This frequency of English localization issues is unacceptable

[Graeham]

I agree. Real racism is against the Garlemald people.

Look I have read the official story for Endwalker from the lackluster story writers guild so I know. Garlemald wins, the Loporrit dies and the God Hydelyn is defeated by the God Meteo. The problem is in translation. Let me give you an example:

世の中はどれも、泥のような……
退屈で……醜く……くだらないものだ……。
だが……時折……こうして火が……
愉しみがもたらされる……。
まったく……憎いものよ……。
お前は、どうだった……
この世界に生み落とされ、名を与えられ、生きてきて……。
歩いてきて……何を思った……。
存分に、愉しかったか……？
……俺は…………

Like everyone else in the thread I do not speak any Japanese at all. But I found a trick and can use the translator:

Everything in the world is like mud... It's boring... Ugly...... It's bad... But...... Sometimes...... And so the fire is... Bringing pleasure.... Exactly...... I hate it... How were you... I have been born into this world, given a name, and have lived... Walking in... What did you think.... Was it fun to the fullest...?...... As for me............

It is confusing and does not make sense. This is terrible! I went to the feedback section and I found the problem. Every other language has a section called Localization. But Japanese forum does not. So they do not have place that they can be told about errors in story translation from official German version to Japanese. This is why they do not know the real story. I am sad about this.

We must write a letter and explain that the story is wrong so we can fix it to the one where Garlemald and Ascians win. I like the god Meteo as well from Abeyond's story so they should win as well. If you give me more quote of the story in Japanese I can use the translator to find the errors so we can make official petition about it.

[KariTheFox]

Is Yoshi given a direct translation of the changes? Or is it localized back to him?

There is no such thing as a "direct translation" in the first place. You are always going to lose some meaning and cultural context when translating. And translators will have to make choices about how to construct the localized text. You're always working with a compromised text when dealing with a localization. There are always many ways to translate something between languages, and they're going to be both right and wrong in some ways, no matter what.

Do I agree with all the choices the localization team makes? No, I actually dislike a lot about the localization.
I would have made different choices personally. But I'm not a professional localizer, working in the context of a commerical product with a top down decision to have every character speak in a certain stylized kind of way.

[aveyond-dreams]

You don't have to be a chef to know when a dish isn't cooked properly, and you don't have to be a localizer to know that something is clearly amiss here.

[Lhanu]

You don't have to be a chef to know when a dish isn't cooked properly, and you don't have to be a localizer to know that something is clearly amiss here.

A (from Yoshi-P): I also consulted with Natsuko Ishikawa to came up with an answer that makes sense when we explain it. As Y’shtola explained it, the ancients being so dense with aether could not have controlled dynamis to stop things at its source. The other ancients that thought okay we’ll summon Zodiark and that’ll be our solution.. but she saw that and determined the actions would be unable to change as a people and we will always be our own undoing. If you look at the dungeon, the Dead Ends, that final boss is our vision for what probably would have happened to the ancients if they just continued as they were. For that reason, she chose to sunder the star to dilute their aether so they might be able to use dynamis and stop the final days at the source. As she herself says, this isn’t really a simple matter of good and evil, and she agonized on if her decision was correct.

I think everyone has their own feelings about Venat, and we want to convey that Hydaelyn isn’t a bad guy, but… it’s this decision she made to split everyone into 14 parts so they can use dynamis. This decision makes me think, she was definitely an ancient huh?

Y'all really be just inventing Yoshi P's opinions on the story for him to cope with the Ascians not being correct.

[aveyond-dreams]

I can't say that his opinions factor into my own view of the story given that apparently Hythlodaeus is somehow scary to him and this "she was definitely an ancient huh?" line. It has severely reduced my confidence in their storytelling going forward combined with the localization issues that have already been discussed at length.

[Exposure]

You don't have to be a chef to know when a dish isn't cooked properly, and you don't have to be a localizer to know that something is clearly amiss here.

Like, I don't get it, a root of this particular argument as far as I can get is over the depictions of particular characters in Endwalker and how they obviously differ from the original intent, but to use a live letter that had an entire section to Q&As about it:

Q: Venat had good intentions and her plan worked in the end. Was sundering the star really the only way to save it?

[snip for word count but Lhanu happen to quote the first part of it]
At the end of 5.0, we find out that Emet-Selch this whole time has been making decisions about how humanity were imperfect creatures but at the end he gives you a chance and re-evaluates his judgement. Hermes is also concerned with this to the degree that he erases his own memories so he can re-evaluate humanity. He’s really concerned with fairness and humanities worth. Venat herself never talks about herself in this lofty way that she’s making a judgement on mankind, but when we see her in that cutscene and holding that sword, that really is a very ancient moment that shows you how different the wholeness of the ancients were. Normally we wouldn’t be able to make such a decision for all of mankind so I think she really was one of them.

