Was it hard to find the necessary voice talent for games like Neverwinter Nights?
BB: That was a real challenge. There were so many dialects. Doug Stone and I worked on the American voices and we brought in a British actress Jean Gilpin to line up auditions for the British talent. The cast was enormous and I can’t recall how many people we auditioned but it took 3 days. On average, how much time will an actor spend recording his or her voice for a game? BB: That depends on the size of the part. I have gone from 30 minutes to one week on a part. Is it difficult to translate Japanese into English without losing any of the story’s impact? (Lots of Japanese words and sayings have different meanings in English and vice versa.) BB: It has been my experience that when localizing a game is to first translate. Then from that point the script needs to be refined to make it work for the respective culture and dialect. An example would be when I was recording I-76 in German. The director adapted a line this way. In English you run over a bad guy the character says “Road kill.”
