Let's talk about localizations

Nowadays the idea of localization most of the time ends with a terrible idea of how butchered and bad written the game is going to be.
However there have been cases where localizations tend to benefit the products even when they made changes (small changes).
The first example that comes to my mind is Fire Emblem 7. Eliwood was pretty bland, submissive, shy for a Lord, with little to no personality, but on the Western version they changed his script and made him more heroic and strong changing some of the dialogues to make him a more memorable character.

But there were some other changes too, Lyndis was 15 on the japanese version and they age her up to 18 on the western version.
NoA mistaked a part of the dialogue on the final battle with Nergal, changing the dialogue which said "Ae..r" for "Aegir" (Aegir = Quintessence in Japanese while Aenir was the name of the female Ice Dragon and what Nergal meant with "Ae..r" instead of Aegir) and while the translation was on point and made more sense than a literal translation it changed some subtle meaning of what were Nergal motivations to become the villain that he was.

And this leaves me with the question, what makes a localization "good"? should localizations just try to translate everything and make no changes? A localization can try to make characters or story more memorable/likeable (if they can) without changing the plot behind it? Can they add more content or make some content better?

Transliterate everything. It's the only way to get an authentic experience.

Let's not. Just an excuse for more cherrypicking and shitposting.

I just want a straight translation. I dont care if a character is shit, it was like that in the og release, so it should be the same in the us release.

Ideally a localization should be accurate with minimal changes beyond what's needed. Mainly sentence flow and substituting jokes, figures of speech, and references that don't transition well into western languages with similar ones (and admittedly in the case of games set in a specific region of the world, leaving cultural specific things in might actually add to experience and let people learn something; one could include translators notes or something in the manual, if those were still a physical thing anyhow).

Unfortunately, a lot of the companies/teams these days (though it's not a new problem; see Working Designs) seem to think they can write better than the original script authors, and toss various stuff out, toss their own stuff in that was nowhere in the original script (or over-embellishes what was there), and at times are all too happy to censor things either because they think doing so will net them a wider audience or because they themselves are getting triggered by the content there (it seems a bit odd that with some companies like NISA, where bringing niche games over is their whole shtick, that they the very elements that make the games niche to begin with). This leaves various localizations feeling more like rewrites than translations.

I won't say that sixth and seventh gen were free from localization issues, but I'd love to be able to go back to those days compared to the shit various games have been getting slammed with lately. What was done to XCX still angers me.

Good translation necessarily come with small changes, but always to make the translated part more authentic in meaning (better than literal expression) and never because of ulterior motives or "cultural differences" or whatever (because those differences are what is to be sought and not vice versa).

This isn't even the only example, and a lot of the most interesting cases come from Nintendo. Advance Wars: DoR remains one of the games whose localisation is most curious for me. The European version had a straight-up translation of the script, as barebones and lifeless as can be. That script itself wasn't astonishingly clever - the plot and characters are good and fine, but the dialogue is the most stale delivery you could ever have conceived. The US version, however, used the dialogue as a baseline and basically rewrote that dialogue into a more nuanced version - all the characters were the same, but they were more fleshed out. The jokester character who only cracks one joke in the EU script now actually makes more regularly timed jokes. I think the best example of the script differences at work is when the main villain explains his motivations in the final battle.

The mad scientist is actually a clone of the original doctor, and because he was produced so carelessly he does not have a value for other lives. He even killed the original just to express his curiosity.
In the US version this is expressed as: "Do you have any idea what it is like? To see yourself die before your very eyes? It is fascinating."
In the EU/Japanese version: "I am but a clone. And I killed the original Doctor Stolos."

In English for the example above, a big change is made, but it's one that's truthful to the original. More so than the original script was, it can be argued.

But look at the changes made in FE: Fates. Don't look at the fact that they were changes, look at their quality. Do you see just how bad it is?

When localising, to change the dialogue is to rewrite it. In that sense, a major gamble is taken - either the localiser gives a more polished version of the script for their region, or they become a pretentious and disrespectful replacement that only think they know better than the writers whose work they are replacing. A quality rewrite that remains truthful will be able to get away with this move. A slip-up like Fates won't.

Localization requires you to change certain things in specific instances for pratical reasons.

For example, let's say they give me OP post to work with, i gotta translate it in italian.
So i look at this

And i translate it

As a translator, i had to look at the phrase, and if was badly constructed try to fix it up, then additionally i had to slightly rebuild it to make more sense in italian structurally.
On top of that i couldn't translate butchered, it would've come out as "maciullato" as the closest word i could've used, but in italian context it sounds ugly and not correct at all when referring to a concept aka a bad translation.
So i had to convey the basic idea without giving you "butchered".

By doing that, did i destroy the character of OP?
Maybe "butchered" was an important part of his way of expressing himself later on in the plot, and this small change i made for pratical reasons will end up snowballing into a lost in translation situation and his character has one detail about him changed forever for those that are reading what he's saying just from my translation.

Now all this, imagine it multiplied A MILLION FUCKING TIMES and you've got the situation you find yourself in when translating anything from japanese.
It's actually a pretty miserable job, it's easy to translate things LITERALLY and not give a single shit, but when translating a game you cna't just translate that shit like it's a bootleg anime subtitle by a small translation group, you need to give proper grammar structure and context to the translation, while at the same time keeping each character personality, and sometimes you'll have to adapt into english dialects and stereoptypes that flat out don't exist in english, in those cases you're sorta trying to inject in the next best thing.

So essentially, do all these complications justify censoring and straight up changing big chunks of video games?
Absolutely not.
And when those changes are fueled by some political agenda or excused with "the wester audience won't be able to understand this" it's completely unforgiveable.

However my point is that even the best translators out there will have to do small changes to keep shit flowing correctly in another language when translating, and sometimes, often on accident, words that could have a bigger meaning in another language end up being lost in translation even if the translator didn't intend for that to be the case.

It's a messy business, it doesn't go smoothly all the time even if you try to do a good job, the more different two languages are, the more chances you have to mess up characters inadvertently.

It depends entirely on the localizers who have to keep in mind that a 1:1 translation results in a flat, boring and nonsensical end-product (only hardcore weebs want a simple English conversion with the only changes being in grammatical structure so it isn't disjointed), but rewriting the script entirely and filling it with whatever bullshit is equally nonsensical. So you have to walk a fine line with it and, at the absolute very least, accurately convey the general gist of each piece of dialogue or bit of a story.

Liberties taken can help and help a lot, as with Kid Icarus Uprising whose US localization is flat-out better than the original JP version, but it depends entirely on what group is taking those liberties.

Anyone that has spent even a few months learning Japanese can tell you that it's literally impossible to have a 1:1 translation to English. Hell, anyone that knows more than one language period can tell you that there is no such thing as a completely perfect translation. That's why it's important to convey the meaning of the original work, and not necessarily an exact replica of the original wording.

Besides the problems with just translating from Japanese to English, there's the technical problem of actually implementing changes. It's not as simple as just swapping out text files - many times translators can't use the exact wording that they'd like, since there are problems with the text actually fitting into the game's text boxes nicely, or at all.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, but there's plenty of reasons why a translation might be different in various ways. Like, as much as I dislike NISA's localization changes I also know that whatever bugs are added to their releases aren't their fault - they don't code in the new dialogue, that's the original parent company. It's not really mentioned, but Gust's games continued to be buggy (just not as game-breakingly so, usually) even after they switched to their own in-house translations. That's why most of NISA's non-NIS titles are fine, in regards to bugs.

Basically translation can be a clusterfuck.