An Introduction to Dragonspeak

[BreathlessTao]

First things first: thank you for the lore chunks about dragonspeak in ARR.

Moving on...

When the EN Localization team received the relatively wordy Japanese lines for this scene, we felt that it would fit the character and his native language better if we localized it in a manner that seemed a natural fit with the dragon language I had created—that being something that was far more compact, but still contained the main core that was in the Japanese.

With respect, this is just unprofessional. The fact that one of the English translators happens to be the one responsible for an imaginary language involved in here should be disregarded and not at all relevant, it should not come into the picture when doing the translation at all. Why? Because this is not usually the case. The translator is usually given a bunch of text that they need to translate, to the best of their abilities, making it sound and feel natural (in context) in the target language, but without altering any of the literary features of the original work. That is all. I understand that your background knowledge gave you an advantage, but if you felt that your own ideas were not in sync with how the writers implemented them in the first place... you should have brought it up to the writers themselves and found some kind of common ground with them. The actual raw translation of the Japanese text and the localised in-game English version are kind of worlds apart, and frankly, it's noticeable if someone listens to the Japanese audio and reads the English text, even without actually being able to speak/understand Japanese. Also, you specifically mention the EN team, so are we also to understand that such a discrepancy doesn't even exist between the Japanese and the other localised versions? Because if that's the case, it's just even less right, in my opinion. Obviously, we don't know what kind of communication went on about all this, before it was greenlit. But at the end of the day, the point is, it was, and it doesn't feel like a wise choice.

So, again, thank you for the lore, but please... next time, don't have the literary parts changed so much.

[Intaki]

With respect, this is just unprofessional.

With respect, I think you don't know what you're actually talking about and are trying to impose your belief on how things should be run over how they actually are, and then holding the EN team to your revised standard.

The translator is usually given a bunch of text that they need to translate, to the best of their abilities, making it sound and feel natural (in context) in the target language, but without altering any of the literary features of the original work.

And we already know that the EN localization team is in direct contact with the JP team as well as the head of all the lore. We also know that there is no actual "original Japanese script"; we've been told before that the creation of the writing is a collaborative process, and teams from each sector can and do take eachother's ideas an incorporate them into their own work.