#efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

#anyway i love cuchulainn #efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

Another thing that's... kinda odd about the English translation is in the DRK quests, Myste says "A reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely", which is a big line in basically a secret route of the browser game Fallen London. and yeah, it is a cool line and neat to hear it in FF14... it also doesn't really work for Myste? In it's original context, it's about the remains of a dead demi-god-like being, which was cast into a well, seeking a reckoning and leading the player down a route which will irreversibly destroy their character in pursuit of dark secrets.

Which is not what the Myste sections of DRK were about at all, lol.

oh I could rant for hours about dark knight translations. that questline is actually why I first went to scope out the german script, because I heard drk wildly differs between english and japanese and that german generally stays closer to japanese than english does. I translated some of the fray parts here actually, though you'll note I'm a lot more forgiving of the english script in that one because i hadn't reached sidurgu's parts yet löl

german fray and myste are just completely different characters from english. german myste is upbeat and energetic. he loves people who help others and feels a strong urge to help them in turn. he spawned from the dark knight crystal in response to the loneliness of countless dark knights stored within it so he could console them and be their friend, he's basically the will of the soul crystal itself. he tries to alleviate that loneliness by facilitating reunions with lost loved ones but grows frustrated that this only leads to more partings, so he tries to expand his powers to maintain his illusions forever, because more than anything he just doesn't want to leave his dear friends the dark knights alone. he represents the childish wish at the core of every dark knight for a world where nobody has to lose anyone again.

in the part of the quests where you take myste to the sea of clouds there's this bit where in english he talks about his guilt complex and lets slip that this is also your guilt. in german he tells you that he was always with these people who fight hard for others, watching from the sides, until one day he heard a cry of loneliness and since then he's been trying his best to help people too. that's the moment that for me really hammered it in that these languages fundamentally disagree on what it even means to be a dark knight.

in english myste is desperate to atone for everything he's ever done and fray is your self preservation instinct who is kinda mad that you let it get this far, but they have to forgive him because you're all you have as you walk this lonely and bloody path that you have to believe is right. in german myste is your ideal, the desire to comfort those who have no-one else, crying that maybe it's better to forget altogether if partings can't be avoided and fray is your human heart who agrees that parting will always hurt but that is exactly where you find the strength to continue the fight, because it is worthwhile even if it never ends, and the path may be lonely but you will never walk it alone when there are people who came before you and who will come after you who all share this same dream of a kinder world. of course you won't have to leave us, you're our ideal, you're what we do it all for, as long as we remain dark knights you'll be with us. this all flows very naturally into drk-as-shadowbringers-class and ardbert's deal too but since I haven't reached shb in german yet I don't want to say anything extensive about it yet

i still think english drk was cooking with even your repressed feelings being repressed + the part of yourself that wants to protect itself obviously trying to protect itself and thus not wanting to show vulnerability so en fray postures as the stronger one who will protect you instead, and that fray writing in the journal (and only being able to be honest in a place where you're unlikely to look unless you don't know where to go) is incredibly clever. but in the context of how english treats sidurgu and just the way they handle the entire rest of the game really i also don't think that they were intentionally going for this kind of subtlety, it feels to me more like they just thought sincerity is cringe like usual and decided to make everyone cool and edgy (and thus needlessly mean to each other) instead.

and yeah english fucking loves to just yoink lines from other media whether it's appropriate or not. they turned zenos' final words to wol into a hamilton reference in english, "my first friend, my enemy" is a hamilton line, he doesn't ever call you his enemy in any other language (in german he calls you his hunter though which yes is incredibly horny of him). I'll admit I'm not in a good position to judge whatever epic references the german script makes because I'm unfamiliar with german language popular media so I won't spot them unless someone else points them out but I do know that when german fray quotes fight club it just enhances their characterisation as trying to sound cool and intimidating but failing because they're really kind of lame and awkward and can't hide how stoked they are to hang out with you.

