I don't have time to study japanese and I don't want to wait years until I have experience with japanese to resume with anime, manga and novels, but I've watched such shit translations that changes the original work completely. I don't know if there is a site or a community where I can check if a series has changes in translation more precisely. It doesbt have to be a literal translation but a good translation taking into account the differences in expressions and language. I've seen literal translations that end up making no sense and having bad wording just because they only translated but didnt adapted.
I was thinking of making a web where people could vote and argue about the translations of a series, in hopes to help others or see what series would need a better translation, would you like that idea? >I also wanna play hentai visual novels and understand what is happening.
Some of these seem a bit pedantic but there's a few egregious examples there.
Chase Diaz
All translations are shit. You're not reading the original manga, you're reading a Western (or SEA) interpretation of it. There is a lot of nuance in the Japanese language that you will never know unless you learn it.
Elijah Foster
Either learn one of the hardest languages in the world or accept you're reading someone's fan-fiction.
Nicholas Hernandez
What fansub was "keikaku means plan"? Or it was always fake
Carson Rivera
Your English isn't good enough for you to be worrying about the quality of the subs.
Carson Ross
>if it isn't fansubbed >it it doesn't have a ton of tl notes >if it has no karaoke captions for OP and ED
Jason Collins
Isnt that the same for every language in the world? Translating isnt just translating the words, is also adapting expressions and the dialogue to the language in question.
Isaiah Moore
Is Japanese really a hard language without considering runes and pronunciation? Reusing template phrases, onomatopoeia, tons of loanwords, silly childlike syntax ('kimochi warui', 'onii chan daikirai'), hokku instead of proper poetry. All of the above makes me believe that Japanese is a poor language, that didn't go that far from some primitive tribal speak.
Jaxon Myers
>reading Initial D manga and his fucking name is KYLE Suduo
99% of manga/anime dialogue is simple and uncomplicated, not philosophical postulates, drop the myth.
Jackson Hughes
I think you have to at least know a little Japanese to start noticing when translations are kinda off. Like I wouldn't say my Japanese is good at all since I just study it intermittently in my free time, but by now I know enough to make out most of what's being said when watching anime even if I don't know every word, and so I can tell sometimes if the subtitles are skipping a line, omitting a word, adding stuff in that was implied rather than said explicitly, etc. Doesn't happen that much though, since I think the subtitles for most series I've seen are decent enough.
I think some ways you can tell the subtitles might be bad though are shit English like another user mentioned (maybe the translation's technically accurate but you shouldn't have to do extra work just to decipher a language you already know), subtitles just lifted from a dub, and really short subtitles when a character's clearly saying a lot more shit onscreen. Even when I knew 0 Japanese, I could tell sometimes that some fan subtitles were shit just because they clearly weren't including everything that was being said.
When it comes to manga I kinda feel lately that trying to read it raw alongside another translation for comparison is the best option. I feel like I've been burned too many times re: characters' names getting translated wrong and shit, to the point where I'd rather just see what was written in the first place. Like at least when watching anime you can still hear character names and shit even if the subtitles are inaccurate, and so you can still compare the subtitles to the original audio somewhat. If everything in the manga is replaced with English text, you can't do shit.
Christopher Thompson
Yeah, the worse it'll get usually is missing some cultural nuance that isn't even important in the first place.
William Sanders
>99% of manga/anime dialogue is simple and uncomplicated True, but that just makes it all the more baffling when "professional" translators get it wrong.
Alexander Anderson
even if the dialogue is simple your brilliant translator will hear ikezu as kisu EOPs can't escape fanfics
Noah Bell
Why would you need to know? If you like it, you like it. Theres a lot of seemingly wrong translations people keep praising. Look at uta for example: Allmost all names from the eroge are translated wrong, hakuoro for example seems to be hakuowlo. (based on aquaplus official translation) Or ruffy in one piece. Its writte in katakana, used for foreign words, yet people claim its luffy instead of ruffy, which makes a lot more sense considering that ruffy sounds like the foreign word.
Most "original translation" tryhards dont even care about proper translation, but only fight for their personal believes of claiminb to be biggest otaku
A more present example would be the people on Any Forums that claim "nisa" is misstranslatig the games, which is why kiseki has so many "hahas". They call the localizations butchered because of the unnecessary haha inputs, yet the original japanese version has even MORE of them.
the problem with names is that sometimes there's no definitive answer (or there wasn't at the time the tl was made) your examples don' really cover mistranslation as a topic
>one piece A lot of character introductions have their names in big english block letters and those are treated as the cannon spellings
Hudson Powell
Disgaea translations always bothered me because they often add their own jokes to normal dialogue that wasn't supposed to be funny. The translations also adds a lot of meta humor over the script that gets tiring.
