Hello! This site is where I collect my translations of the German FFXIV script.
I first played the game all the way through to Endwalker in English. When I heard about some of the huge differences between languages in the Dark Knight job quests though I decided to check out the German translation of those (because I don't speak Japanese lol) and found them to be both very different and very well done, and so I decided to use my freshly made alt to replay the game in German and see what else is different.
The answer turned out to be: a lot! Characters I disliked were suddenly likeable, plot points that seemed to come out of nowhere were actually foreshadowed long ago, everyone spoke with much more personality, and I was regularly presented with poetic and evocative writing that blew the English script out of the water. A game that I already enjoyed turned out to have such a beautifully written version, just outside many people's reach! The purpose of this site is to share some of the German script with players that don't speak the language.
There is no such thing as a perfect translation, each language is unique and differences between each translation are an inevitable part of the process. That said, the English script is pretty infamous for how many liberties it takes (while German and French generally stay closer to the Japanese script), both stylistically and with the actual content of the text. Regardless of whether that style is to your personal taste, the sad truth is that a lot of English language FFXIV fans end up confused or arguing about things that just plain aren't even issues in other languages. I hope that by sharing parts of the German script I can help people gain new insights into the story and provide some interesting comparisons.
This site is still under construction, and many pages are still empty. I am also still in the process of replaying the game, which limits the range of scenes I can confidently say are different. My main priority is to add scenes I already translated to my friends before, scenes that are significantly different between languages, or scenes with differences that I found personally interesting. Don't expect this site to cover the whole game at any point - that would probably take me so long that there'll be new expansions to translate by the time I'm done! If you're curious about a particular scene though, feel free to email me at germanffxiv@pm.me and I'll check it out for you.
The translations are formatted like this:
Please read the translation notes page for more context and information about the translation process.
I did my best to make this site look okay on mobile, but it is best viewed on a desktop computer.
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