A word from the italian community about social media posts

[TTB-Kun]

I'd advise people to not post here anymore. OP has made their mind about what this is and no amount of proof will change it. You could have Yoshi coming here directly to say it's not an official page or that it is but auto- translated and OP would just say he's lying to cover "SE's lazyness".

The amount of caps locking they've been doing lately ciments this as just a thread for people to agree with his SE bashing, not actual discussion. That's why he's lashing out so much at people saying that he's wrong. They want to be right at all costs and will ignore all evidence otherwise.

what evidence? I've seen none of that, and don't get me wrong, i'm one of the biggest fan of the dev team and the game, but this thing is objectivly unacceptable

Why do you keep saying it isn't being translated by Facebook when it obviously is? Your Italian page and the English page are followed by the same amount of people. What does that tell you huh?

Cause that is how facebook pages works!!! you can show DFFERENT posts to pepole visiting from different regions. stil the posts are different.

[TTB-Kun]

Stop spouting misinformation. It is not correct BECAUSE it is auto-translated. For it to be correct, the auto translation itself would need to be improved OR a human translator would need to post-edit the machine/auto translation. And no, an online translator would do that, despite the growing progress in machine translation. Get your facts right before QQing, please. It's quite embarrasing.

an auto translate software will translate correctly on a word on word basis, an auto translate software will fail in grammar sintax and in the case of multiple meaning of a word.
An auto translate software will always translate apple with apple, but in that post i'm talking about the word has a totally different meaning, like translating apple with anchor!!! that is not an error an auto translate will do!!! that is clearly an human error

Well, the simple answer is that because it's easier/quicker/cheaper to do it this way (whatever way that may be) for a language that is not officially supported.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see them support more languages, but the fact is that they do not at the moment, so there is no professional support for it. They are not going to pay for translations for non-supported languages.

Edit: For the record, a translator can charge around €50 per hour for translations.

italian is not supported in game but on a promotional level it is by some degree, we even have the phisical version of the game with italian info on the box, that's probably also the reason why an italian OFFICIAL version of the facebook page exist


OK since you all think i'm crazy, i just looked through all the post from last month on both the English and Italian page, i should've done that way before. GUESS WHAT? ALL POSTS ARE DIFFERENT, even the post with the same image or the same news cannot in any way be auto translated, sintax is different, different phrases are used. english posts have also different version for NA and EU/PAL in the case of contest etc, and it's specified in the post.
But NONE of the post on both page can be linked directly to another on the other page.
If it was auto translate shouldn't i see at least some posts with the same structure on both pages? cause i see none of that.
Posts on the italian page are clearly written exnovo, just for that version of the page, they are not in any way the same! look at these 2
https://www.facebook.com/FinalFantas...jm3v&__tn__=-R
https://www.facebook.com/FinalFantas...2zl0&__tn__=-R
The italian post begin with: "Greetings, Hot blooded adventurers!"
TELL ME WHERE AN AUTO TRANSLATE CAN GENERATE SUCH A SENTENCE!! TELL ME PLEASE!

[tdb]

Yeah, and Spanish-speaking countries can't afford a 10 euro sub.

Go on with your show, go on.

I'll admit I overestimated the poorness of most South American countries. On closer inspection Venezuela and Cuba are the only major Spanish-speaking countries that are definitely too poor for the average person to possibly afford a subscription.

Still, it seems Spanish is not quite the gold mine for video game money you make it out to be. Here, have some statistics: https://knoema.com/infographics/tqld...-game-revenues

This is by country, not by language, but we can look at the countries with Spanish as their primary language. Spain itself spent around $2.2 billion on video games in 2019. Mexico clocks in almost $1.6 billion. The rest are pretty far behind but since there are several of them, they make up maybe another $1 billion. This puts the total at $4.8 billion. United states is the big wild card here; 13% of the population speak Spanish, but I could find no data to correlate income with language. It seems likely that Spanish-speaking US citizens are more likely to also have good English skills.

France, meanwhile, spent $3.4 billion and Germany $5.0 billion. Both of those languages also get a decent boost from other countries since they are pretty popular in much of central Europe. French is also spoken in Canada and a few minor countries. Again I have no data of secondary language skills in those countries, though Austria is pretty overwhelmingly German. So depending on how you interpret the Spanish situation in the US, it could place either before or after German and French.

We might also look at the spending per capita. An MMORPG subscription will cost upwards of $120 per year, which is more than the average in almost all countries. But then, not everyone is a gamer and the average also includes those who spend nothing at all, so some people will spend more. Much of Europe and other well-developed countries spend decent sums, including Spain at $48 per year. But if you scroll down and look for other Spanish-speaking countries, the next ones are Chile and Mexico at a measly $13 and $12 per year, respectively. The next one is Colombia at $7 per year. It seems unlikely that very many people will spend 10-20 times the average, though some certainly will. Since most of the Spanish-speaking population is in the countries that are unlikely to buy a subscription, it's questionable whether they should be included when considering translations for video games.

On the other hand, China as a nation is the biggest spender, and even their per capita spending is twice that of Mexico (the biggest Spanish-speaking country). So maybe we should forget about Spanish and translate FFXIV to Chinese instead?

[NessaWyvern]

Does anyone have statistics or research to cite? Because so far it's just anecdote vs anecdote on english in Japan.

There's some stats and explanations in the article "The Role of English and Other Foreign Languages in Japanese Society" by R. Jeffery Blair, previously published by The Faculty Journal of Aichi Gakuin Junior College.

