Have you faced any challenges localizing and bringing One Piece to an audience beyond Japan?

Well, luckily we have two big factors helping us out with that. One is Toei Animation has a big list of what they would like things to be called. There are some instances when we can keep it in its original Japanese terminology and format, while other things they really want us to call it "this". So that is a nice, helpful list that takes some of the decision making process out of our hands, so we can concentrate more on the quality of the dub and the acting and whatever else without having to go through each time a new proper noun shows up or some sort of terminology to have to make the call.

The other is the head writer for this particular show, Clint Bickham, is not only a huge One Piece fan who's been reading the manga for quite some time, but he's also actually fairly fluent in Japanese, both spoken and in print. So he understands where the jokes are, what all is happening, what the fan base clicks onto, what we should fight to keep, and what we should fight to change because he's been a fan of the series for quite some time, with or without even being in the industry.

There are some vocal tics on the dub end of things we have to approach and address, and make sure that they don't get lost or get brushed aside. Sometimes I can read through manga and say, "Well, that's what it says on the page, but that certainly doesn't sound like what the voice is doing," and I have to come up with some sort of middle ground or make a decision and go from there. It's not necessarily a Toei directive of, "We certainly want things this way or we don't want things this way." It's something that, on the dub end of things, we have to address and make sure that it doesn't get brushed aside. If, for instance, there's a character who always talks about himself in third person, "Mike is talking to you on the phone right now. Mike has a drink. Mike always enjoys doing these sorts of things," we don't want to lose that sort of speech pattern and that approach to that character, because that's part of who that character is.