@Mento said:
They don't bother usually. It's localizing into the other languages that often delay European releases.
Though if this thread was in any way inspired by the Operation Rainfall games (Last Story and Xenoblade, at least, I haven't played Pandora's Tower), they were localized into British English because they weren't sure at the time if an American release would even happen. As far as I know, both games retain their British accents for their respective US releases.
But man, it would be so weird if they decided to give the P4 Arena cast a British spin during this long delay between the NTSC and PAL versions. As much as I like my home country, I don't think I want to live in a world where Chie is addicted to blood pudding.
To add onto what Mento wrote, Nintendo actually has a sporadic history of producing entirely separate English localizations for North America and UK/Europe. Probably the most vivid example within relatively recent years was Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, where each version not only had different dialog/writing styles, but also entirely different names for the cast and terminology for the game's world in general. It was an interesting experiment to watch unfold, to say the least, even if it was understandably not necessarily met with warm reception and probably created unnecessary fusion between fans in both regions. As somebody who does Japanese-English translations as mostly a hobby (for the time being), the writer in me would be interested in seeing it happen more often, albeit perhaps not to as extreme of an extent as the example provided. Despite the base universality between American English and other varieties like British English, there's still plenty of things unique to each dialect at a colloquial level that I don't think it'd be an inherent waste of time to produce separate American and British localizations. Financially there are certainly better things you could be doing, but Japanese in particular is such a distinctly different language compared to English that you could never point to one translation and say it's the only definitive good one, so there's always that particular justification, too.
As Mento also mentioned, it's the translation into other languages aside from English that holds up a lot of European releases for games, since I believe EU trade laws officially require availability in French, Italian, German, and Spanish in addition to English. To further add to the list of games first localized in the UK before being brought back to the States relatively unchanged, Solatorobo for the DS was originally translated by Nintendo's UK team before being handed off to XSeed for its US publishing gig. Then there are of course games like Last Window, the sequel to Hotel Dusk, and Another Code R, both of which only ever got an official English localization in the UK and were never brought over to the US.
I could probably ramble endlessly about localization and translations in general since it's basically all I do day in and day out when I'm not playing the games people are going to ask me to translate anyway, but I'll just stop here for now. I don't know if I added much to the discussion, but I hope it's useful information to somebody.
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