Certain languages are more difficult to translate to English than others. This is especially true for Japanese since direct translations of certain phrases won't make sense, so translators will try to match the tone and meaning instead. XSEED has gone in depth with the localization process in an interview.Japanese especially has a completely different word order.
That said, there has been multiple smaller publishers of Japanese games that have no issue of localizing their games overseas, so I don't know what is holding Atlus back.
So if you wanted to say "I talked with my friend."
In Japanese you'd literally say "I, my friend with talked."
Makes it really tricky to translate speeches, because you would pretty much have to wait for them to finish talking before you get to the actual sentence.
Also Japanese often drops words.
So instead of "My major is computer science", you could say "major is computer science" which sounds a bit odd in English.
