Richard Honeywood

Honeywood grew up in Australia and spent time in Japan as a foreign exchange student in high school. He earned degrees in computer science and Japanese at University of Sydney and spent his fourth year at its sister school, Hosei University. He began his career as a game programmer at Rise Corporation, a subsidiary of Seibu Kaihatsu. 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 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, 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, 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==