#cyborg squid #king of asks #efksiv #ffxiv

[tainbocuailnge]

hi, i made a website to host my various translations of german ffxiv! please check it out if you're interested in the game's localisation differences! every scene I have translated on there comes with the official english script next to it for comparison and it's all color coded and mobile responsive.

most of the scenes on there are from stormblood right now but I have something for every expansion, and I translated the dark knight questline in its entirety since it's the reason I started looking into these differences in the first place

#ffxiv #ff14 #final fantasy xiv #translation #efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

Hey, sorry to send an ask without us knowing each other 😅

But I just saw you in the tags in the post about jrpg translations, saying that FF14 has better translations in other languages.

Can you talk more about that?😊

I played in English before and it was okay. I tried German too, but was a bit disappointed. So hearing you say that, I'm genuinely curious to hear more!

I've been replaying msq in german and wrapped up tsukuyomi just yesterday and it's insane the extent to which german is more thematically consistent and has stronger and more nuanced characterisation than english. i think the german script is more poetic too, despite english trying so much harder to sound flowery and important. I've been translating bits and pieces to my friends and I keep feeling like I'm presenting them with that botched jesus painting restoration because I just don't know how to convey how beautifully constructed some of these sentences are. the german translation team are genuinely very good writers.

as an example of what kind of differences we're dealing with here, and since it's what I finished most recently, in german from the start there's a lot more emphasis on how it was systematic mistreatment from the "good old" doma that lead yotsuyu to where she is, and that her cruelty is specifically retribution for the way doma has failed her (as opposed to english trying to frame it as in large part to satisfy her personal sadistic impulses). gosetsu is repeatedly shown to be sympathetic towards her for this even while she's actively trying to hurt and kill him (as opposed to english having him be sarcastically dismissive of her), which makes it make way more sense that he'd take tsuyu in his care later even without the "also she reminds him of his dead daughter" bit (that they do still tack on at the end but doesn't feel like a handwave excuse as much because of aforementioned consistent sympathy).

in english hien has several lines showing he's hostile to and wary of tsuyu and waiting for the right opportunity to kill her, but in german hien brings up killing tsuyu one (1) time and when gosetsu argues for her right to live hien agrees, and the difficulty in keeping her around is not his personal dislike but that it's hard to guarantee her safety when the doman people will want violent retribution in turn (in clear parallel to lyse trying to keep fordola from getting lynched without a fair trial). because german hien is not constantly talking about how he wishes he could just kill yotsuyu for her crimes, it doesn't read as pathetically incompetent of him to let her sneak out of the mansion multiple times because he was treating her as harmless citizen of doma instead of an enemy of the state (because german in general emphasises a lot that she SHOULD have had a place in doma), and her backstory is taken seriously as part of his motivation to create a better doma that she perhaps could've had a peaceful life in

there are many cases like this where german displays a nuance that english doesn't, and from very early on. in english arr cid ran away from the empire out of moral disagreements, in german it's clear that he also holds a complicated resentment over losing his father to project meteor and then his replacement father figure gaius to a similar mad search for power, something that in english doesn't come up until all the way in shadowbringers with bozja. in english castrum meridianum livia says she's going to kill you because gaius is hers, in german she's mad at you because you killed her friend mr cape westwind and is going to kill you before you can take gaius from her too.

in german heavensward thordan sounds much more convinced of his principles. when you defeat him in english he's horrified of how you could possibly overcome the amount of faith he's powered by, in german he's horrified that the future of ishgard will be thrown into chaos in the name of your pursuit of truth. gaius sounds more convinced of the ideals he spouts too, and it feels more plausible that he has people willing to die for him and his ideals. in german the similarities between nidhogg and estinien are clearer, and when nidhogg possesses him he insidiously frames it as an act of kindness.

in german, many random moments of misogyny in the english script outright don't exist. matoya doesn't make fun of alphinaud for looking like a girl. alphinaud isn't dismissive of alisaie in binding coils. most of the lines in english that insult or dismiss yotsuyu as an evil whore don't exist in german, and lines that weren't about her at all in english turn out to express sympathy towards her in german. in english hydaelyn had minfilia fuse with her by force, in german it was minfilia's idea. in english i was bothered by lyse being made head of the resistance because she sounds so unsure of what to do and think right until the end, in german she's full of conviction and clarity of purpose. I'm sincerely convinced the english team hates women.

