This frequency of English localization issues is unacceptable

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Exactly. This isn't a local tastes thing, this is a misrepresenting the lore thing. A friend of mine commented on the following dialog from G'raha last night:

EN
Yet I daresay Fandaniel still wanders the aetherial sea. As do ancients who gave rise to Zodiark, setting in motion so many cataclysmic events...
If there is a justice or morality at work that governs our fates, I do not know it. Nor do I think any man ever will.

Near as I can tell, the translation of this dialog is:

JP
On the other hand, the souls of Fandaniel and the the souls of the ancients who made up Zodiark he hijacked have drifted to the sea of stars.
I'm not trying to argue about whether it's good or bad. I'm just trying to argue the facts.

This goes back to the OP examples of Hydaelyn being credited for forestalling the Final Days, now Zodiark is being accused of "setting in motion so many cataclysmic events". I noticed this throughout my first playthrough of EW before learning it's a localization problem.

I don't want a rewrite of the source material. I want the story as the original, JP writers told it not a localizer's re-envisioning.

Are you sure it's not saying the ancients set into motion cataclysmic events?

The ancients, after summoning zodiark, set into motion cataclysmic events.


That's how I read that.

[Rulakir]

The topic is localization issues, not debating what the EN "translation" is supposed to mean especially when it's not even remotely the same as the original dialog.

[Slatersev]

The topic is localization issues, not debating what the EN "translation" is supposed to mean especially when it's not even remotely the same as the original dialog.

We have been told a million times the scripts for both English and Japanese are written alongside each other. Koji has actively come up with lore and written lore and dialogue for both versions. How much there even is an "original" is something they have gotten annoyed about many times because that's not how they have operated.

[Theodric]

The established trend seems to be that whenever Venat is mentioned in the English localisation, her role as a saviour is played up and her sins downplayed. Whereas whenever Zodiark or the Ancients as a whole are brought up there's not so subtle suggestions that they somehow had it coming despite being entirely undeserving of being targeted for genocide.

[Jagick]

Without reading through all 22 pages of this thread, forgive me if it's already been brought up.

When we received the February 2022 live letter, it was announced that Koji had actually been working on FF 16 since some time during Shadowbringers and that the new girl, Kate, had actually been leading the localization and translation since then. Could that explain the downgrade in the English translation compared to every other language? Either inexperience, bias, or simply another person's take on the translation and context? I've seen it more and more throughout games these days where the localizers take some pretty heavy and sometimes egregious liberties with the translations they make. Some of them just can't help but inject their own personal writing into the subject matter for some reason.

Edit: Read through several of the pages and apparently this was talked about multiple times. It's still what my money is on, as I assume as lead, Kate would be calling the final shots on the English localization.

[MeeDeggiThePunisher]

We have been told a million times the scripts for both English and Japanese are written alongside each other. Koji has actively come up with lore and written lore and dialogue for both versions. How much there even is an "original" is something they have gotten annoyed about many times because that's not how they have operated.

If I co-write a novel with someone in English and decide to translate it in a language I understand but my co-writer doesn't, that would give carte blanche to change, add and omit things as I see fit. Which would be the original? Our English novel, or my translated hackjob?

[Teraq]

Also the French version despite copying the JPN often has made its own bizarre deviations, like making Mitron a women which was very confusing for folks over there.

Objectively the best thing the FR localisation team has ever done, ftfy

As someone who is actually a folk over there, source on "very confusing"? Personally I didn't feel very confused, merely validated. This is only a one-time thing anyway, it is only Cylva who uses a female pronoun, and Cylva knew Mitron a hundred years ago – he's gendered male as you meet him in Eden. It's not exactly surprising an Ascian would choose to possess bodies of different genders, especially one who has a female name and a boss appearance based on said goddess. Consider Loghrif also initially being taken aback by his current appearance. I know Altbion even asked if this was a mistake over on the FR forum, and they replied it wasn't.

(The fact that both Endwalker's English and French scripts pointedly obfuscated Ancient Mitron's gender is also ... interesting.)

This little tidbit doesn't make the meaning vaguer or takes away from the Japanese like the English blunders here; it just adds its little spin and subtly whispers Trans Rights at you without taking away anything. Mitron as you see him in Eden is still male-gendered, and their Ancient self's gender is still perfectly unknown. French only adds that Cylva probably saw them in a female form once and she went with that.

[Ransu]

The topic is localization issues, not debating what the EN "translation" is supposed to mean especially when it's not even remotely the same as the original dialog.

They convey the exact same message in your examples....

[ArslanMalqir]

If I co-write a novel with someone in English and decide to translate it in a language I understand but my co-writer doesn't, that would give carte blanche to change, add and omit things as I see fit. Which would be the original? Our English novel, or my translated hackjob?

Do you genuinely think there's no oversight on the localization, and that the localization team is actually able to just write whatever they like and change things as much as they like without it being looked at, especially given there are vastly more English speaking players than there are any other offered language?

[Lauront]

Do you genuinely think there's no oversight on the localization, and that the localization team is actually able to just write whatever they like and change things as much as they like without it being looked at, especially given there are vastly more English speaking players than there are any other offered language?

Unless they are performing comparisons between versions, as is the case here, what difference would that make, pray tell? How would they even know? The same even goes for the lead writers in a different sense - if they are not fluent in the target language, and are reliant to some degree on what the localisers are telling them is the case ("yes it lands better this way in English"), how would they even really know that the differences are causing either (subtle) omissions or tonal/characterisation differences? So the question is, what does this oversight even amount to?

They convey the exact same message in your examples....

EN
Yet I daresay Fandaniel still wanders the aetherial sea. As do ancients who gave rise to Zodiark, setting in motion so many cataclysmic events...
If there is a justice or morality at work that governs our fates, I do not know it. Nor do I think any man ever will.

Near as I can tell, the translation of this dialog is:

JP
On the other hand, the souls of Fandaniel and the the souls of the ancients who made up Zodiark he hijacked have drifted to the sea of stars.
I'm not trying to argue about whether it's good or bad. I'm just trying to argue the facts.

The bolded is not the same, particularly due to this: "setting in motion so many cataclysmic events...". In fact, the subsequent phrase does not even read the same way with the insertion of that phrase. The intention here appears to be to set up a contrast between the two (Fandaniel the hijacker vs the ancients who tried to save their world through Zodiark) but it's phrased very awkwardly (whether by intention or not) and instead seems to be blaming them for said "cataclysmic events", when really, they preceded Zodiark. If you want to pretend it's the same, go ahead, but it really isn't.

It does seem the English localization team takes more creative liberty than the French / German localizations with the argument that "localization is not literal translation, and the importance is to attune the content to what fits local tastes."
As one who is fluent in Japanese and English, I always just play in Japanese text / voice acting because the issue is beyond simple "tuning of content" and clearly seems to be influenced by erroneous interpretation by the localization team.
I have done some localization in the past, but it is clear there doesn't seem to be any effort to correlate information between the different localizations -- we may as well call these different games. Different plot, different spell names, silly equipment names, etc.

It's a shame, because Ishikawa seems to think they are the same but it's clearly not the case, to varying degrees of subtlety.