Spoilers for the fangirls claiming JP is original:

http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/06/...tion-and-lore/

G: I read that the localization of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn isn’t exactly a straight one-way affair from Japanese to English like the usual video game translations. Can you elaborate on how this works?

MCKF: Oh, yes, localization is definitely not a one-way affair on this project. Actually it hasn’t been back since the beginning of the project and before then into Final Fantasy XI. The localization team has always worked closely with the online teams to provide a little bit more than what the Japanese developers can provide...They want to give it a more global feel… something that’s not strictly Japanese… something that has a feel of being international since there’s no borders in this game.

One of the things that they do is instead of making things solely Japanese and then ask us to translate those, they’ll talk with the localization team and collaborate with us to get more western ideas in the game itself. This comes down to things like monster names, monster attacks, place names, item names… these are all conceived by myself and the other members of the English team and we work directly with the world lore planners to come up with these, and then help them translate them back into Japanese.

We make sure that there are stories connected with these as well, so it’s not just random names. There’s a reason why something is called an “Angry Gobbue” — the Gobbue’s angry for a reason. NPCs as well are actually a collaboration between all of the localization team members. For example, the hyur and miqo’te names for NPCs are all done by the English team, the Elzen names are all conceived by the French team, the Lalafell names come from the Japanese team, and the Roegadyn names are a joint effort between the German and English teams and so, again, you have all these aspects of the game that are being created by not just the Japanese side, but also by the localization side as well.

And then, again, a lot of the quests, when we do our translations, we will some times add things — Japanese can be a very vague language — a lot of important information is either cut completely or it’s implied heavily. It can be kind of confusing for western players and readers, so we’ll go in and tweak things to make it a little easier to understand and a little bit clearer. A lot of times the Japanese team will then go back and look at the English translations or the French translations and get ideas on how they can change the Japanese text in turn.

So a lot of stuff that we’ve done actually influenced the Japanese side as well. It’s going back and forth and there’s a lot of communication between us and the team.