It does seem the English localization team takes more creative liberty than the French / German localizations with the argument that "localization is not literal translation, and the importance is to attune the content to what fits local tastes."
As one who is fluent in Japanese and English, I always just play in Japanese text / voice acting because the issue is beyond simple "tuning of content" and clearly seems to be influenced by erroneous interpretation by the localization team.
I have done some localization in the past, but it is clear there doesn't seem to be any effort to correlate information between the different localizations -- we may as well call these different games. Different plot, different spell names, silly equipment names, etc.