Weird english

[Mysteltain]

As has been said by others (and I feel that it needs repeating) the Japanese and English scripts, as well as French and German, are written concurrently with all Localization members in a constant dialogue with one another. Further, as stated by Koji Fox, the English version of the script is technically the "original" in most cases. Anyone continuing to ignore this fact, honestly, doesn't much deserve to participate in a discussion on the localization since you're not contributing anything but misinformation--you're borderline trolling.

Now that I got that out of my system, I don't find many issues with the text or dialogue in this game. As others have also said, directly translating lines of dialogue from English to Japanese, or vice versa, or in any other combination of languages, is pretty bad. You see a lot of that in older games and it is often terrible. That is why we have "localization" teams nowadays, and not just "translation" teams, since localization implies a translation of a foreign language with attention being paid to not just the language, but also the culture from which the languages originate, both in terms of country and location there within.

I'm no expert on translation, but I read quite a bit of translated--not localized--text for pleasure (largely Old World myths and legends, but some more "recent" works like The Tale of Genji or even Dante's The Divine Comedy), so I feel like I have at least some insight into the process. And I can tell you that the majority of the time, directly translated text is an absolute slog to read through. It's stilted with no flow whatsoever. But with better translators, they may add or remove words, yet still retain the meaning of a phrase or name. Even better yet, some translators will have footnotes explaining why they translated certain lines (or even single words) in the way that they did. Those notes can even be paragraphs long for goondess sake, and for a single word, at that! And that's because some words or phrases (especially idioms) simply lack an adequate translation into another language. So in context with the localization of this game, the occasional stumble included, they've done a pretty good job of it, in my opinion (although I can only speak for the English localization).

That's my little rant on this topic. Sorry if it came across as arrogant or rude at any point, but I felt I had to contribute something to this topic.

[Zojha]

That is why we have "localization" teams nowadays, and not just "translation" teams, since localization implies a translation of a foreign language with attention being paid to not just the language, but also the culture of both languages.

The "culture" of the language tends to have fairly little meaning in the process - more important is the culture of the region you're localizing for. It's pretty much in the name, "local-ize", to make it local or suit locally. That can go as far as changing facts - Turning female heroes into males, changing the ideology of the hero from one to another etc. A very common example would be the removal of visible bones/skeletons for chinese clients - that, too, is localization. Depending on the differences between the original intended audience and the audience something is localized for, the differences between the versions can be very small or very big - imagine a bard trying to localize the story of a valiant dragonslayer for a flight of dragons. Chances are, the dragonslayer becomes a dragon in the localized version.

That said, seeing as I have no idea how the texts are supposed to look and what message is supposed to be conveyed, I'm not really qualified to judge the english localization. I personally just skip the texts if people are trying too hard to look archaic.