That sailor moon censorship will always be one of my favorite things ever, because of how hard it failed. You went from normal lesbian couple to incestuous lesbians. How did this improve anything?
I think I do get their logic, flawed as it was: if they'd tried to cover up the relationship by saying they were just close friends the gay subtext would've still been overt enough to make people suspect more was going on, by making them cousins they assumed that it would throw off suspicion in the audience, i.e. "those two couldn't possibly be closer than friends because they're cousins.".
As someone watches a LOT of Asian dramas, this hits so hard. Things like idioms, slang and references are so baked into a language that literally translating them results in gibberish. Last night, three friends of mine had to explain to a Spanish friend the difference between dumb and dumbass, because that distinction apparently doesn’t exist in Castilian Spanish.
The French for "I gave her a kiss" and "I fucked her" are literally one syllable off, and it's also super reliant on context and sentence structure, and anything I can write here is an oversimplication. That's going between to languages that are influenced super heavily by Latin, I can't imagine going from an incredibly old Chinese and Korean influenced language to a mostly Latin and Germanic one. That's not even touching cultural differences, jelly donuts aside. If you ever want to see this sort of thing in reverse, the word "get" in English is basically impossible to translate literally in all the ways it's used. I can get a joke, while I get in the car, to run to the store and get some cat food, realize I don't have the money for it, and get caught trying to shoplift it. This makes sense in English, but that example is an absolute nightmare anywhere else.
@@oreokitty333 Yep. I'm trilingual and it's always way harder to translate an idiom from one language to the other than using the existing structures and words that the language I'm trying to speak in already has to convey the same idea. Often, the results are NOT 1 to 1. Trying to say the same thing in two different languages may have you say something at least slightly different. Different languages make for slightly different THOUGHTS AND IDEAS. That's something that we don't realize, even people who DO speak more than one language.
@@antonioscendrategattico2302We've been making jokes about a Brit asking to "bum a fag" off a Texan for years and yet people still don't understand that language is complex and influenced by culture just like every other human construct. It's like the one Archer idioms joke, with a language that simply doesn't HAVE idioms and Archer continuing to struggle to communicate even with an excellent translator. Tom Scott has a really good video about machine translation and why it doesn't work on his channel. He talks about how Brits say "That's a brave idea" to say that an idea is impossible and that the listener is stupid, while an American would take it as a complement if they didn't know any better. And that's just friction between two flavors of the same language. This stuff is complicated.
Spanish here, but wouldnt dumb=estupido and dumbass=pendejo invoke the same sort of energy when doing that translation? That's how i would do it anyway. And by no means am i a certified translator, just gut feeling.
psycho idk. we were talking on a discord about a character being a dumbass, and she was upset we were calling him stupid (which a problem in fanfics with this character) and we were trying explain that dumbass =/= dumb
Beyond being scummy, keeping the translators anonymous makes the "localization bad" problem worse. Whenever I read a book that's been translated into English there's almost always a foreword by the translator that talks about the way they chose to approach the material and some of the compromises they made for clarity. That transparency helps to dispel the notion that they're trying to censor or deliberately change it, and it's also just really cool to see them talk about their work.
Great point, there's this obscure ass SNES game I'm planning to play called Adventures of Hourai High, with a fan-translation made back in 2011 by Aeon Genesis. I remember reading the readme file that came with the patch, where the translator talked about his rationale in terms of some of the name changes he made and it instantly got me to trust him. The anime industry, both in Japan and the West needs some massive changes.
As much as I agree with you, in the current climate that only seems to open things for harassment and real vitriol. If there's something this and last year taught me is that people REALLY want there to be a culture war between anime fans and distribuitors. Translators deserve as much credit as they can get. But they don't deserve the huge amount of hate they would get from certain groups if their names were broadcasted in the open.
@@Enchufe92 yeah, but that feels like an excuse a company would give to not give credit where it is sorely due, something along the lines of "we would give you credit but we'll leave your name off on the off chance that the ever capricious twitter mob turns its sights on you specifically." in my mind it's worth the risk if it gives hard working people something they really need, and something that can help them in their career
Translation is knowing "teme" is a rude way of saying you, localization is knowing when it's best to make character A call character B a bastard/asshole or if it's it's best to use tone and/or the VA's delivery to convey character A's rudeness.
