Thank you. Star Ocean 4 was horrific shit in Japanese, and we tried our damnedest to make it less horrific in English, but the client wanted a duplicate of the Japanese. Hence it remained horrific.
Either have a superior enough knowledge of English that you can work closely with your translators, integrate them into the production team, and make the work true to your visions (see: Matsuno/AOS/Reeder, among others), or leave the translators alone and let them do things the way they see fit.
NichM said:
Mai Namba is a fantastic translator (I work with her on almost every project and on the ones where I don't, I wish I was) but she's Atlus USA staff, not From. I worked with her on fixing up a lot of the B team's item and spell names and descriptions, the canned messages you can write on the ground, and various other things.
Orayn said:
They asked someone at SCEE for help, and got connected with some Scottish production company. I believe the same group was also responsible for Dark Souls.
Is Mai Namba Japanese or American? If the latter, my hat is off even further -- I only hope to be able to someday write Japanese of that caliber!