General Translation Notes
German isn't my first language and don't live in Germany, so I don't have a lot of cultural context to spot things like regional dialects or pop culture references. It's also inevitable that I will make mistakes sometimes, so if you're a native speaker and spot a mistake or something you think could use a little more explanation, please let me know and I will correct it as soon as possible. I try to be concise in my inline translator's notes and limit my commentary to what I feel is actually necessary to understand what's being said, but I love discussing nitty-gritty details of translation! If you have specific questions or comments about the exact phrasing of a line I'll gladly answer to the best of my ability. You can contact me by emailing germanffxiv@pm.me.
German has formal and informal second person pronouns, with du being the informal and Sie the formal (not to be mixed up with lowercase sie, which can be third person singular female or gender-independent third person plural). Sie is used for people who are older than you, who outrank you, or who you have a politely distant relationship with (such as strangers on the street, store clerks, the bus driver, vague acquaintances from work, etc.), though anyone learning German as second language will be told it's more like "basically everyone unless you're absolutely sure you can use du." Friends, family, classmates, and direct colleagues are usually addressed with du, and younger adults are more likely than older people to use du for each other even if they just met. Informal surroundings like bars and festivals also often have strangers use du for each other, as do rural dialects, and almost nobody uses Sie when posting online.
Depending on context using informal pronouns can be either warm and friendly or rude and pushy, and using formal pronouns can be either respectful and polite or cold and distant. Characters in FFXIV are quite a bit looser with their use of du than the average German but still generally follow expected patterns, Alphinaud uses proper and polite formal pronouns for political leaders when discussing state matters with them for example. Most characters address WoL with du, probably because "adventurer" isn't a particularly high status even if WoL themselves is highly respected by most.
I suspect that the German translation team is predominantly Swiss, since Swiss German uses du much more freely than standard German and the game also often uses Ihr as formal pronoun rather than Sie, which wikipedia tells me is common to southern German and Swiss dialects and effectively unused outside those. As mentioned I am not a native German, and while my native language has a very similar formal/informal split it has looser standards of formality overall, and I was also taught standard German rather than Swiss German, so I'm not the best equipped to comment on exactly how respectfully everyone addresses each other or whether their use of either formal or informal reads as unusual. However, things like a character switching from formal to informal (Yugiri uses formal for WoL and Alphinaud when she just arrived in Eorzea but switches to informal after they vouch for her to Nanamo and she's become more comfortable around them), or a character using formal for someone who uses informal for them (Alphinaud uses formal for Haurchefant while Haurchefant uses informal for him, which in this case shows admiration and fondness respectively), are easy to spot and I will point them out when relevant.
In my translations I will refer to the Warrior of Light with gender-neutral terminology as much as possible, and I will slightly tweak the official English lines to match. These changes are marked with [square brackets]. However, German is a highly gendered language and both of the characters I play are male, so the German lines will all refer to the Warrior of Light as male.
I try my best to preserve the tone and feeling of a line, which in practise often means leaving out a decent amount of words and punctuation. German has a lot of "filler" words that convey tone and emphasis, and which can be tricky to preserve when translating to English. Tja, doch, schon, bloß, schließlig, the list goes on, are all words which add certain feelings to a character's dialogue in ways that have no clear English equivalents or which would feel awkward when kept in the translated line. I've noticed machine translation often completely ignores these words and the way they influence tone and meaning because they're so context dependent that it doesn't even try. German also uses a lot more commas and periods than English, which would make dialogue feel choppier than it's supposed to be if kept. My translation of the German line occasionally being a lot shorter might seem a little strange, but it's an inevitable result of the structural differences between German and English. I want to convey the way it feels to read each line, and if this causes conflicts with the precise meaning of the words I will elaborate on that in a translation note.
The Echo in German is called "the power of transcendence" (die Kraft des Transzendierens). This is obviously a pretty significant difference, but because the term is used so much throughout the game pointing it out every time would just disrupt the flow of the text, and I feel like it's different enough that just directly translating it everywhere without comment might be more confusing than it's worth. Because of that I opted to translate it as "the Echo" across the site. This does result in various lines where people are talking about "your gift" or "your power" in ways that might read a little awkward when in English they just say "the Echo", but it's because English doesn't have the mouthful of "Kraft des Transzendierens" to talk around. Other terminology and location names are translated either directly or with the English localisation on a case by case basis, depending on how large and/or relevant the difference is.
The faux-archaic language used by FFXIV characters in English is exclusive to the English translation. In every other language version, including German, characters talk in modern language unless they're actually ancient or Urianger. In practise I have found that this leads to characters having much more distinct individual speech patterns in German too, since they don't need to adhere to this overarching standard of archaic speech. I obviously won't translate every instance of this difference because that's the entire game, but you can get the idea from what I do show on this site. This is also one of those situations where me not being a native speaker makes me want to put up a disclaimer that I likely will not be able to perfectly convey each character's speech patterns, but I'm definitely good enough to be able to tell that German Alisaie would not say "perchance".
While the German script generally stays closer to the Japanese script than the English script does, that doesn't mean you should assume whatever is in the German script is also in the Japanese script, or that the German script is always closer to the Japanese script than the English script is. I can pick out a few words of Japanese that let me occasionally spot when the Japanese voice line definitely does not correspond to what's in the English or German textbox, but I can't reliably point out every time this happens, and doing so isn't the purpose of this site anyway. I'm only here to tell you about the German script. If you know of a similar resource for the Japanese or French scripts (or Chinese or Korean!) I would love to hear about it.
Finally, while I personally like the German script far more than the English one overall and this is the reason I made this site, please don't take that to mean I think there is no merit to the English script at all or that those who enjoyed the English script are wrong to do so. If I hadn't enjoyed the game in English first this site wouldn't exist, and there are some points where I think the English script wins out in the comparison. Please use your own judgement and form your own opinions.
