And this absolutely pains my heart, how the gaming industry and capitalism itself is heading towards a direction where everything just gets worse thanks to new technologies companies think do the work that actual people were paid to do before.
So yeah, let me show you what it used to be, and what it has become.
It is always the wildest thing to see certain C-suite types opine that translation and localization aren't worth investing in because the return on investment over more perfunctory work is supposedly difficult to quantify. The thinking goes that translation quality has little impact on a product's commercial performance one way or the other, ergo, translation expenses should be kept to a minimum. And yet cases like this post highlight there is absolutely a return on investment for properly funded translations and that's an end product that is, y'know, properly accessible to the target audience, which will encourage other consumers to give it a shot and spread the word. A good translation tends to be reputationally invisible outside of creative works, for better or worse, but a bad translation can become a suffocating spectre that's tremendously difficult to shake off, yet it's amazing how few monolingual decision makers are able to appreciate these stakes.
It's obviously hard to speak about a case like this definitively, but my guess as someone who's worked on his fair share of (forever NDA'd) online game localizations is it is indeed probably a case of either a personnel shakeup, or, in a truly catastrophic worst case scenario, the translation agency being switched out entirely. I'm almost inclined to believe the latter, if mainly because while people will invariably come and go when it comes to localization projects for live games like this, if there was still continuity in project management, you'd think they'd have the savvy to track down suitable talent who could maintain the existing quality level. Or at least not like, send it down a cliff. Changes on the development side are also always possible, but I'm less inclined to think that's what's going on here; the inertia for these sorts of processes is really hard to change, which I'd argue is generally good for maintaining smooth workflows, so if the Spanish localization was previously receiving good contextual documentation, unless the person in charge of producing those notes internally was fired and not replaced, I feel it would be really unusual and counterproductive for that well to suddenly dry up after all these years.
The emails obviously speak for themselves. Whether it's MTPE (machine translation post-editing, where material is fed to a machine translator and then only proofread/edited by a real person after the fact) or just regular MT, hold the PE, you probably don't need me to tell you that in this age of "AI," more and more companies are falling for the siren call that the machine is now good enough for at least certain types of translation tasks. What really insidiously sucks about issues like this is that unless there's sufficient outcry about this in English, these sorts of consequences can go undetected for a really long time if there aren't people in-house keeping a close eye on those other audiences and reporting back accordingly. You'd be shocked how often that can happen even with larger developers who treat localization as just a means to make money from other markets without recognizing those other markets come with their own responsibilities that must be catered to and accounted for.
Something clearly happened and we'll almost certainly never know what because of how rampant NDAs are in localization. And until Arenanet sees an appreciable dip in player retention and revenue from Spanish-speaking players, it's entirely possible they'll remain blissfully ignorant of anything being amiss.