Context is king. I have seen more than one fansub where the person not only mistook "chikusho" for "kuso" (and then go on to always translate it as "shit", even though it's not as inherently vulgar as "shit" is in english).
@@alphamone Plus the fact that “kuso”, while *literally* meaning “shit”, is more of a catch-all term for frustration ranging from “darn” all the way up to “fuck” depending on...context!
My German teacher said it best: "When you are communicating a message through a language barrier, adapting the message is much more effective than just translating the words".
I'm a boring technical Japanese to English translator, but I've got to say as someone who has friends who translate manga and such, THANK YOU for speaking up. They work so damn hard, it takes so much energy and creative talent to translate and localize effectively. They absolutely deserve to be paid more and not get shouted at by monolinguals who don't really understand the big picture. More pressure needs to be put on these companies to pay them fairly.
@@emeraldbonsai This is a fair point, and is why I work in logistics rather than games. Though I will point out that "putting pressure on companies to pay them fairly" and "demanding raises" is, you know, kinda the same thing.
as the old joke doesn’t quite go, a translator, a fansubber, and a 4Kids writer walk into a bar, an izakaya, and a McDonalds... Thank you for summarizing this so effectively. Next question: knowing all this, what’s the maximally ethical way to consume translated Japanese media?
Imo: pirating is the way to go. Especially if you can't afford a streaming service subscription or want to watch a show that isn't on a service you're subscribed to. I'm gonna make this in bullet points because I tend to ramble a bit, but pretty much: 1. The legal anime streaming services do extremely scummy things (elaborating will take a while but there's plenty of videos discussing different controversies related to these companies) and affecting the corporate executives' wallet directly by boycotting them is the only real way for any change to be done to the industry. 2. Specifically for older anime, most pirated sites will use a fansubbed version of the work, either because an official English sub doesn't exist or because they just don't update the episodes they already released. In that case, the person doing the translation isn't an underpaid translator, but someone who did it for free out of passion for what they love. I think the Sailor Moon fansub and the One Piece fansub are the best example of that. 3. One frustration people have with the licensed anime streaming services is the monopoly they take on series. Rather than being a competition of which service is better, it becomes a question of which service has the better exclusive titles, and forces people to either pay for all the services to see all the stuff they want or be forced to pick one or two and miss out on shows they really want to watch. Pirated sites bypass that monopoly altogether and are basically a middle finger to this blatant attempt at squeezing as much money out of people's pockets as possible. 4. Translators are paid by commission, not by how well the show does on official sources, so translators aren't directly affected by it. In that same vane, it doesn't even support the industry much either because most of the money is going to the distributors anyway and the people who worked on the show get pennies if anything from the western audiences. Also, if you want to support the industry, you can support it in other ways without having to buy a Crunchyroll subscription or whatever, like buying official merch and manga (and yes, I know the creators don't get much from that either, but it's about as effective as paying to watch the anime so might as well get a physical product out of it and it's directed specifically at the creators of the show you buy the merch of rather than "the industry", and the path of where that money is going is at least a bit clearer) 5. If you want to watch a show but don't want to support the person who made it for whatever reason, like not wanting to support Nagatoro's creator because he used to draw l*licon or not wanting to support the creator of Rurouni Kenshin because he was found to literally own child p*rn, then pirating the show allows you to enjoy their work while not giving money to people you don't want to give your money to, similarly to the first point about not giving money to scum. I hope this all made sense lmao, I genuinely think pirating is the most ethical option for consuming anime and manga.
I remember as a kid once watching a movie with an unofficial sub and it was so literal, we got distracted just reading the subs (we understood both languages so it was just hilarious). The thing that tickled us the most was how the characters often exclaimed 'Oh boy!' in excitement and they translated that as 'Oh, male child' (we have no word for a gendered child) in my native language which made as much sense as it does in English.