because german doesn't go out of its way to sound like some kind of ancient wizard prophecy at every turn, several scenes which in english were confusing convey their information clearly in german (I'm particularly thinking about the minfilia anitower scene here). characters talk clearly and with a lot of personality that english fails to achieve because everyone has to speak faux old english. and because most characters talk like real people instead of ancient wizards in german it's extra cute that urianger does in fact talk like an ancient wizard.

as a more personal gripe, I have noticed several moments where the english script centers the warrior of light and their importance and struggles, while in german those scenes where about, like, the character the scene is about. german wol is still hydaelyn's favourite freak of nature and everyone loves them obviously, but as the example most fresh in my memory there's the scene in early post-stb where you visit fordola in her cell and she unwillingly looks into wol's past thanks to her fake echo. in english, she asks wol how they can bear all the suffering other people have put them through. in german, she asks how wol manages to stay sane when the echo makes you so deeply aware of the suffering of others. in the flashback of her past you see in that scene the german script also mentions that her face tattoo is an ala mhigan design, which makes it clearer than it was in english that she was specifically trying to rise the ranks of the imperial military as ala mhigan and makes her motivations more coherent - namely wanting to prove both the ala mhigans who hated her for being garlean and the garleans who hated her for being ala mhigan wrong by achieving success as both (and the power to lash out at both).

there have been very, very few moments where I actually thought the english script was better (shiva's trial lines and like, one line hien says at the steppe, that's it), and the vast majority of the time german is anywhere from about the same quality as english to just insanely better. the english script is so concerned with sounding cool and important that it becomes scared of letting characters be motivated by emotion. it's plagued by the kind of insincerity and insecurity that plagues so much of western media and leads to movie superheroes making fun of their own costumes. the english script will write one good line and then keep repeating that line ad nauseam and yet still fail to achieve the amount of internal thematic consistency the german script has, because english is relying on this handful of cool lines to carry its emotional core instead of actually letting the emotional core drive the characters. combined with the consistent pattern of dumbing down and/or vilifying female characters frankly I want to beat koji fox with hammers.

I'm actually very curious what about the german script disappointed you. the german voice acting is not good so if that's what turned you off I completely get it (I play with jp voices myself) but that's separate from the actual writing. these kind of things will ultimately always come down to personal preference so i won't judge but as you can tell from these several paragraphs i feel very strongly about the quality of the german script so I find it hard to imagine why you think that

#riverrabbits #king of asks #efksiv #ffxiv

[tainbocuailnge]

#efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

its so incredibly fucking funny to me that they tried to rehabilitate lahabrea's image in pandemonium by making him this really stern responsible man when throughout basically his entire existence in the game until then he's been defined by being like, a cackling villain who keeps insisting he's not owned while slowly shrinking into a corn cob, and then they tried to make it plausible that he really used to be this stern responsible man by telling you he became like that because his evil wife left him the rock that makes you evil in her will. it makes you white too apparently. limitless comedy

#anyway i love cuchulainn #efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

anyway i think its really funny that when zenos at the royal menagerie is like do you wanna be friends and hang out :) he doesn't even like it when you say yes. if you say yes he's like lol as if, we both know we're here to fight. and if you say no he's like yeah you get it, we're here to fight. funniest bitch in eorzea

#efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

i dont think its just that ffxiv fans don't read and i don't think it's just the myriad issues with the english translation making things hard for those who do read either i think a significant chunk of it is also that many ffxiv fans aren't used to reading fate even though natsuko ishikawa writes so blatantly fatelike. if you want to increase your understanding of shadowbringers you should read fate/stay night. they cast junichi suwabe for fucks sake.

#efksiv #real gamers knew ardbert's entire arc the moment he first opened his mouth

[tainbocuailnge]

What your favourite FFXIV character says about you

Alphinaud: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Alisaie: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Y'sthola: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Urianger: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Thancred: You should play Fate/Stay Night

G'raha: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Estinien: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Ysayle: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Aymeric: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Haurchefant: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Ardbert: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Lyse: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Zenos: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Yugiri: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Yotsuyu: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Fordola: You should play Fate/Stay Night

Ryne: You should play Fate/EXTRA

Gaia: You should play Fate/EXTRA CCC

Emet-Selch: You should play Fate/Grand Order Cosmos in the Lostbelt chapter 4 Samsara of Genesis and Terminus: Yugakshetra

