It's not an issue of translation vs localization. Localization is necessary when translating media like this into another language, especially from Japanese which works very differently to English.

There's a difference however between good localization and what they did with FF14. It's totally possible to localize the game without cutting foreshadowing from ARR, muddling lore concepts like "The Lifestream", erasing narrative themes, misunderstanding the script, replacing all the quest names with pop culture references and generally making unnecessary changes.