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.
This right here is why, despite being a professional translator who makes good money doing it, I'd need some really good incentives to ever work for a Japanese corporation as an in-house translator again. Far too often that your sanity can bear, you find clients/bosses with just enough English to be dangerous demanding that you translate a specific word using a specific English word, context and accuracy be damned, or any number of other nitpicks that make your job impossible to do.
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.
All these parties combined to do such an amazing job. Who made the decision to cast a Slavic (Russian?)-accented woman for the Maiden in Black? Such a good decision. I'm still waiting for the day when Japanese developers finally discover the flavor that can be added when you make use of non-native-speaker accents (or even extensive use of non-Tokyo accents). I can't imagine the seiyū cartel allowing that too easily!
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!