Elidibus: You should play Fate/EXTRA CCC

Hermes: You should play Fate/Grand Order Cosmos in the Lostbelt chapter 6 Fairy Round Table Territory: Avalon le Fey

Meteion: You should play Fate/Grand Order Cosmos in the Lostbelt chapter 6 Fairy Round Table Territory: Avalon le Fey

Erichthonios: You should play Tsukihime

Venat: Fate/Stay Night again

#anyway i love cuchulainn #efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

stormblood genuinely has really good character work outside the handful of jarring moments where characters suddenly say or do incredibly stupid and/or ooc stuff because they really needed this particular plot beat to happen (and those moments are all the more jarring because the character work is genuinely strong for so much of it otherwise!). i think more than anything stormblood was really ambitious and it ended up trying to do more than it could actually deliver on a lot of points because of that, so it keeps having something good going and then suddenly doing something very stupid that takes you out of it, as opposed to like, heavensward imo having a lower standard of character work but far less jarring weak points so you end up remembering it as being way better overall. ive been talking myself in circles for days on whether i think stormblood is good or not and I think if it weren't for the horrendous optics of the fantasy japanese prince obtaining the highest seat of power in fantasy mongolia so he can reclaim the chinese styled fantasy japanese mainland stormblood wouldn't be nearly as contentious but, well, that's not something that's easy to overlook

#efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

the thing about FFXIV and character voice and my replaying in german that i keep running into is that most of the time I don't even notice the character voice is significantly different in german because the character talks like how I remember them talking. and then I see literally anyone open their mouth in english and they don't actually talk like that, they talk in a stupider and more generic way. estinien and sidurgu are both irreverent older brother type knights running on hyper vengeance trauma and getting mad at moogles for harshing their chuuni vibe but because the german writers are good at character voice there's still a clear distinction between estinien as guy who plays tony hawk on his xbox 360 and sidurgu who plays call of duty on his xbox one. it's all so natural. you know exactly what i mean by that and they talk exactly like that. but not in english. in english they're forced to say mayhap.

#efksiv #one day that tag will be something other than bitching about localisation maybe but its the thing i want to share the most thoughts on #they talk like people you know in german. they talk like real people in german. even zenos talks in a way that someone would actually talk.

[tainbocuailnge]

garlemald was inevitably going to be hard to write about in endwalker bc it started out being the cartoonishly evil empire but i think the writers also made it even harder for themselves during stormblood bc the tone was more serious but the empire still evil so the list of crimes got more detailed and heinous. and ala mhigo liberation arc isn’t really the right time to start humanizing the oppressor but the longer they put that off the harder it got to pull off and now i have people in the notes of my art saying wol is completely justified in massacring garleans actually. helping garlemald is the right thing to do because the people dying out on the streets are not the ones who signed off on the imperialist policies but the more nuanced takes on garlean imperialism and propaganda came so late in the game that all the garleans who don’t immediately denounce the empire's evils look like fucking idiots for taking pride in cartoonish evil, even though given the premises set up in universe their stance is understandable if unsustainable.

it would've gone a long way if there were some garlean deserters in the ala mhigan resistance or something bc until maxima and his populares in stb postgame the only garlean we meet who's not a raging imperialist is like. cid. nero is a deserter but not really for moral reasons he just wants to bother cid and gaius in stb postgame still believes in imperialism just not the ascian kind. all the others we see desert were forced conscripts to begin with. typical scrambling to recover from stormblood botching its execution situation tbh. i also think ew postgame is resolving diplomatic tensions with garlemald way too easily but that's more personal preference for complicated and difficult situations than an actual failure to write the story they're trying to write here.

