Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger · SNES · 1993 · Japan → North America
English needs roughly twice the characters of Japanese to say the same thing, and the cartridge did not get bigger. Woolsey's job was not translation — it was compression under fire.
Ted Woolsey translated Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Secret of Mana and Breath of Fire for Square during the SNES era, and his name has become a byword for a whole philosophy of localisation. The constraint that defined his work was brutally physical. English requires roughly twice as many letters as Japanese to convey the same meaning, and the ROM did not expand to accommodate that — so every script arrived over budget and had to be cut to fit. Final Fantasy VI's dialogue was roughly halved to fit within a 32-megabit cartridge. The crude text compression available at the time made it worse; Woolsey has described delivering initial drafts that exceeded capacity by 300 to 400 per cent before the iterative trimming began. Secret of Mana was the extreme case. Woolsey has said the localisation "nearly killed" him and that about 40 per cent of the text had to be, in his word, "nuked" for space. He was given thirty days. There was no opportunity for revision or restructuring — only for cutting. What emerged from that process is a body of work whose characteristic moves are now called "Woolseyisms": aggressively condensed lines, invented idiom, jokes and personality substituted where a literal rendering would not fit, and a willingness to rewrite rather than abbreviate. Fans have argued about them ever since, and both sides are right.
It is easy to criticise Woolsey's scripts for their liberties and much harder to propose what he should have done instead. The cartridge held what it held. A faithful, complete English rendering of Final Fantasy VI would not have fitted, and no amount of care or scholarship changes that. Given a fixed budget of characters, a translator has exactly two options: abbreviate, or rewrite. Abbreviating produces flat, clipped, lifeless dialogue that fits. Rewriting produces something that is not what the author wrote but is at least alive.
Woolsey chose to rewrite, and did it with enough wit that a generation of English speakers formed their entire relationship with these games through his voice. Kefka's cackling malice, Cyan's archaic diction, the general comic timing of Chrono Trigger — these are, to a substantial degree, Woolsey's, and they are why the games worked in English at all.
The retranslation era has made Woolsey a permanently contested figure. Fan retranslations and official re-releases have restored material he cut and corrected liberties he took, and comparing them is genuinely revealing: the original Japanese is often more sombre, more explicit in its themes, and less funny. Purists regard his work as a distortion. Others regard the retranslations as technically accurate and tonally dead.
What both camps tend to underweight is the thirty-day deadline and the memory ceiling. Woolsey was not a scholar making interpretive choices at leisure; he was one man cutting 40 per cent of a script in a month because the alternative was shipping nothing. That the results are still being argued about three decades later is, in its way, the strongest possible verdict on them.