They want a litteral translation, watch the original 1960s speed racer dub, it was fairly litteral translation and is absolutely unintentionally hilarious because of it
The lip syncing is a huge issue for anime, I remember Death Note actually has episodes edited or even reanimated just so they can match the english dub so it doesn't look weird
Yep! More and more shows are doing that now and even get the original ver without the mouth flaps at all so they can insert their own if that makes sense lol I think CDawgVA talked a bit about it on one of his VA vida
Better to reanimate than not even fucking try. Like “When they Cry” where words are spoken by one character even when another is speaking because the Japanese VA’s already finished their sentence.
Their localization of Team Rocket is AMAZING. The New Pokémon dub may be more accurate to the Japanese but Team Rocket is nowhere near as funny as how they were in the old dub.
I'll never forget the one I saw when I just started watching tokusatsu: "Kouhai: the opposite of Senpai." Me, not knowing words yet: huh? The fact that TV-Nihon still exists is a travesty.
@@kirbyfanprime I think it's awesome they still exist, it's great to see legacy groups around. and I know they aren't the best, but considering that they tend to sub things no one else does, they're better than nothing lol
The not crediting translators thing reminds me how in the early days of video games Atari wouldn't credit their developers, leading to many developers leaving the company and resulting in part of the reason for the 1983 game crash.
Me: *laughs at a joke that didnt get subbed that well.....spends 30mins trying to explain the cultural and language behind whats going on * I kind of miss translator notes before fansubs
Another great example of localized translation is the Simpsons dubbed over into Latin Spanish. When I spent summers in Mexico with family I would watch The Simpsons on tv and was really struck by how the jokes and references were changed to fit a Latin American audience. In the episode where Homer asks Mr Burns for money while he’s high on rubbing alcohol Mr Burns hallucinates that he’s the pilsbourghy dough boy. Of course in Mexico pop n’ fresh is not really a well known brand so Burns in Spanish calls him “el osito de pan” the little bread bear, which is the mascot of a popular brand of bread and snack products on Mexico.
There's a great joke in the Mexican dub of the episode 30 Minutes Over Tokyo were Homer (or Homero as we call him) complains about a show saying "can't we watch Dragon Ball Z?", they even made a Ranma 1/2 reference a couple of seasons later. In one recent recent episode they added a joke referencing that the actor who voices Smithers also voices All-Might from MHA.
The best localization I've seen was a scene from the Tagalog(Filipino) dub of the anime "school rumble".The scene is on a rainy day and the male character offered an umbrella to the heroine. She looked worried if the male will be alright, but he replied "don't worry I have a capa". In Tagalog "capa" is cape. But the male came out and wore a Kappa suit and it just so happened that this "Kappa" is a Japanese water demon who was fine in the rain. What a coincidence those two words can be used for a joke.
As a translator who lives and works in Quebec, Canada, a place that is heavily peppered with localized and translated content, thank you for this video and explaining what this whole thing is about. Of course I'm not a Japanese translator, but an English to French one, and it is very hard to explain to people who don't really need translating into their lives what I do. It's not a word for word thing, unlike math, there's no single right answer, it's about not only translating the words, but also the context that comes with it and shaping the words around it so they make sense, and that the humor, or whatever emotion is conveyed, is brought along with it. It's so important that people understand that before they insult localization and the people who take care of it. It's a very hard part of translation, and for having done fansub for a couple american shows for a French from France audience, we had to work real hard to make some references understandable. It's fun, but it's not easy. People really should do their research before criticizing but...well people be people, y'know.
The Yakuza example is also great, because it shows that at the end of the day the "we want translators, not localizers" crowd don't actually care about the artistic integrity of media as much as they claim. They are happy to champion the "original creator's vision", but then Nagoshi praises the localization of the Yakuza games and attributes the good localization to its success internationally, and all of a sudden his thoughts don't matter.
Also continuing on from your last point, so many people blamed the localisation team for the Yakuza 3 remaster getting rid of a transphobic substory, but didn't realise that it was Nagoshi himself who said it didn't fit the current world view and got rid of it in the JP version too. They don't care about the actual creator's thoughts/opinions, they just want to be mad at something.
