This frequency of English localization issues is unacceptable

[Lauront]

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.

You can keep going with your "would haves", "should haves, "uhhhmagerd it's so insulting", "you must be insinuating the localisers are satan/the devs are dumb", I couldn't care less. The differences are there. It is not necessarily due to incompetence, but merely the fact that fairly subtle omissions can be easy to miss if you are not at a high proficiency in a language. But the reasons are of lesser import than the fact that there is some loss of/difference in meaning. It may be due to writer/dev intent, in which case I'd ask "why?", but in my mind that's little more than an assumption at this point.

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:



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.

Sorry, but what's this got to do with localisation? We're aware of that Q&A that casts her in an even worse light. But it's rather besides the point of ostensible differences in meaning in the localisation that go beyond mere "cultural differences".

[KariTheFox]

merely the fact that fairly subtle omissions can be easy to miss if you are not at a high proficiency in a language.

Congratulations, you have identified the central dilemmna at the heart of all efforts to translate something from one language to another. A translation will never be perfect, and a choice somewhere will always be made to leave something out or translate in a way that emphasizes one aspect of the original text over another. It's normal, it happens with every localization and translation.

If it bothers you, I'd suggest looking into multiple different translations to get a fuller picture, or become fluent in the original language. That's what I try to do. It's a lot more satisfying than deranged conspiracy theories.

[Lauront]

Can it with the gaslighting. No one is demanding a "perfect" translation - what we are disputing is that the differences identified are at all necessary. As should be evident from my posts, I do tend to check the FR localisation. I understand that for your diet of deranged conspiracy theories, you prefer consuming a particular subsection of the forum.

[Tsumdere]

When I read the English version and then the Japanese version, they are almost always more or less saying the exact same thing in different verbage. They may take a few more sentences to say the same thing, but they do. The only thing that is drastically different from JP to EN is Haurchefaunt's personality (which some might argue was for the better).

The story we get is the same as the story JP gets.

What seems to be the issue is that EN speaking players interpret the EN translation in wildly different ways due to more fanciful EN wording.

[Rulakir]

I feel the need to point out again that FR and DE aren't having these same problems with the JP script. Pointing out side-by-side dialog examples where EN is the outlier among 3 different languages isn't conspiratorial. Whoever is doing the translating/localization for EN, they seem to be struggling with it if I'm being generous and hopefully (especially with the increased activity this thread is receiving) someone can address it so they can either do a better job next time or be replaced by someone else who can.

"Fanciful wording" also isn't an excuse for the discrepancies that have been documented in this thread either.

[Ransu]

It's a death by a thousand cuts situation when every piece of dialog is treated this way. I haven't even been posting every example I've come across due to the frequency in which it occurs.

Regardless, I have to wonder whose interest it's in to not get the story presented accurately? Also, like I said, this goes back to ShB missing what I'd consider crucial context, but EW is so exponentially worse I don't consider it an issue that can be ignored anymore.

The story is presented accurately. I've played through all the expansions in both English and Japanese. The differences in context are not even remotely as extreme as you want to pretend they are. You're just taking this weird narrative of "Japan is original so any changes are blasphemy" when reality is the script is written in conjunction with each other. Its not written in JP and then translated, its specifically written in both languages at the same time and the nuances between them are adjusted. They have been open about this process in the past and its perfectly fine how they go about it.

[KariTheFox]

Line by line comparisons don't work too well when making a comparison between translations because a translator might have decided to shuffle dialogue around or place something a little earlier or later in the scene to make it flow more naturally in the target language. You'd have to at least compare bigger chunks of dialogue to get a fuller picture of what is lost in translation.

Also, the reason the english is an outlier in these comparisons might be pretty simple. One is a localization, the others are attempts by amatuers to make direct translations into english.

[Ransu]

Line by line comparisons don't work too well when making a comparison between translations because a translator might have decided to shuffle dialogue around or place something a little earlier or later in the scene to make it flow more naturally in the target language. You'd have to at least compare bigger chunks of dialogue to get a fuller picture of what is lost in translation.

People also don't understand that sentence structures in Japanese are completely backwards from English. Add to the fact that the game uses a form of Old English and you have a style that is going to have selective verbiage in which differentiates from the JP script. But as I said, the core message/plot is literally identical. I wish people would get over the minor nuances between the JP and EN scripts.

[Rulakir]

Some of us care about more than just the broader picture, which in regards to EW was a mess in any language. I enjoyed ShB my first playthrough, but learning all of the context and information that was left out in EN made going back through it almost an entirely different experience. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it does to me.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

When I read the English version and then the Japanese version, they are almost always more or less saying the exact same thing in different verbage. They may take a few more sentences to say the same thing, but they do. The only thing that is drastically different from JP to EN is Haurchefaunt's personality (which some might argue was for the better).

The story we get is the same as the story JP gets.

What seems to be the issue is that EN speaking players interpret the EN translation in wildly different ways due to more fanciful EN wording.

I think part of the problem is many making this comparison also aren't natively English speaking. They keep referring to the French translation, which leads me to believe French is their native language