by Kokuyōka — 黒曜火
TLDR: English FFXVI is more of an adaption of Japanese FFXVI than a translation or localization of it.
Living on Their Own Terms
At the end of Final Fantasy XVI, Clive Rosfield burns away the old world order of Ultima to replace it with his own and declares, “These… These are our terms”. To say that is an excellent summation of what seems to have happened with FFXVI’s English translation is an understatement. When it comes to the terminology used by FFXVI to describe what is going on in the story, particularly in the “deep lore” of the story, it is as if the English translation swapped out a great number of terms the original Japanese script uses for terms of its own.
There is undoubtedly a larger discussion to be had about what the goal of translation and localization actually is. However, it is generally assumed that the point of translation is to communicate the original writer’s meaning in a different language than they write in as accurately as possible. Localization is based on the same idea, with a greater appreciation for how different languages use different terminology and turns of phrase to convey the same concept. But the key there is “the same concept”. Not a different one.
And this is where FFXVI’s English translation gets into a lot of sticky situations with terminology. The terms it very often uses for concepts simply do not communicate the same concept in English as they communicate in Japanese. This is not a case were English does not have the concepts Japanese is using in its vocabulary already either. It very much does. It is simply not using the terms that mean those same concepts.
Concepts, especially in the context of a long complicated story, are not something that can be substituted for each other without having major effects on everything they interact with. If a concept is changed, then everything in the story that depends on it changes. Sometimes in a minor way, sometimes in a major way. When the concepts getting changed are the ones under-girding the entire thematic logic of a story, that is going to have some very large-scale changes across the entire story. And the types of changes FFXVI’s English translation makes to its concepts by using its own terms are very substantial indeed. The effects of those changes on the story are no less small.
Once is an Anomaly, Twice is a Coincidence, Three Times is…
One of the more overlooked aspects of translation is the frequency at which major changes to the meaning of the original language happens. If major changes to the meaning do not happen very often, then the effect of the changes is often greatly diminished over the course of the story and it suggests that the major changes are either accidents or very carefully considered. If major changes in meaning happen very often, then the effects of that is often very pronounced. It also suggests that the changes to the original language’s meaning were being done on purpose rather than by accident.
With FFXVI’s English translation, the frequency of changes is astounding. In fact, the odds are better at there will be a major change to the meaning of any given line of dialogue in some way (vocabulary choices, VA line delivery style, etc.) than that there will not be any. This becomes almost a guaranteed certainty the more important a given line of dialogue is for establishing a world-building concept or a significant characterization moment.
Because changes to meaning happen so often in FFXVI’s English translation, the effects of those changes to the story snowball extremely early, especially in characterization, and they can be extremely large. Large enough that the logic for why the final boss cannot just absorb the hero at will is just about the opposite in Japanese as it is in English. The other effect the high rate of frequency of changes has is that it makes it very difficult to see the changes as happening due to honest mistakes or random chance. It instead comes across as a purposeful decision to not translate things accurately on the translators’ parts.
That last effect is probably the worst effect out of all of this. Translation does not work without the person reading the translation trusting the translator to a large extent. And FFXVI’s English translation cannot be trusted to be an accurate translation of what FFXVI’s original writer is attempting to communicate to the audience in their original language. There are too many substantial changes to FFXVI’s story that happen too often for that to happen.
Translating for the Scene, Not the Story
Despite the the major issues of both terminology differences as well as how often those differences occur, it might be possible to argue those changes make sense if their overall effect resulted in a well-written story on its own merits. With the trouble being that, there are a lot of problems FFXVI’s English translation has on that front. This is particularly noticeable in Act 3 (post-Twinside). In Act 3, FFXVI’s English story thematically falls apart on itself, and it is by far the weakest section of the story as a result.
This last issue is a more interesting problem, as if the English translation was a more accurate translation of the original Japanese story, then this would be a writing issue rather than a translation issue. Which is not the case. Act 3 has much, much stronger writing in Japanese and it ties all the themes of Acts 1 and 2 together in the finale. FFXVI’s English translation cannot do this anywhere near as well.
