
Originally Posted by
Eorzean_username
This kind of stuff irritates me to no end, but not for reasons of moral panic.
I intensely dislike — outright despise — how much the English "localisation" team just outright-changes the script, and the intention of lines, from the JP original. Other languages tend to remain far more faithful, but of course English thinks its hack translators can write better than the actual paid writers... and the result we get is constantly-mangled stories and scenes, coloured and flavoured to fit the translator's personal biases... or puerile memery and humour.
If the original JP text says something, and English just translates that, I don't care. If the original JP was a stupid masturbation joke that would embarrass most 14 years olds for how simplistic and uncreative it is — "haha wood haha stroke" — then I'd not say anything. Fine, that's the writer's intent.
However, I get really annoyed when the original script is perfectly-straightforward, and it gets "localised" into something completely different. That's not localisation, that's just weird reverse-plagiarism: "Haha I'm not actually qualified to be a real writer, but I can pretend to be by changing someone else's work and leaving their name on it".
So yeah I dislike this, but not because lowbrow sex jokes bother me. Rather, constantly and arrogantly modifying the original script bothers me. I have never liked the justification of "it's LOCALIZED", because it's usually not used for the stated purpose — to make something seem more sensible in a different language. Instead, it's used as carte-blanche for hacks to rewrite scripts to fit their random personal vision for what would be better, rather than actually doing their job as a translator. And XIV is absolutely infested with those kinds of dialogues.