Sounds like I'll be playing The Witcher on hard.
What's the difference anyways? Just more hit points for the monsters?
Maybe, but not all that much. The monsters do, however, attack more quickly, hit harder, and defend better. IOW, you need to pick the right style and have better timing to beat them. Alchemy becomes a necessity rather than an optional extra -- you will be using Swallow, Crinfrid oil, Necrophage oil, and Spectre oil a lot. The "flaming sword" icon is gone, too.
The upshot is that you can't beat any but the weakest monsters by simple click-spamming; you have to pick your technique, use buffs intelligently, and use your signs intelligently to get there. But if you do, it's not all that hard.
Put another way, I got the impression that "Hard" was the way the game was designed to be played, but then someone chickened out and made "Easy" the new "Normal" and added a "Really Easy" mode below that.
Also, is the EE edition supposed have improved dialog\translation for the English version compared to the original release?
Yes. Also voiceovers.
Edit: What Jabberwocky said. There's a surprising amount of depth to the combat -- double-tapping to flip over enemies, switching from group style to strong style to finish them off, using Aard to stun, then followed by a finishing move, and so on. You tend to miss much or all of that if you're just staring at the sword, waiting it to go yellow.