Quote Originally Posted by Aeyis View Post
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.


Quote Originally Posted by Aeyis View Post
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.