NTE's EN translation is actively ruining the story.
Posting this on behalf of u/09eragera09 since he's new to the sub and can't post, and I'd rather not have him encounter spoilers for 5 subreddit karma. I apologize if it's against some rule.
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TL;DR: I'm a JP->EN game translator, years of experience. While playing, couldn't help but notice a metric ton of mistakes that range from confusing wording to straight up the opposite of what the characters are saying. It actively ruins the plot, making the character motivations inconsistent, and introducing plot holes where there are none. Images included with the post, see for yourself.
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Hey all. I recently came back to the game (3-4 days ago) after having quit in 1.1, due to the slop-grade localization and a general lack of content. My main motivation for coming back was of course pulling for Zankou, and doing 999 Nights (Eureka from FF14, anyone?). However, the latest story patch has localization so poor that I'm genuinely having trouble believing it. The localization hasn't improved, it has only gotten worse with every successive patch. For context, I'm a full time JP->EN game translator, and during 1.0 I had to re-translate only a few lines here and there for my friends. During 1.1, I had to translate several of them. In 999 Nights, I had to do every other line, and the latest patch is so bad that I'm effectively doing live retranslation for every line from Japanese (I've attached images to this post so you guys can see).
Now yes, I am aware that the Japanese in itself is a TL from the Chinese, and that the EN is also a TL of the Chinese. But the differences shouldn't be THIS massive, THIS nonsensical (the EN dialogue straight up doesn't make sense, doesn't match the characters, etc) and somehow it's always EN localization that suffers such "creative liberties" in these games. Look at the EN dialogue and my Japanese->EN translations, and tell me if you really think that the EN lines are somehow better. I cannot help but wonder if even a straight Google Translate/ChatGPT translation of the dialogue would be an improvement over what we've currently got. If any of you know Chinese and would like to contribute, please do.
I have emailed Perfect World about this as well, and received no response. I've been complaining about the localization in every survey I've gotten as well. I would love to hear the community's take on this, and find whether there's anything we can do, because I like the game, and the poor localization is really making a decent product so much worse. We as players deserve better, and I think we should make our voices heard.