Emet-Selch is very popular, but I agree with Alphinaud when talking about judging people “what right does he have to do that?” and that might be true with Venat as well. If you go back and look at the different parts and the side quests with the ancients you might find it interesting.

you got that general sentiment of "She's not a bad person but she was also still an Ancient with all the flaws that came with it" which is pretty clear throughout the English localization, the game just doesn't go "see she was secretly evil against you the whole time", which would fit with the localization also generally being sympathetic towards Emet and Hermes?

I mean I got kinda baffled reading some of the earlier posts saying how nearly nobody on the English side likes the Ancients/Ascian characters and how they're unfairly maligned because man that is not my experience at all with the more active FFXIV places on the internet.

[ArslanMalqir]

With incompetence ruled out, the only solution left is malice. Kate and the rest of the EN team work in lockstep to ensure that their twisted hackjob is pushed to the English speaking world, with the specific intent of twisting what the game says and means for whatever reason they do it. Despite this going out to millions of players and multiple languages freely available, and despite constant pointing out of the differences in localization between languages, not a word ever gets back to anyone working at Square Enix, or anyone who could possibly tell anyone in Square Enix anything. The EN localization team get away with their crime and trick millions of fans into thinking that Venat was fundamentally good-natured and well-intentioned, and that Zodiark and the Ancients were flawed—statements that the developers never intended to give, despite interviews with Yoshi-P and Ishikawa saying them outright. Presumably the EN localization team got to those too.

Or situation 2: No such conspiracy exists, the team exhibits basic communication and competency, and Yoshi-P and Ishikawa are satisfied with the EN localization despite the tiny ways it differs from the original Japanese text.

I'm going to be blunt—the solution is Situation 2. No conspiracy exists, and whatever goes out to the game, the team is happy with it. Yoshi-P is a man who willingly delayed Endwalker two weeks for bug-fixing and cried on stream about it because of how crushed he was that his own mistakes lead to them having to delay it with barely any warning—he is quite simply not a man who would turn a blind eye to it if his own team were actively changing the meaning of the game, which he has directly called his life's work. None of these changes are actually meaningful unless you think that an ambiguous phrasing about how Venat's actions helped forestall the Final Days (by sealing Zodiark rather than killing him, as context makes obvious) makes the difference between someone thinking Venat did something wrong and someone thinking that Venat was the real villain.

Furthermore, the whole argument is rooted in baffling, honestly sort of offensive assumptions about Yoshi-P and the scenario team. We know that Yoshi-P does speak and read English, the same can be assumed of many of the people working on writing and translating the game, which we know he works directly with and oversees every script produced. We have interview evidence of Ishikawa and a localizer talking about the process, where they say that they literally sat in the same office not too far away from each other during the script-writing process. We know from interviews how Yoshi-P and Ishikawa felt about the Ancients and Venat and all of that, and it all checks out with what is told to us in the EN localization, and every other version.

[ArslanMalqir]

There is no reason to look at this mountain of evidence and come to the conclusion that they are victims of cruel trickery that they are not just unaware of, but incapable of noticing—they don't understand nuance, you see. They're not native speakers. The team is hiding it from them, and they never get a chance to hear it from anyone else. Poor Yoshi-P's close friends are pulling the wool over his eyes while writing the scripts with him. Poor Ishikawa thinks that the scripts are 1:1 and would be devastated to learn the truth. There's just nothing they can do but be taken advantage of.

I don't understand how people don't see how insulting that is—it's an argument rooted in the idea that the native Japanese speaking producers and writers of the game are fundamentally incapable of understanding they are being tricked, incapable of understanding the words on the screen in front of them even when they can speak and write and read English, incapable of even listening to fans when they say that there are clear issues that need to be taken care of. I don't understand why people would rather argue that the entire Japanese side of the development of this game is just so woefully incompetent that they don't even realise when their pride and joy is bastardized in the localization for its widest audience and that every native English speaking worker is malicious and out to change the game to suit their whims than just accept that maybe the team is just happy with the product the EN localization team delivered, and doesn't feel the need to change it.

[Boblawblah]

I grew up in the days of "all your base are belong to us", so I guess I'm biased, and willing to put up with a lot of jank, but I don't find anything off with the localization at all. The meaning is clear, I can follow the story, I'm happy.

[Tsukino]

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.

This is very wrong. Many years ago Koji said something about how they get asked to make things that can be used across all versions, citing the English team as having created the dragons' language and a large amount of player titles (they're in English in the Japanese version of the game, though not always the same). People kept repeating it without quoting it, playing some weird game of telephone until it became "they somehow write the game in English and Japanese simultaneously." They don't, it would be difficult to impossible to even do something like that.

That's not to say that the English team doesn't have much more input than any other localization team for pretty much any other game does - Koji does indeed write background or "lore" for a bunch of stuff, and he's worked out of the Japanese offices and been able to directly bounce ideas around with Yoshida and Ishikawa and the other writers, which is obviously way more involvement than just being the head of a localization team. But this doesn't somehow make the English version co-original, however you think that would work. The script is written in Japanese by native Japanese speakers, and it has an English localization team that has some input, that's it.