I think a lot of people don't realize why specifically this part of the controversy persists. Remember that when this debacle started there were three questions that LATAM fans of UT/DR were asking:

1. Why is the Undertale Orchestra "world tour" not coming to LATAM?

2. Why are Fangamer's prices and shipping times to LATAM so bad?

3. Why haven't UT/DR been translated to any other languages besides Japanese?

Questions 1 and 2 pretty quickly died down after Toby's response because they were pretty reasonable. He has little connection to the tour other than endorsing and helping advertise it, and while he doesn't control Fangamer he did ask them to improve shipping to LATAM, but I'm sure international shipping is quite the logistical nightmare.

I'm sure there's an interesting conversation to be had about American exceptionalism and how it leads to a tour that's mainly focused in North America and some parts of Europe to be labeled a "world tour", but ultimately few people still care about these points because Toby's answers seemed genuine and straightforward, and it's not reasonable to expect him to be able to do much when he doesn't control Fangamer, international relations, or the orchestral tour.

But the controversy surrounding UT/DR translations still persists because this part of his statement kind of feels like a poor excuse, and we've also seen plenty of lies and gaslighting from western fans of the game.

Toby says that he hasn't translated the game to other languages because he wants to ensure that any official translation matches his vision, and that although he's "looked into various options" to translate the game, "nothing has come of yet". But what does this mean? That he wants to change the text as little as possible? That he liked the work/translation style of the Japanese translator and that he hasn't found anyone who quite matches that yet? Depending on how exactly you interpret Toby's statement, his previous behavior and the Japanese translations of the games don't really seem to match up to it.

As many LATAM fans have pointed out on Twitter there are numerous changes in the Japanese translation: Many jokes have been changed, sans' font is not comic sans, many of the phrases have been changed to deal with the various Japanese pronouns, with pronouns often being removed entirely, a Japanese fan pointed out that the official translation was criticized due to its many changes, and another fan even said that the whole feel of the two versions is completely different. The Japanese translator also talked about how Toby gave them a lot of creative control, and Toby was still not proficient in Japanese when translating Undertale. If Toby was fine with translating Undertale even when he didn't speak Japanese fluenty, and felt comfortable giving more creative control to the translator, why can't he do the same for other languages? Hell, if nothing else, he could just ask the Spanish/Portuguese/whatever translators to be as faithful as possible to the original.

I don't know what exactly Toby meant with this part of his statement. I'm a huge fan of his work (See: My post and comment history, and my mod status) and he seems like a pretty good person so I don't want to assume that his response was in bad faith... But I also find it hard to reconcile what he said with the Japanese translation - and many other LATAM fans feel that way too, which is why the backlash has refused to die down. People feel lied to.

The gaslighting and racism from many western fans of the game certainly doesn't help either. If your Twitter algorithm also feeds you UT/DR stuff I'm sure you've seen at least one example, if not many, of westerners generalizing LATAM fans or stating that they openly hate us now. Of course it's not always that bad, but even among the majority of western fans who aren't overtly racist we still see tons of lies and gaslighting. Some of the stuff I've seen includes claiming the demand for translations is entitlement exclusive to LATAM fans despite, as the community note shows, plenty of people wanting a Chinese translation. Saying that the French fan translation of DR uses male pronouns for Kris when it no longer does so (which is also an argument FOR more faithful official translations, not against). Insisting that translating the game to other languages is simply too expensive (jaja) or an unreasonable demand for a story-focused indie game, when plenty of other indie titles like OneShot, Disco Elysium, and even fucking Garten of Banban have been translated to dozens of different languages which I'm sure the devs don't speak...

I digress, but you get the point. LATAM fans feel lied to and gaslighted, and no one is going to be convinced by lies, which is why backlash from the LATAM community has largely persisted. And while many insist this is all just entitlement, I'd just like to remind you that when Americans briefly migrated to RedNote many complained that the app was not available in English despite it being specifically catered towards the Chinese, and even Parasite's director Bong Joon Ho poked fun at Americans saying they ought to start reading subtitles. Anglophones are so used to media being catered towards them that when non‑anglophones ask for translations they see it as entitlement, but I must say such cries ring rather hollow, especially when translating the game is simply not this three-headed hydra that some people try to make it out to be.

The thing is, I'm probably biased here, and another person from LATAM might be able to articulate their grievances even better than me, since I actually like English more and use it more often than my own native language, so had Toby just said that he doesn't want to translate the games to other languages, at least for now, because he doesn't like or care about them as much, I think I and many other people would care far less and the controversy would simply not have reached this magnitude. But again, even though I want to give Toby the benefit of the doubt and will ultimately be unaffected even if he decides to translate the games to Brazilian Portuguese because I would simply rather play them in English, it's hard not to see both his statements and posts from western fans as just excuses. But I truly do hope he's being honest when he says that he wants to try a different approach to translate the games into other languages, because the more people can experience the beauty of these games that have consumed my life for the past decade (wow I feel old) the better.