With all the recent topic about game translation (with UT/DR being only available in English and Japanese), I think often of my dad.
He was a very avid gamer, had always been since his youth. However, like many other people of his generation in Spain, he only spoke Spanish (and Catalan, but that's besides the point). A lot of early games never got translated to Spanish, and then some started to arrive with very shoddy translations. FFVII's Spanish translation is infamously bad (thankfully, these quickly improved, and FFIX's Spanish translation was pretty excellent).
So there was this margin of time where he had a lot of games to enjoy because translations to Spanish started to become more commonplace.
... Up until, well, I think 2015-ish or so, where suddenly there was a growing influx of games that went back to not being translated. I did not mind it for indie ones, translations are costly, but you got games like FFXIV which simply never considered it worth having a Spanish translation. So, there was this growing list of games I really wanted to show him that were never translated. Sure, some had fan-translations, but he didn't really play much in his computer, so most of them were off the table.
He started to learn a bit of English during 2020 in order to be able to eventually try some of these games. Covid hit, he had some time for it. I was away for college and I could not help him much, but he would text me English questions every now and then. He had never finished even basic schooling (pretty common for folk born and raised in francoist Spain), so his progress was slow as he did not know how to... Learn something like a new language.
I did finally come back home after college, and for few months, I was able to help him with his learning. I think he would have eventually got the gist of it. But he ended up passing away very unexpectedly.
It's always been a sore point for me to see all these games I wanted to play with him that we never got around to because of linguistic barriers. Sure, younger folk tend to have higher levels of English literacy, and for many it is not as much of a gap. But there's still many that don't talk it. There's a lot of older folk who will never get to experience certain games due to a lack of localization. And I truly understand it for indie games with limited budgets, but there has been an increasing trend of games with high budgets that do not translate to anything just because there's enough young folk with English knowledge who will play it regardless.
And, I guess, it's just sad to know many people will never get to experience these games because of how increasingly anglocentric is the videogame world becoming.
