Translation Team: Please stop doing this...

[Viridiana]

The opposite I would think? Because her origin is kind of important to the meaning of the dialogue and plot.
He is correct about it pointing to origin. But incorrect in that it does in fact change meaning.

Hello. Hi. 'Ello. Hey. Heya.

Notice how the meaning hasn't changed at all, only the origin? And to use your examples, the meaning didn't change until you added a whole additional clause.

[Averax]

That's not technically old english. Real old english is on a much higher level of confusing than how the NPCs talk.

Google the intro to the Canterbury Tales, that's a great example of it.

[Krr]

Exactly! This isn't a Japanese script that's translated and localized into other languages. It's a cumulative effort of all the languages' teams.

Can you please stop spreading this misinformation? There is an original Japanese script. Koji Fox & other localizers only give advice. There is no magical Writing Collaboration Fairy who compiles everyone's ideas and puts them into 4 languages simultaneously.

Anyroad (see what I did there?), while we're all jerking about our English majors and vocabulary width I should note that you academic geniuses have apparently forgotten the rule of writing we all learned in our honors classes: excessively using large, complex, or obscure words or phrases, while popular and fun in academia circlejerk, is bad writing if those words and phrases are not absolutely necessary or add some value to your work.

Is goofy garbled ye late english used on every character providing any value to the work? I'd say no, because it's not adding any 'character' to anyone if everyone uses it all of the freaking time. Used sparingly, it would be a good way to highlight nationalities or even class differences between characters, and it even actively detracts from characterization if some idiot farmer in Limsa is using the same dialect as the stiff knights in Coerthas or the stuffy Ul'dahn paladins who's jobs mostly involve "standing" and also "standing".

[Gilthas]

Can you please stop spreading this misinformation? There is an original Japanese script. Koji Fox & other localizers only give advice.

Just because you downplay it to mere advice doesn't mean that it doesn't affect the JP script.

[kyuven]

Just because you downplay it to mere advice doesn't mean that it doesn't affect the JP script.

The differences are pretty staggering for it to be more than "advice," though. The Localization team clearly has a lot of autonomy.

[MiniTofu]

http://i.imgur.com/b9J7It4.jpg

I understand it's a "fantasy" game but there's no need to use this really old and quite frustrating to read English...

please phase this out and start using normal words... Portendeth? I speak excellent English but I still had to google this word (even google failed to understand)

The whole limsa pirate thing was frustrating enough, sure it was cool but you're putting way too much effort into it... if you expect me to read all these quests at least make an effort to phase this weird ye olde english style out of the game and start using normal english.

Stop using "Thy" and "Thou" ...

Meant for deaf players. To get the feel of the voice.

[Krr]

Just because you downplay it to mere advice doesn't mean that it doesn't affect the JP script.

Advice does not a collaborative writing effort with "no original script" make. It is misinformation to claim that there is no "master script" of the game's original language. There is one, and sometimes foreign opinions on the flow of the story are allowed to influence it.

[Gilthas]

Advice does not a collaborative writing effort with "no original script" make. It is misinformation to claim that there is no "master script" of the game's original language. There is one, and sometimes foreign opinions on the flow of the story are allowed to influence it.

Of course someone has to write the original script.

But if they're giving advice that affects the JP script that actually makes it into the game, yeah, that's a collaborative effort.

[Viridiana]

Advice does not a collaborative writing effort with "no original script" make. It is misinformation to claim that there is no "master script" of the game's original language. There is one, and sometimes foreign opinions on the flow of the story are allowed to influence it.

Except that all four languages are released simultaneously. In that respect, the English is just as original as the Japanese. As are the French and German.

[Niwashi]

That is quite true. However for example American English phrases many things differently then UK English. And there are variants of those as well.
This is why I feel that the best localization should focus on translating, rather then phrasing. Make use of words with exact meaning, instead of expressions.

Currently I feel that a lot of color is added where originally there was none.

The notion that there originally was none is clearly false. All Japanese dialog is full of nuances that English simply doesn't have.

Was it written in casual grammar, polite grammar, formal grammar? English doesn't have any of those, using the same form for all occasions, but you can't form a sentence in Japanese without choosing one. What sort of pronouns are used? Where English just has universal words like "I" and "you", Japanese has a wide array of descriptors to choose from. While any of them indicate whether you're speaking of yourself or your listener, the choice of which is used also gives a great deal of insight into both the speaker's personality and how they feel about the person they're talking to. That can't be done in a language like English that doesn't have any choice in what words are used as pronouns. When a character mentions someone's name, there again, in English all you get is knowing which character is being mentioned, wheras in Japanese the way a person's name is said indicates the speaker's relationship to (and in many cases their feelings about) that person. And so on...

All these sorts of nuances that are built into the way the Japanese language works are used by Japanese authors and screenwriters as one of the primary ways that characters' personalities are expressed and conveyed to the audience. And they're all lost as soon as it's translated into English. Since direct translation alone strips out most of the personality from characters, localization teams often find it necessary to find ways to phrase things that will bring some of that lost information back in. Since English has less to work with in this regard than Japanese, the results sometimes sound a bit rough or stilted or flowery as the case may be, but that's better than having nothing to go by to figure out the characters' personalities just because the original information was lost in translation.

Or as they put it:

And then, again, a lot of the quests, when we do our translations, we will some times add things — Japanese can be a very vague language — a lot of important information is either cut completely or it’s implied heavily. It can be kind of confusing for western players and readers, so we’ll go in and tweak things to make it a little easier to understand and a little bit clearer.

I don't know, personally I would much rather enjoy the original writing rather then someone else's take on what the writing should have been like.

Ok, now that gets more into content rather than color. When I said it can help to add some linguistic color back in after they've been forced to eliminate a lot of the original color, I was talking about phrasing and word choice - the sort of details this thread is about. When it's a matter of changing the content of what's being said, that's a different issue. Occasionally that too may be necessary to adjust slightly in order for something to be clear in a different language, but I'd agree that it's something that needs to be kept to a minimum.