#anyway i love cuchulainn #extremely rare efksiv opinion post on main from me make sure to savour it #endwalker spoilers #efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

i tend to hone in on the dark knight questline when it comes to translation differences in ffxiv because it has perhaps the largest difference between languages in the game, at least as far as I've seen, and it's also one of the cases where the german script (generally known for sticking pretty close to jp) also does its own thing. I actually went over the entirety of both en and de versions of it again the other day because I'd been meaning to translate it for comparison and one thing I noticed this time is that en actually has more lines, as in, optional lines when you talk to characters after they gave you the next quest objective that in german would just repeat the last line they said, in english would say something different. the journal entries changing depending on whether you have the job crystal equipped or not is also unique to the english version.

it's interesting because to me it shows that they really felt incredibly strongly about their take on dark knight and put a lot of serious effort into pulling it off. it's actually improved my opinion of english drk a little because clearly someone really believed in what they were writing here and used absolutely everything they had available to try and make it work. but even with that extra text to work with I still think the german version delivered their concept better and had a clearer vision of what they wanted to say with these quests. because the english team are just not as good at writing as they seem to think they are.

in my recent replay of stormblood in german there were so many scenes that made me think "you know what, maybe stormblood isn't as bad as I remembered it being", and then when I went to double check the english version of that scene it actually was as stupid as i remember it being. and often the thing that makes it stupid is like, lyse displaying confidence and competence in de but talking herself down in en, or yotsuyu pointing out the systematic failures that brought her where she is in de but indulging in personal sadistic tendencies in en. and making your antagonists dumber and more evil is one thing but the fact that they also made lyse sound so insecure and incompetent at so many points when she's the main character of the expansion, it's just so baffling to me. are we supposed to believe she can lead the resistance movement or not?

so knowing that de will generally be closer to jp than en is but does occasionally have major deviations of its own, and seeing all these stormblood scenes where one of the big glaring differences between en and de is that en keeps dumbing down and vilifying (female) characters that have more nuance and with it more thematic consistency in de, that leaves basically two options. either the japanese script had that nuance and the english translators were so full of misogyny that they decided to remove it, or the japanese script didn't have it either and it's the german translators that decided to not hate women actually. and while i don't know enough japanese to be sure, listening to the jp voicelines does give me reason to believe that the jp script is harsher to yotsuyu than de at various points, so it's probably a bit of both.

so, yknow, I can't make a sweeping statement of being against major script changes in localisation in general without being a hypocrite because the de script has at multiple times done its own thing in a way that i consider either an improvement or at least an interesting alternative of roughly equivalent quality. but that's also exactly what my problem with ffxiv localisation is, that when the en script has major deviations it's almost always some stupid shit like adding gendered slurs (they love calling a woman a bitch or a whore in english it gets really glaring when you start putting individual lines next to each other) and transphobia (matoya does not make fun of alphinaud looking like a girl in german) and removing instances of characters openly saying they care about something (thancred calling ryne his daughter in every language but english) and generally destroying all character voice, and when de changes things it's like, well written and makes sense even if it's different. so the en team looking down on the script theyre translating and changing it is hubristic overconfidence but when the de team does it they actually have the writing chops to back it up

#efksiv

[tainbocuailnge]

#efksiv #ffxiv #this post is about how they use female pronouns for omega in the german script

[tainbocuailnge]

really fucked myself with this whole replaying in german thing cuz now even fancontent that closely adheres to the (english) text makes me go 'they wouldn't fucking say that' quick everyone go learn a whole new language so you can get mad on the internet with me

#efksiv #uauaughghg. we dont talk about ffxiv here though

[tainbocuailnge]

i briefly mentioned it already in that ask the other day but the more i think about it the more instances i can remember of the english script elevating your player character as uniquely important and special in a way german doesn't, to the point of warping things to be more about them than they are in german. in binding coils theres the scene where alphinaud tells you to keep an eye on alisaie and help her sort her shit out and in english he says something along the lines of you were the key to him figuring out his own purpose so you'll surely do the same for alisaie, and in german he asks you to make sure she doesn't get herself killed while she figures out her own shit. english thordan fearing your power vs german thordan fearing for ishgard's future as he's dying. the previously mentioned fordola jail visit where in english shes like omg youre so uniquely tortured and in german she's like how tf do you cope with excruciating awareness of how commonplace suffering is. the way english dark knight is about how uniquely tortured wol is vs german dark knight being about how you are very much not the only one to go through this. which absolutely isn't to say that people don't kiss your ass in german they very much do but like, there's a notably smaller amount of asskissing. all of which is to say it's kind of insane how many gripes i have and/or which ive seen other people have with (english) ffxiv are either not as bad or outright nonexistent in another language. did i mention yet how much the english script seems to fucking hate women.

#efksiv