Ever wondered why you have to wait quite so long to play games that have been out in Japan for years? It's because turning Japanese into English – and French, and German, and Spanish, and Italian – takes a little bit of time. A little bit of time and a fair amount of effort. But those efforts have been getting better: the days of 'All your base are belong to us', are well finished now. Instead companies are enlisting the help of Harvard-educated literary translators like Jay Rubin, who took time out from translating the likes of leading Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, to work on Microsoft's Lost Odyssey. Companies like Square Enix are taking localisation to a new level.