Hello! This site is where I collect my translations of the German FFXIV script. It currently hosts 2.952 translated lines across 95 scenes.
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) 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! I find that this game I already liked a lot is often far more coherent, enjoyable, and just plain beautifully written in German.
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 are perfectly clear 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 a work in progress, and a number of 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. The scenes featured on this site range from having major differences in meaning to only slight differences in phrasing that I simply found personally interesting, and there is a slight bias towards scenes from Stormblood and onwards, as that is when I started paying closer attention to these differences on my replay. 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. I am caught up with patch 7.0 in English.
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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