Alexander O. Smith
American translator and author
Alexander O. Smith is a professional Japanese to English translator and author. While his output covers many areas such as adaptation of Japanese novels, manga, song lyrics, anime scripts, and various academic works, he is best known for his software localizations of Japanese video games including Vagrant Story, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and Final Fantasy XII. He currently resides in Kamakura, Japan, where he operates his own contract localization business, Kajiya Productions, and is co-founder of a translation and publishing company, Bento Books.
Biography
Smith first gained an interest in Japanese after attending an exchange program in northern China. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Japanese from Dartmouth College/Keio University in 1995, and a Master of Arts degree in Classical Japanese Literature from Harvard University in 1998. Just before graduation, he interned at Sega, during which he was asked to perform voice-over for Winter Heat. His first work in translation was as a subtitler for Japanese television dramas. Smith joined Square after earning his master's degree, working as part of Richard Honeywood's nascent localization team. On his first project, Final Fantasy VIII, he and the other translators were not given access to the game files; they were instead forced to hack in their new dialogue using GameSharks during testing. In 1999, he worked as the main English translator for Yasumi Matsuno's Vagrant Story. Reviewers noted the high quality of the English script, in which Smith utilized various archaic English idioms and slang that distinguished the game from its straightforward Japanese counterpart.
“Alexander O. Smith” enters the record as american translator and author. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alexander, Smith and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Alexander O. Smith” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Alexander, Smith and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4719770. VIAF identifies the subject as 9548052. The Library of Congress control number is no2004006462. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 1998 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexander O. Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.