When Yakuza 6 was coming out, Scott Strichart and Sam Mullen were doing official SEGA Yakuza livestreams where they would talk about how the team handled certain scenes, text, and differences between both the english and jp version, and watching them honestly encouraged me to want to finish college, and seriously start to persue a career in that field. I found that the changes (like changing Y6's mission objectives to reflect Kiryu's inner thoughts) improved the game's emotional impact, and made me interested in the process of how localization works. I used to be very heavy on the "wanting translators, not localizers" side, (I mean I made a shit FE Fates video back in 2016 that got ALOT of attention from that crowd that I have since deleted) but I think the Yakuza team opening up about it really helped me get out of that and formed my own opinions on each case.
The internet in a nutshell right here. They'll tart-up their viewpoint to make it sound grand, often under the guise of "supporting the creator's original vision", but it simply comes down to having an excuse that sounds more dignified than "don't take the titties out of ma vidja garms!". Their loyalty extends only so far as when it aligns with their worldview.
@@fireaza And I mean... is there something really wrong with that? isn't that way the way that everyone but a few select gentlemen and gentlewoman behave?
RB: "Could you imagine putting all those hours into translating a project and then not being able to see your name on it and also not being allowed to talk about it?" Me: WELCOME TO MY LIFE. 😂🤐🥴🙃🙃🙃 Thanks for the lovely video! Well worth the wait.
@@mitkitty Even dumber when during what I call the "the Todd Snap arc" they CALL THE RICE BALLS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ARE: FRICKING RICE BALLS!! Shortly followed by Ash imagining a worst case scenario of him and his friends getting SNIPER ASSASINATED upon seeing a weird lens glare from the grass.
Ok, so this my personal pet peeve since I'm from a small country and basically everything has to be translated so I'm always super happy when I see a great translation and super mad when I have to switch subtitles to English. Translating something means you have to write the entire book again in a different language and understand your characters enough to know what would they say if they spoke your language. Not to mention that you need to know some creative writing too. I just wanted to thank you translators for your hard and underappreciated work. You're breathtaking. :)
I think a case of bad script localiztion people forget is from Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation, where two of the game's playable characters; assassins named Saizo and Beruka interact with one another. In the original Japanese script the characters are discussing their body count with one another and comparing methods. Here's how the English localization of this conversation plays out. Saizo: "..." Beruka: "..." Saizo: "..." Beruka: "..." *conversation ends*
The dialogue just being dots is honestly a pretty dang funny way to censor something. Sometimes the silence makes it so you have to interpret it, & it makes it funny that way.
@@ExtremeWreck I never would fucking touch the fate series due to 1. Nintendo consoles in the DS family are region locked FOR NO GOD DAMN GOOD REASON.... 2. Censored beyond belief. If I am paying 30+ dollars, I want ALL OF THE CONTENT.... When it is fucking censored... I view it as stealing someone's hard earned money and saying... " No you can't eat that steak because my infant doesn't have teeth ".
@@ExtremeWreck "haha we kiddified your game and decided to treat you like a dumb toddler, funny right? Thanka for wasting your money on this game sucker"
I'm so glad that this video hints to the fact that not even fan translations are perfect, because they aren't. There are things like the J2E transition of FF4 and the original scanlation of Vento Aureo which are great examples of hack dubs and why a literal translation isn't always the greatest.
I'm an online Chinese translator, and this video is on point. I started off as an editor because of the overly literal translations of Chinese webnovels, and now I've come a long way in understanding how to translate a text into English. One thing online translators do get is recognition, though. Which is very nice. But you also get a bunch of hate for things outside of your control. Some people are better at recognizing it's not our fault, but some people don't care.
I'll admit, I've fallen into the "literal is better" trap a few times, and it's also true the hack dubs/translations of days gone past have left their scars. It certainly doesn't help "localization" sounds like scary word that could be interchangeable with anglicization It's a nuanced discussion that can often, ironically, be lost in words and poor examples that don't really paint the full picture.
The problem is that translators are often freelancers and forming a freelance union is not really easy. There are people trying, in Spain we have various professional associations, which are not the same as unions, but at least they can lobby for better treatment and make things like rates guidelines. ATRAE (the association of audiovisual translators) and ASETRAD (the association of translators and interpreters) do great work, but they have limitations over the power of traditional unions.
