Ted Woolsey translated Final Fantasy VI to a budget measured in bytes

Ted Woolsey joined Square's American office in 1991 with academic Japanese: he held a master's degree in Japanese literature. For the next five years he single-handedly produced the English versions of almost everything Square shipped on the Super Nintendo — Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI (released in America as III), Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG.

He worked inside three constraints, none of them literary.

First: space

English is wider than Japanese. One character occupies a single tile on screen and becomes six to ten Latin letters in translation. Meanwhile the size of the text block in the cartridge and the width of the on-screen window had both been fixed at build time. The translator was not working with a paragraph but with a byte budget: a line had to be fitted, not merely rendered.

The style follows from that. Long explanatory sentences were thrown out and a short, sharp register remained. Kefka's famous Son of a submariner! is not a joke taken for its own sake; it is a way of putting a character into an allotted number of characters, when the literal line does not fit and would clear the censor less easily anyway.

Second: time

For the entire Chrono Trigger script Woolsey had roughly thirty days. A role-playing script of that era runs to tens of thousands of words scattered across lines he saw out of context and often out of order. There was nothing to check the result against: a test build with the finished text barely existed.

Third: the list of prohibitions

Nintendo of America maintained its own content policy. Religious symbolism, alcohol, direct depictions of death, anything sexual: forbidden. Crosses in the artwork were redrawn, a tavern became a cafe, the Holy spell became Pearl, the Death spell became Doom. Woolsey described it in interviews as a guessing game: he read the Japanese script and worked out in advance which story threads would fail the filter, so he could rewrite them before they were cut.

He was not translating from Japanese into English. He was translating from Japanese into what fits and what passes.

What to do with this now

His work produced the word Woolseyism: a compression that reads as invention. Later fan translations restored literal accuracy and lost the register, and the argument about which matters more is still running.

That argument, looked at honestly, is inherited from conditions that no longer exist. Text now lives in a separate resource, fonts are proportional, windows stretch, a team works on localisation and a patch ships on release day. Not one of Woolsey's constraints survives. What survives is the habit of demanding literalism from a translation, as though it were still competing with a two-megabyte cartridge.

Woolsey left Square in 1996, founded the studio Big Rain, which became Crave Entertainment, then worked at Microsoft on Xbox Live and at Undead Labs. The games he rewrote by character count are still being reissued, usually with his text intact.