[petition] live translation of the live letter in english.

[silentwindfr]

i'm not fond of the petition, however, i feel it's really needed now.
we had recently the 16th live letter and more and more people look at it. sadly, the other community are left with only the question translate and loose a lot of the live letter into it.

we had until recently reinhart doing it for us, but i think it's really the time for SE to move and treat all the community correctly.
at the last live letter we had more of 1.000.000 people on twitch, then it will be good to think at the non japanese talking community.

[Rikkustrife]

they usually translate it, just takes a couple of weeks for it to show up

[Grizzlebeard]

It's always seemed with S-E no matter how many NA/EU players there are we're an afterthought regarding communication. Live Letter translated release is significantly behind the Japanese playerbase, their gaming magazines receive all the tasty previews, and their quest text/spawn conditions etc seem to give a considerable advantage as well. After having partied/allianced with Japanese players in FFXI for many years I refuse to believe they're just inherently better at discovering all elements of the game before the Western audience do.

[Ninix]

Live translation is very difficult and is prone to mistakes or interpretations that may not completely/accurately match the source material. Square Enix, as I'm sure you've already noticed, are extraordinarily meticulous when it comes to making sure anything published by them has been properly verified and signed off by PR. Almost all communication from them (lodestone posts, patch notes, all non-CM posts on the forums) is written in the same rather formal, very particular style, with FINAL FANTASY XIV and SQUARE ENIX always properly branded and stylized and everything reading as though as it was written by the same person. Everything has almost certainly gone through multiple PR people to make sure the information is accurate and presented exactly how they want it to be. Just check the Information section of the forums and you'll see what I mean.

It is extremely difficult to do live line-by-line translation like Reinheart used to do while maintaining this same kind of style/standard, and it is much easier to make mistakes and possibly misrepresent an upcoming feature in a live translation, which would otherwise have been caught during editing for the translations they post later. It just seems to go against the way their player relations/communications have always worked with this game for them to provide a live translation.

They already provide a semi-live translation of the Q&A, which they post on the forums as the live letter is running. I think this is as much as you'll get from them, unfortunately.

This is actually one of the things I really liked about Wildstar and Carbine, regardless of how I felt regarding the game... it seemed like the employees posting on the forums and social media (many of whom were actual programmers/artists/designers and not just CMs) didn't have to run every little thing by PR, which allowed them to post much more frequently and share a lot of information even though much of what they shared could change by the time they actually got around to implementing/finalizing it. It made the company as a whole seem much more personable and friendly, which was a really nice change of pace from Square Enix who feel much more distant, formal and corporate. I'm not really complaining, since obviously Square Enix has the language barrier to work with, but it's just a different way of doing things that I really enjoyed.

[ZReport]

The fact that certain people that translated live letters at E3 didn't step up to translate the recent live letter is a testament to just how hard it is to doing a real time translation of a language into another language in written script. It's an extremely difficult job. They hired on Reinhart, so I'm sure they will have good things in store considering his talents. It remains up to us to remain patient then.

You could always search for a transcript of the Live Letter, as many JP game magazines (Game Watch, Famitsu, Dengeki) transcribe the entire Live Letter itself almost always word for word verbatim. From there, people who are well versed in Kanji and Hiragana can type up the translation in English.

You can find an example of this here:

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/123...-Transcript%29

It's of course not in real time, but a translation at all is better than just an Official Q&A.