Richard Honeywood

Richard Honeywood
Alma mater	University of Sydney
Occupation	Translator
Years active	1993–present
Notable work	Xenogears, Final Fantasy XI, Dragon Quest

Richard Mark Honeywood is a video game localization director and professional English/Japanese translator. He grew up in Australia, moving 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 moved into localization after joining Square in 1997. He is credited with founding the localization department at the company which has been praised for its high quality translations. During his tenure at Square (later Square Enix), Honeywood expanded the team from Japanese to English translation to a partner of the development team, creating localized text and graphics for multiple languages 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.

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. Originally, he was to work as a programmer on Final Fantasy VII under Ken Narita. However, the impressive sales of Final Fantasy VII in Western markets prompted Square to look into improving the quality of its translated products—Final Fantasy VII was widely criticized for its rushed translation, which had been handled entirely by Michael Baskett, the company's only in-house translator at the time. Compounding this critical staff shortage, text in the game could only be input in Shift JIS, a standard Japanese character encoding format, which was incompatible with spelling and grammar correction software. Honeywood and Aiko Ito were brought on as localization producers to recruit for a dedicated localization team within the company. 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. For Final Fantasy VIII, Honeywood had written a text parser that would automatically convert text from English ASCII to Shift JIS format required by the game engine's compiler, streamlining the translation process dramatically.

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