This frequency of English localization issues is unacceptable

[Telkira]

They explained at one of the recent Fan Fests that it's not a direct translation because it wouldn't necessarily make sense to English speakers that way. They said that when you do this line of work you realize that localization "is the only way to do it".

I will have to fact-check you on whether they actually said that, it just sounds so wrong, but I guarantee you that taking the source material and warping it to such an egregious degree that this game's localizers have done is not "the only way to do things".

Arguing that is just so wrong that things like subtitled anime and fan-translations of manga/anime content wouldn't be watchable or enjoyable by foreign audiences.

Their goal is not strictly to say the same thing the original story writers wrote, but rather to produce the same emotions and feelings that the original story writers are trying to get out of the Japanese audience. Sometimes in order to do that, they have to change words, phrases, use common western sayings, or say things that westerners would be familiar with that are more likely to draw emotions from them.

They're playing a Japanese game, a game that's conceived and produced with Japanese audiences in mind, from things like visual appearances and aesthetics, to the names and roles of characters and places within the game's story. Localization apologists like to rebut this by arguing that the Localization team is all in-house and that Westerners help write and conceive things, but I guarantee you that their roles are severely diminished compared to that of the native Japanese staff members, otherwise they wouldn't have had to go over the heads of the higher-ups to censor Haurchefant. Trying to re-create and elicit those types of feelings in foreign audiences isn't going to work in the long-run because, at the end of the day, it's still a fundamentally foreign product.

I don't think I would mind it, based on what we get when we put it into Google Translate. But they also seem confident in what they say about localization being the only way to do it.

People seem to think that machine-translation jobs are what people have in mind when they complain about the discrepancies and deviations with the Western localizations of the game. That would be stupid. Translating things from one language to another is about communication, and condensing what is being expressed or communicated into another language, hence why things may be 'lost in translation'.
But what a lot of people don't know is that things being lost in translation or not being properly communicated is a fault on the person doing the translation and their ability to act as a medium in this regard. I've seen enough complaints from users who are fluent in both Japanese and English to know that it can be done, hence why I keep using the phrase "faithful translation".