Thank you for talking about how a literal translation is impossible! I'm no translator but I speak both English and Spanish so people talking about literal translations annoys me quite a bit. Even though Spanish and English are similar, it's still really easy to stumble with non-translatable words and translation problems, I can't even imagine the problems that occur when translating from Japanese to English, considering how different those languages are.
I was just thinking about this! I was watching Sgt Frog and there's so many jokes that needed to be Americanized to make sense. The dub is SO well rewritten, very funny!!! It's on TH-cam for free, I definitely recommend it!
Don’t translate literally or you’ll end up with shit like “starfruits!”,”you better take your little horse out of the rain”, and my personal favorite: “ball show!”
Reminds me of how they translated 'Lethal Drops' here in the Emperor's New Groove game. Drops in Italy only refers to water, the other meaning translates to 'Burroni', so we got the hilarious 'Gocce Letali', technically right, but nonsensical.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Smile Precure/Glitter Force and Dokidoki Precure/Glitter Force Doki Doki considering they got the 4kids treatment in the mid-2010s, and the changes that were made are pretty awful and insensitive.
Oof, yeah. Someone at Saban obviously thought they could easily do with Precure what they do with Super Sentai, while ignoring the fact that very 90s conventions that created Power Rangers might not fly today. Not even Laura Bailey could save that mess.
On top of that, they cut 8 episodes, never did the movie, and deliberately changed the setting from Japan to...pretty much anywhere else since Glitter Force was released everywhere except Asia. Considering the fact these dubs released in 2015 and 2017 respectfully, I’m worried that the kids who watch the dubs will accidentally be culturally insensitive in the future. “Miyuki isn’t a real name! I’m just gonna call you Emily!” “Hey, are you wearing a bathrobe outside?” “Japan? What’s that?”
I'm glad you touched upon how little paid and crunched translators are, people seem to think these people are expendable and not human, especially when they threaten them over how they are just trying to do their jobs.
The whole translators getting the shaft reminds me about the working conditions for mangaka and the people who work on anime and manga in Japan. It’s a logistical nightmare from what I can see. So, you have the people who work on the anime/manga who’s work condition might not be that good, the company who might not be getting the best deal, the distributors like Crunchyroll or Funimation who need to sell the product, the translators and other employees that aren’t being paid enough and might be getting the short end of the stick, and finally the consumer who either will buy it, not buy it due to price/another factor, or pirate it. It’s all one big mess and should be fixed but as it is with the current business model, it might be a tough road to divert from.
Today I learned that anime fans hate localization! This really shocked me because I'm a huge Ace Attorney fan so I've only ever heard of localization being talked about with high praise. Btw Janet Hsu, one of the localizers on the Ace Attorney games, wrote a really great blog piece about the process. She talks about how important it is for the audience to feel the right emotions in certain parts of the story and why changes would be made. One of the examples she gives is that looking at a kindergartner's name badge will give Japanese audience members a feeling of nostalgia while the rest of the world either won't know what it is or won't have any emotions towards it. idk if youtube will let me link it but it's titled "Localization and Ace Attorney" and it's on the capcom-unity website
While I don't represent most anime fans, my feelings toward localization always were against hack dub products. In the cases I'm critical of, we usually have a subbed version that offers one context and meaning (which I automatically assume to be close to origin meaning) and a dubbed version that offers a completely different meaning to the same scene. The kicker being both versions are present from the same source (Funimation, Crucnhyroll, etc.). The question then becomes why are the two versions so different even though they come from the same licensing company, and why does the dub version more often than not inject political leaning that wasn't present in the subs. It may be the case that the dub turns out more accurate to creator intent than the subs, but a typical consumer won't know since they cant understand the original, thus is why I make the assumption that the subs are more accurate to creator intent than the scripted subs are. Those are the types of translations that seem off to me, and makes me feel like im being preached to rather than enjoying a creator's vision. But on another topic, Ace Attorney is Great! I have the trilogy and wish Capcom would release more from the series to the west, even the notorious Edgeworth investigation games. Glad to see people still appreciate the IP years after the games came out.
@@SlavoidUkr Yeah, it's like our inside joke. I mean, if you need to choose a place in America where Japanese culture is prominent, California seems like your best bet.
