please come to brazil

Having portuguese as my native language and interacting mostly with media originally in english only makes me more bothered by people trying to justify Fire Emblem Fates’ awful translation. As soon as I learned enough english to watch untranslated videos and movies, I was shocked when I tried rewatching them. Many had completely different tones or straight up different dialogue, since they were butchered by some poor underpaid soul during translation. English is a language commonly studied in Brazil, by far the most important when looking for a job, and both public and private schools try their best to teach it, yet even so big companies get away with terrible localizations.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are fluent in multiple languages you should know: a good translator is a “liar”. There are just too many expressions and puns that simply can’t be translated directly, so completely literal translations always end up like poorly worded messes. In those cases, a translator’s job is to look for a workaround of sorts, a similar expression or wordplay that preserves the original meaning and tone, even though he chooses different words and such. In a few cases a translator is forced to change something in order to match local age ratings, but that wasn’t what I’ve seen so far for Fates. 

A translator has no right to modify the original dialogue and story simply because he thinks it’s not “witty” or funny enough. Their job is making media accessible to people, and not attempting to replace the writer.