I know it would be time consuming however I thought if they didn't have to pay for disks, cases, manuals, and shipping that maybe it wouldn't be that bad to pay for translations. I have no idea what that would cost (and know that Yakuza games tend to have a ton of dialog) so I may be way off on this.
I'll try to give you a very vague idea of what I would probably charge as a freelancer if I was contracted to do a game like Yakuza. Let's take a look at this now increasingly cliche image that puts into perspective the word and character counts for the first three Trails in the Sky games. I'm fairly certain a Yakuza game isn't quite that wordy, but they're definitely up there, so we'll just use the Trails in the Sky figures as a rough estimate since it's difficult to directly ascertain character counts for a Yakuza game as someone not actually working on one.
I can't speak for salaried employees like (I assume) people who work at Atlus, as I've never worked for them, but for a typical text-based freelancing job, I normally charge somewhere in the neighborhood of $0.05 USD to $0.10 USD per Japanese character depending on the volume of the work and the nature of it. These are pretty standard rates for people that actually want to be able to feed themselves. Often times it goes on the lower end of the scale because the sheer volume of work I might get from a given client is enough to just outright offer them that sort of discounted rate to ensure I have work coming in, especially since I'm pretty good about getting stuff done in a timely manner, but sometimes it hits the higher end, especially if it's a smaller one-off job where I really do need to maximize my revenue in the short term to make it worth my time to work on that versus other work.
If a game like Yakuza were to clock in at the first Trails in the Sky's 1.5 million characters and I was (somewhat implausibly) asked to do it by myself, that job could cost Sega $75,000 if I charge them at that minimum $0.05 USD per word. That might look pretty high, especially considering that, again, a Yakuza game probably isn't that wordy. So let's maintain that $0.05 USD rate, but cut the word count by half, down to 750,000 characters. I would probably be at least a little surprised if the figure came in that low, but let's go with it for the sake of simpler math. That's still going to cost Sega $37,500 and, again, that's if we use my lowest normal rate. They can reduce the wait time by throwing more translators at it and giving each individual person less work to do, but it's not like anybody is going to take a serious pay cut in that scenario. It'll ultimately be a matter of several months of, at minimum, eight-hour work days until a sufficient final English script is ready to be submitted. I think I read somewhere that once localization work began on Yakuza 3, the proper translation process took something like 9 months. If we use that $37,500 figure, this amounts to about $4100 a month and if you've got at least two translators working on it, which is likely, that means you're paying them about $2050. That's hardly ideal, but I guess not entirely out of the question depending on who's being hired. I've definitely been undercut before by especially cheap translators that emphasize sheer speed over a quality bar that at least precludes coherence.
Now you might be thinking to yourself that Sega can make back those translation costs by just selling a few thousand copies. But as I and Parakeetman have been saying, translators aren't the only people you need to pay in order to bring a localization to market. Somebody also has to be paid to transplant that English script back into the game, which can still be a bit of an ordeal as some companies still don't plan ahead for localizations while developing the base game. After all, game localizations don't just entail changing the text to a Latin script, but they also routinely include graphic edits (e.g.: menu options, etc.) and technical modifications to account for the logistics of how that Latin script is processed and rendered differently in a computer compared to an Asian one like Japanese (e.g.: changing the byte type for character encoding, font kerning, etc.). Then somebody (or more like multiple people) has to be paid to test the English version of the game to make sure the localization didn't break something and if something does break, which is to be expected, then either the translator and other the other production members involved have to be brought in to fix things, whether the solution requires a script modification, glitch fix, or something else entirely. That process continues and everyone involves obviously keeps getting paid to work on it as necessary. Then after all of that, you get to pay for the certification process with Sony or whichever console maker you're working with and then if you still have money after all that, you get to pay for publishing and distribution to actually get it into the hands of the public. Bear in mind that even if you go completely digital, the console makers are likely still going to take a cut for every purchase made on their digital store and if they have technical requirements like drafting up an electronic manual, somebody has to be paid to go and make those things too before the game can come out. Also note that I haven't even included the costs of hiring voice actors or licensing the original Japanese assets to reuse them overseas as the Yakuza games normally do, neither of which is going to be particularly cheap on top of everything else that actually
has to be done to make a game localization functional and playable.
None of those people involved in all of that work are going to be willing to do their respective jobs for free out of the kindness of their hearts, even if they want to help bring those games over as badly as the foreign fans want to play them. Again, everyone has to get paid enough to be able to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads. As I've hopefully shown with a translator, it's not that hard to be pushing survivability issues once your rate is at a low enough figure and they're only one part of a much bigger equation. A lot of those other people in addition to the translators are probably getting paid full-time salaried wages, so it's pretty easy to see the overall budget for a localization ballooning to be at least several times just what the translators alone cost.
Again, it's hard to know the specific costs for a game like Yakuza without actually being involved and there's definitely some back and forth in terms of overall payment and completion timelines as a freelance translator because both sides are interested in getting the work done. But they each have their own needs that have to be addressed in order to undertake the work comfortably and satisfying those needs gets pricey fast.
Hopefully my insight helps a little!
