How important is it to properly localize into English?

Developing a game is an expensive and difficult process. Or, at least, that’s what they tell me. I understand calling a person to write the narrative and dialogues, and giving the text over to a translator to localize into another language. The rest, to me, is magic. Lovecraft things. Forbidden arts unknowable by the human brain.

I am starting with this warning to leave it clear that I understand. If every cent in your budget is already destined to there being a game you can sell, and developers already know “the book is on the table”, going after a trustworthy agency to pass texts over to an adequate english might look superfluous.
This won’t stop me from keeping writing, because, after all, every monkey in his branch. You might have noticed something strange in this text. “Wow, where’s that delicious fluidity of Thierry’s writing? Why does it look like, instead of a silk cloth, he’s caressing me with pebbles glued with adhesive tape?”

Because I’m making sure to elaborate this text as something close to what someone with an intermediary level of english (which 38% of Brazilians say they have) might write, based on a text written originally in portuguese. And if the main public of these articles of mine, translators that localize from english to their native tongues, is feeling that bother, imagine the average native speaker (who is notoriously little tolerant to expressions of culture that not their own)?

OK, that’s enough of that gimmick. Those of us who grew alongside our translation industries saw the pitch for localization taking shape quite naturally over time: getting access to all sorts of new information and products from overseas was cool and all, but the texts were so clunky that deciphering them was a task unto itself. For the young people, imagine most apps, series and YouTube Short subtitles being in the worst, most poorly-trained, sloptacular language possible.

That was us some decades ago. Thankfully, that changed and we did pretty good for a while. Watching something adapted into your language became natural, effortless. Some might even say comfortable…And now we’re heading there again. Maybe history does repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Hopefully our dubbing industry and consumers will keep doubling down on supplying and demanding quality to fight against sloppification. We won’t have robodubbed Banana Fishes on our streaming services, thank you very much.

Anyway, there's no (ideological) reason for us to give unto the world any less than what we demand for ourselves. If we love the cozy swaddle of well adapted text, we can make the anglophone world crave it as well.

Okay, that was the lofty aspiration part done. Let's talk real life again, briefly. Versioning text from our native languages into English is a lot harder than the other way around, meaning you should expect a spicy invoice on job delivery. I bet many indie dev noses scrunched up at that prospect, but let’s try and be friends.

Maybe, hire a good proofreader, preferably at rates where they won't want to stab any of your writers, or even a consultant to write you a style guide of do's and dont's for the English version. Whatever penny you scrounge up to offer for this service will be worth it, I promise. And, I dunno, optimist that I am; maybe we'll someday live in a world where spreading works of art and culture to other parts of the world is a profession to be cherished and supported by the whole of society.

And then, hopefully, we’ll never see headscratchers like this at major game conventions again: