Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
Yes, but in English people were not clear on what 'the Bozja storyline' was; I know a lot of people who thought the Bozjan Southern Front questline was just a side-quest to give people an alternate path to grinding the relic materials, and that the Bozja storyline would just be continued on separate from it, the way the relic questline started. (And while it's fairly obvious by the time you reach Castrum Lacus Litore that the Southern Front storyline is very closely tied to the storyline that began with Cid and the others and led to the first relic stage, those who never went into the Southern Front and never made it to Castrum never had the very obvious storyline clue there.)

And some of that is that Square-Enix's English summary after the fact was unclear, and that's 100% on Square-Enix.

But some of it is also that translating things from one language to another requires awareness of intent; that the English summary was vague enough to be misunderstood is on Square-Enix, but that the actual running commentary of the live letter was unclear is on the fan translators. (Not that they're at fault; they are always stuck translating without knowing what Square-Enix's intention is, and also trying to do so while keeping up a running live translation in real-time. Even if you get context for one unclear bit within the live letter, trying to do live translations is frazzling and bits like that can be overlooked.)

With Square-Enix translating the actual presentations and preparing the translators ahead of time, the translator would not have had to wonder "what do they mean by this particular bit? I could interpret it as meaning <A> or <B>..." and take a guess on-the-spot; they'd be able to ask someone else "hey, do you know if they mean <A> or <B> for this bit here?" and have a more clearly-phrased translated summary ahead-of-time.
Perfect example of what I said. Square said what they intended, and a facet of the community didn’t believe it and instead convinced themselves to look for something that isn’t there. No amount of clarification is enough in this situation; had Square posted “clarification” then people would be mad they didn’t get clarification of clarification. Or they would’ve argued over the intent of that clarification, and got mad when square’s intent didn’t match with their theory of square’s intention.

Do the bozja story. That includes castrum.