Quote Originally Posted by Eorzean_username View Post
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.
Here's the thing though the joke and the point about Beatin is that he's way too much into wood. I saw someone post the German which tends to do a 1:1 translation of the JP and said that he still talks about how he really likes the smell and feel of planks of wood. So, sure it's probably less innuendo than the English. Yet, the dev team has on more then one occasion said they all work together when it comes to the localization and translation of the game where some things do originate from the English side. They know and ok it when the English side gets more flowery. As long as the main idea gets across. There are plenty of times when a word or a phrase doesn't exist in whatever language you're translating to. Or some jokes don't work well if it was a 1:1 due to how just the words themselves are funny or they sound like something else that only those who speak the language will understand. Not that I think anyone is going to be able to convince you about any of this.