Nihon Falcom, a Japanese developer, has long since had a foothold in the JRPG market with their long list of prestigious franchises, including the Ys series as well as the Trails series. As with all Japanese video game companies, however, Falcom has been looking for more and more ways to connect with the ever expansive market in the west, and their latest endeavor into this involves the use of AI to translate and localize their games. In an interview with 4gamer (with an English translation of some of the answers here from boundingintocomics) Falcom president Toshihiro Kondo says that he’s considering AI as a way to speed up localization of their scripts for more efficient releases in the west.

There were times when the translator got minor subtleties wrong, but at the same time, I felt that he translated some parts so well that I was sometimes surprised to see that he translated them exactly as they were written. Although there are still areas where human translators are not as good as they used to be, I can’t help but think that this is an amazing technology compared to what we had a decade ago…Compared to that, the translation of ‘ELLA’ is at a much higher level. Also, since the AI is learning more and more, I feel that even if human intervention is necessary in the end, it will save a lot of work time in the future.

This is, obviously, a contentious topic. The mention of AI as a replacement for jobs sparks major debates in the west, something Kondo is no doubt aware of. For many people, AI takes jobs from localizers and the machines just can’t properly emulate the flexibility of localization that many more esoteric linguistic phrases demand. For others, many localizers have done subpar and, admittedly, awful jobs translating the scripts they’ve been given, and even a literal machine translation with no nuance would be preferable to localizers essentially rewriting (or even removing) entire sections of dialogue or characters as a whole.

Regardless of whichever side you fall on, it looks like Kondo isn’t really considering the social ramifications and is mainly looking at the efficiency of AI. Whether or not Falcom with go through with this is up in the air, but the mere vocalization of the possibility is sure to rile up Falcom fans both for and against this.