The Local Vocal

Jessica Chavez is your videogame’s fairy godmother. Not unlike those fairy tale miracle workers who turned pumpkins into carriages and wooden puppets into real boys, Chavez, 28, performs a kind of international electronic alchemy, transforming obscure Japanese videogames into Americanized products. From her perch at XSEED Games, in Torrance, Calif., she has translated the texts of such classics as Half-Minute Hero and Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon. Basically, when it comes to non-blockbuster Japanese games, all your awesome are belong to her.

So what you do is technically called ‘localization’?

“Localization” is such a corporate-sounding word. It kind of makes the whole process sound boring or sterile. Luckily at my company everyone delights in adding a bit of silliness to the games, and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. A good example from a past game was when we were finishing up Retro Game Challenge and the team was asked to submit some fake names for the in-game magazine. We were basically instructed to plumb the depths of our Simpsons, Family Guy and lowbrow humor reservoirs for the names. I think one of mine, Don Keeballs, got used in the end.