Another Plea to the JP team to provide direct EN Translation for the JP Audio/Text

[RaionKansen]

The English localization continues to deviate from the actual Japanese used in several voiced scenes and lines from NPCs during battle content encounters.

This also means that most of the text in the EN version also deviates from the JP text.

I would really love it if we had the option to have the English subtitles/text to be a direct translation of the original Japanese, rather than what is provided in the English dub when playing with Japanese audio selected.

It is very frustrating to be stuck with the EN Dub subtitles when I understand enough Japanese to notice times when the lines are completely different.

I strongly believe that the integrity of the original text/dialogue is important and it is frustrating that I cannot experience it because I am not fluent in Japanese.

[Zero-ELEC]

If you are not fluent in Japanese, how can you be sure that the English localisation is wrong?

Learn more Japanese and play it in Japanese! You will improve yourself and you will have more legs to stand on to complain about the official translation! N3 probably a good place to aim for!

[RaionKansen]

If you are not fluent in Japanese, how can you be sure that the English localisation is wrong?

Learn more Japanese and play it in Japanese! You will improve yourself and you will have more legs to stand on to complain about the official translation! N3 probably a good place to aim for!

Because its wrong and I understand enough Japanese. You don't need to be fluent to understand like 80% of dialogue.

There's a handful of examples from this most recent patch alone.

Do you want me to go through them?

[Margasian]

Western players strongly support and defend localization even when it changes many things or adds sexual harrasment jokes (you can check this: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-Ishgard-quest)
Unfortunately, "if you don't like, just study Japanese and play in it!" is the only answer you will get. The amount of the game content is too big to even make a new translation (like Spanish), and they won't make just another English version only because lesser part of the community wants to understand the original script. Final Fantasy is still in 90s' localizations era, with the same "quality".
I understand your feelings, having personally encountered plenty of insults for comparing versions. But, unfortunately, SE is still a company, and it sees no benefit in "translation, not localization", as long as the overwhelming majority accepts localization without question (though I suspect it's completely done without checkings, considering the Moenbryda minion description hasn't been changed in about 10 years).

The only thing I can advise is switching the client language to Japanese and use a screen translator for the sentences you have difficulties with (it's not a third-party tool as it just captures the screen whatever the image is, no influence to the game process).

[DPZ2]

The Japanese team is probably never going to provide what you’re asking for. English simply isn’t their working language, and, much like how North American students learn Spanish or German, school‑level English education in Japan doesn’t produce the kind of fluency needed for accurate translation. Even after a year of high‑school German, all it really gave me was enough to skip first‑year college German and ask where the train station is.

The point is: localization is not translation.

The JP development team are not English translators, and they’re certainly not responsible for producing direct‑language subtitles. That’s the job of the localization teams, who rewrite lines to fit tone, voice direction, and regional expectations—not to mirror the Japanese script word‑for‑word.

[Reginald_Cain]

Weeaboo yelling at cloud much? Seriously why are you playing with jp audio if you arent using jp text? That's pointless and screams weeb with no actual argument besides I wanna sound cool on the forums because I pretend im bilingual but still need English subs. Nonsense and anything you say to defend this nonsense is intelectual dishonesty.

[Aderyn_Seren]

The main problem is that as long as players enjoy jokes about sex and harassment, feces and urine, and until they understand what's behind the tons of fanservice with "mommy" Y'shtola and the Ancients-our-friends-forever, with Alisaie, whose character of a feisty aristocratic girl (and in the JP version she has a very refined manner of speaking) was replaced by the character of a typical boorish younger sister from Western films and TV series, where siblings hate and insult each other and only in times of trouble do they unite (which, in fact, does not describe the real relationship between Alphinaud and Alisaie at all, localization literally changes the character's personality, adapting it to the most banal media templates), then nothing will change, and after years of playing FFXIV I understand that players never will be interested in what the original meaning of the scriptwriters was put into the game. It's sad, but it's true. When important plot points are changed for the sake of fanservice, no one cares about the smaller details, you can see it even in messages that people write here.