Iwata, then-president of HAL Laboratory, personally offered Honeywood the opportunity to work on an early Pokémon game but he declined, instead joining Square in 1997. This team established best practices with respect to code preservation—localization efforts for Chocobo no Fushigi na Dungeon and Tobal 2 were halted at the gate when a complete copy of the source code could not be pieced together from the disbanded development team's computers. This difficult experience catalyzed many of the changes to the company's approach to localization, moving translators' workspaces closer to the original development teams, improving communication with them, and introducing full-time editors. Another key change was adding a familiarization and glossary creation period to the schedule, in which the team develops a consistent style and characterization guide for the project. Honeywood spent four years working as localization director of Final Fantasy XI (2003), translating new content concurrently with the Japanese version. After Square merged with Enix to become Square Enix, he was tasked with managing localization for the Dragon Quest series. He is the localization director for Level-5 as of 2011. For Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (2013), Honeywood adapted the different Japanese accents of the original script into various British accents. He pointed to a stand-up comedy routine midway through the game as a particular challenge for that project.

Works TitleYearPlatform(s)NotesRaiden II 1993 Arcade, PlayStation Programming Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom 2018 PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows Snack World: The Dungeon Crawl – Gold 2020 Nintendo Switch English localization