Apparently, up to 30% of Japanese students start learning English in elementary school, according to this paper.
Also talks about how French, Italian, German and Spanish is viewed in Japan.

Since you know, people don't want a family anecdote :P

[Saefinn]

And out of interest to actually test this. I've changed my Facebook to be in Spanish and to auto translate into Spanish but kept my location UK.

Yes, it's now auto-translated. But it also /tells/ me that it has auto translated. It doesn't in the screenshot provided by the OP and if you navigate to the Italian version of the page whilst logged out of FB, it'll show stuff in English, except for the stuff posted by SE.

Like I've been saying in the thread. Facebook /tells/ you when something is autotranslated and it will give you the option to view the original. I visited the page when logged out of Facebook to avoid getting redirected to the English one, because if you are logged in, it will redirect you to your location, it's designed to do that, because it's the same FB page, but different versions exist for different locations - think like Netflix in different countries, what's targeted in the US is different to what's targeted in the UK, as an example.

This is the English version of the FB page auto translated into Spanish. I've circled in red where it gives you the option to view the original and to rate the translation:




To keep consistent with the above test. Here's what it looks like on the Spanish localised version. Notice the lack of "View Original" and "Rate Translation". Also notice the content is different.



Everything except the posts are in English. The posts are in Spanish. It's exactly the same for Italian. This is consistent with what the OP posted.

So I strongly suspect the below is what's happening, taking into consideration what the link somebody showed earlier of this B2B Facebook feature SE is using for localisation (here: https://www.facebook.com/business/he...60266880806087).

When you navigate to the Final Fantasy XIV Facebook Page. It detects your location. It will redirect you to a version of the page that matches your location. This is so you receive directed content for your region.

Once it has directed you to the right place it will check your language settings and autotranslation settings too.
If the language in your settings has an available translation on that page (or anything already translated by FB), it'll offer you that translation. And it'd make sense, because this is what's normal for locatalization on the web, blocks of text can be swapped out based on language and for translations to be available.

Then for the posts, if they're not in your own language and you have auto translation turned on, then it will auto translate posts into your language and you will know this because it will say "View Original" and "Rate Translate". If those two options aren't there, it hasn't been auto translated and is shown in the language it was posted in.


I'd be interested in evidence that shows the contrary. Because I cannot get it to auto translate without telling me it has auto translated. Until then, I'm going to assume it's a case of people on a forum thinking what they know what they're talking about when they don't, s**t talking the OP for not knowing what they're talking about when they do.

[Parisu]

there are several languages the FFXIV face book page exists in. Many with poorly translated text as its most likely done with an automatic translator the pasted into the facebook post.

If you try to access one of these pages outside of region or language the website redirects you to the "appropriate version" accordng to your browser's region and maybe Ip/DNS settings.

So the short version is.

Yes Square is using lazy auto translate text, then posting it onto their facebook.
Yes Op was right that there is an italian FFXIV official page that sucks... just like all the other int pages.

Now the bottomline is: Anyone cares at this point?

Anyone but Op?

Yeah, thought so.

[tdb]

Another piece of data for the Spanish language, closer to the right context: WoW population statistics. https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/WoW_...ion_by_country

As the page says, this is the number of characters on servers of different languages, not subscriptions or client installations by language. But it gives you some idea of how many people are interested in playing WoW specifically in Spanish. There's only about 1.6 million characters on Spanish realms, while French has 2.3 million and German 5.4 million. Also note that while both US and EU regions have a Spanish option, US does not have a French option so any French-speaking Canadians are likely to play on English servers.

[Mhaeric]

Thanks for the screenshot. It helps to see what you are seeing. My guess is that since they don't officially support Italian that they just use Google translate from either their French of German posts.

P.S. when someone is disagreeing or asking questions that might be counter to what you are saying doesn't mean they are calling you and your entire culture stupid. I get that this is the internet with overreactions abounding but

[Yeol]

People are so quick to defend SE mistakes smh.

Despite OP providing evidence, people are not even trying to verify anything, until someone else does.

Even then, they will defend SE by saying “no one cares about it but you” /shrug

It does come out as an insult to OP.
He has the right to point out a badly translated official page.

People acting that it doesn’t matter is kind of disrespectful to OP.

If it was french or german, you would see their forums filled with complains too.
Because they have the right to complain about it.

OP did nothing different here.
Italian might not be supported in-game, but that Facebook page is official.

[Parisu]

People are so quick to defend SE mistakes smh.

Despite OP providing evidence, people are not even trying to verify anything, until someone else does.

Even then, they will defend SE by saying “no one cares about it but you” /shrug

It does come out as an insult to OP.
He has the right to point out a badly translated official page.

People acting that it doesn’t matter is kind of disrespectful to OP.

If it was french or german, you would see their forums filled with complains too.
Because they have the right to complain about it.

OP did nothing different here.
Italian might not be supported in-game, but that Facebook page is official.

Well youre absolutely right. I honestly consider myself a civil person all in all. Sorry about my dismissive attitude. Honestly this kind of stuff can bring big changes in industry like when someone that Ported Genesis Games made the most beloved Sonic game in the last decade. Perhaps this call to attention should be a call to action instead, would be nice if OP were to apply as community manager for IT on facebook or things like that. Id support that myself. I mean he obviously cares passionatelyand seems bilingual enough to point out all of these inconsistencies and seems well versed in the lore so. How about it Squareenix? Bout time you cleaned some of your dirt?

Again, sorry for being so rude.