Dutch subtitles

[bjorno94]

Do you plan to ever bring dutch subtitles in the game because for example my girlfriend can't use any language you offer as subtitles and i think there are still a lot of people like her and i personally think is also good for growth of the game ?. Because I think people like her deserve to experience a beautiful story game like final fantasy 14

[Toutatis]

I don’t see it happening. They don’t even have Spanish (475million first language speakers) or Portuguese (230 million speakers) translations.

[GoatOfWar]

Don't most Dutch people speak English better than the Brits themselves anyway?

[bjorno94]

we can then argue that they can also add subtitle spanish and portuguese this is actually a large group of players that you miss out on and not everyone can speak english

[Midareyukki]

we can then argue that they can also add subtitle spanish and portuguese this is actually a large group of players that you miss out on and not everyone can speak english

The issue is that comparing Spanish and Portuguese to Dutch is a different beast. Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands, South Africa (kind of, it's Afrikaans), and in Suriname. Plus give or take a few islands in SEA where the majority of people speak other languages anyway, it's not a native thing. Spanish is widespread across a whole continent and is the 2nd most spoken language, and Portuguese is spoken primarily in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and other countries\regions as a second language\creole, amounting to it being the 6th most spoken language. Those are areas with a high demographic number. Dutch is the 57th, and it's not spoken natively by that many people.

One other aspect of the language for localization is its marketability. Portuguese won't be as marketable as Spanish is. And as much as Bengali is the 5th most spoken language in the world, it won't make it any more marketable than Portuguese or Russian who fall directly below as 6th and 7th respectively. Contrast to French (17th) and Standard German (18th), and you can see why they chose these languages instead. Moreover, they would have to assess the costs of getting localization teams for these languages, which will be hard to get in Japan, much less make internal teams for them. I doubt there are that many dutch speakers in Japan in comparison to Spanish speakers. And getting external teams for those languages is costly.

It is unfortunate that your girlfriend cannot enjoy the game alongside you however. I've also had FC leaders who came from the Netherlands and Italy and couldn't really understand the story because their grasp on English was limited to what they've learned in school. And it's likely that there are people in South America or Africa who cannot enjoy the game because of language barriers. But it does seem to be a cost risk that SE isn't willing to take.

[freekyfreezer]

Like already mentioned, not even Spanish, one of the most spoken languages in the "Western World", is represented. Also remember that all the dialogues and cutscenes make up hundreds, if not thousands of manhours of translating. It would of course be nice to see more access like that, but I fear it won't happen anytime soon, if ever

[Atelier-Bagur]

I'm still here....waiting for a Spanish translation/dub





sadge.

[Shibi]

Although there is an addon for that already - for account safety it would be nice if SE provided official hooks to a translate API.

Should SE do that, then a player could set their source language to French or German and people could officially use an API to transparently machine translate text to anything.