So I've never played any Persona games (or Atlus games for that matter, besides Radiant Historia), but a friend randomly sent me P5 as a birthday gift.
@DarthAsthma:
http://www.personaproblems.com/
Seems like an interesting read concerning P5 localization.
And everything here sums up my thoughts from playing for 30 minutes. The translation and localization is horrendous. Weird objective errors everywhere + generally stilted/unnatural speech, as if written by non-native English speakers. It's often obvious from the wording when they've tried to translate stock Japanese phrases literally. It was kind of shocking, given what a huge budget this game obviously had (also shocking: this).
The site mentions how the team had 6 translators and 8 editors, and there's no doubt in my mind that that's the root of the problem. Consistency (in voice, terminology, and syntax standards) is a huge issue I've come across in my own work (in, say, a manga series with 30 volumes); it's hard enough to tackle when my only/worst enemy is myself, so it's no wonder that 14 different people wouldn't be able to consolidate their work into a comprehensible, quality script. But even a basic QA check by a single native speaker reading through the script should've weeded out the truly bizarre, blatant violations of English grammar/diction ("a scum," luggage->them, trifle instead of trifling, etc.).
@Black:
I just don't see how the translation of P5 is a 'failure by Atlus'. All you need is basic reading comprehension and understanding of how poeple talk in english and you're fine.s
Communicating basic author intent is an extremely low bar to set for a big budget script, and even that isn't accomplished when there are literal errors in meaning.
Plus, what kyle said. People don't talk like that in English.