Why FFXVI’s English translation cannot do this is easiest to explain by looking at the scale its translation works best at. In the moment of any given scene, the English translation works just fine, is pretty slick grammatically and often very entertaining to listen to. The trouble is that to get there, FFXVI’s English translation does its usual thing of seeming not to care about accurately translating the meaning of the Japanese story. It cares a lot more about how things sound and feel when they’re spoken in English in the moment.
It then does that with seemingly every single scene in the game without checking to see if the new terminology the script now uses in English matches itself across the scenes. The English translation’s terminology is never guarantied to be consistent across the larger scale of the story. Instead, it is a jumble of terms that may or may not have anything to do with each other in the original language.
Because of this, FFXVI’s English translation comes off like it completely gutted FFXVI’s Japanese story of the main theme holding the entire story together, only to try to patch the gaping holes with a bunch of smaller themes that are all competing for attention. And without having a writer who could get them all to work together nicely. The result is a story never spends enough time exploring one theme it can develop strongly enough to support the final act of the story as a unified whole.
Stories are not just “a series of linear events happening to the same group of people”. They are a series of events that have a thematic core linking them together somehow. Good writing very often highlights what that thematic core is from as many different angles as possible through the lens of the events of the story. When the thematic core is changed, the story cannot help but change alongside with it. When a singular theme is changed into many different ones, the events it was linking together are no longer thematically linked together. And the accumulated changes FFXVI’s English translation did to the original Japanese majorly changed FFXVI’s theme in many different ways.
Making individual scenes work is one of the very few things FFXVI’s English translation can be argued to a good job at however. Within a given scene, the English translation is highly entertaining to watch and listen to. It just sacrificed a lot of other things that go into good storytelling on a larger scale to be able to pull that off. And changes to a story never happen in a vacuum.
Is English FFXVI Really a Translation?
Up until now, I have been using “translation” pretty generically. Mainly because settling on any one name for what FFXIV’s English translation is is rather difficult. The number of terminology changes alone suggest that if it is a translation, it is not a very accurate one. Even calling it a “localization” seems like a stretch at times given all of the other types of changes I decided not to go into here (like characters having very different personalities between Japanese and English).
When it comes to describing the relationship between FFXVI’s Japanese script and FFXVI’s English translation, I rarely use any terms associated with the act of translating a work from one language into another. I find myself reaching for concepts that have much more to do with adaptations of works from one medium or genre into another. I have even thought of FFXVI’s English translation as a “software fork” of FFXVI’s Japanese script at times!
If I am thinking about the types of changes that FFXVI’s English translation made to FFXVI’s Japanese script though, there are two examples that involve translating and adapting Japanese media that it reminds me of. The first is ’90s Funimation anime translations. Just if they were of a higher English writing quality. The second is how a great many of the most famous classic Westerns really were jidaigeki (Japanese period dramas) that were rewritten to fit into how Hollywood portrayed the wild west. Both of those examples can work fine on their own merits, but people who are familiar with the original source material they are based on will see and notice different things about them that should be there but are not thanks to the adaption process. There is a sense where FFXVI’s Localization Team (at least its English localization team) feels a lot more like a group of scriptwriters adapting a foreign script for (what they perceive to be) the sensibilities of a domestic audience rather than a group of translators trying to communicate to their audience what the original scriptwriter actually wrote the story to be about.
Which…After translating as much of FFXVI as I have, is where I ultimately have landed on about its English translation. English FFXVI is much more of an adaption of Japanese FFXVI than a translation or even a localization of it. The types of changes made to it, the frequency of the changes made to it, where those changes wind up showing up in the story the most… All those are much more in line with what an adaptation of a story is like rather than what a translation of a story is like. And adaptations are much more prone to wanting to “live on their own terms”…