@@timelordvictorious8610 Subs are often different from dubs for a very obvious reason, they are different mediums with different limitations, in dubbing you have to match mouth flaps and syllables, so that sometimes makes choosing one word or expression over another more convenient, they also have to work better with the expressions, since they are coming from a voice rather than text. Subs have other limitations, usually character limit, (people read characters at certain pace and characters can only be on the screen before the next bit comes, and they ideally can't distract from the scene too much. That leaves subs to be usually more like general ideas, very brief and to the point and also more tame in the choice of words and expressions since, again, they can't distract you (that is why sub is a good practice to avoid explanatory subtitles, and that's why fansubs are full of them). Neither subs or dub is closer to the original text. I have worked as a subtitler and the hoops I had to go to fit a long very quickly said flow of words from English to a nice two lines of 35 characters into would amaze you
@@Elsenoromniano Well, obviously. I'm well aware of the need to sync with lip flaps, limited scene times, and the need to not distract watchers. Those are basically the main points of the video and many others like it that cover similar related topics. I never said that the dubs and subs had to match exactly, that would be practically impossible to do and maintain a good watching experience. Again, the problem comes more from hack-dub type changes when the scriptwriters seem to place ideas or concepts unrelated from the original work into the show. The Kobayashi and Prison School examples are the most well known and understood, essentially taking a cliche joke based on circumstance and dramatic irony and changing it to some comment about politics or misogyny. The change was unneeded and arguably decreases the enjoyment of the experience since it doesn't help the flow of the story or make much sense in the context of the story presented. It is interesting to know that neither the sub nor dub are necessarily closer to the original when compared to the other though. I always assumed subs typically were due to their nature, although most dubs don't tend to stray that far off of their sub counterpart anyways so that makes sense. And your last line reminded me of the Ghost Stories dub where they comment about having to sync the fastest lip flaps and just make random noises. Good stuff right there.
thanks so much for this video it's really well done and if more people knew this the community would be way less toxic, for a personal example: I've lost to much time trying to explain to fellow fate fans thing like that the translation "I see that being right is the only thing you actually care about" is better than "just because your correct doesn't mean your right" because of things like the flow and shit just for them to at the end say and I quote: "if you like to watch a show that was modified by a foreigner, changing words killing the real message, then go ahead" and "I think most anime translators are lazy/they don't know Japanese that well." it's real story : /
The common perpetrators of such thoughts are always the people who only speak English. Been having this conversation for the last decade that language isn't one to one and that word choice and sentence structure convey different ideas and emotion across languages.
Oof it really be like that. I understand that for some people it can be hard to recognize how different languages can be but it still gets super annoying when people complain about shit like this
@@beepboop7345 exactly. Look at the word chair. In English a chair is a chair. But in my native tongue the word for chair also means throne or high seat. Without localisation you could shift into all 3 meanings of the word in the same conversation, which wouldn't make much sense to the viewer.
@@Matthy63 bold of you to assume they read ANY version of the Odyssey and aren't just scrolling looking to be pissed about something that they have zero interest in to begin with
Digimon and Saban in general, were weird and inconsistent when it came to their dubs. Sometimes you'd get shit like "soda/taco sauce/milkshake" sake and Japanese being "digi-code", and other times they kept all the Japanese influence, including names of people, places, and foods, and reference subjects that would be taboo to a western audience, like religion.
@@lizardlord4k Very true, Digimon was bizarrely inconsistent in terms of what content was allowed. My favourite completely nonsensical aspect was that, in Digimon Adventure, the only deaths that were ever censored were instances of villains killing their underlings, while all the heartbreaking deaths of 100% sympathetic heroic characters were left totally untouched.
@@PrimeroJinJusuke Hey, it wasn't that bad, the dub score was very good, in the first two seasons they just weren't always very good at syncing it with a scene's mood correctly or leaving moments silent when appropriate. _Hey Digimon_ is a cute song but again, the problem was they often used it in inappropriate circumstances (they always tried using it as battle theme which it really wasn't suited for, the two best uses of it are the times it _wasn't_ used like that: in the last Adventure episode and in the movie). 02's battle songs were all actually really good and were always used appropriately and effectively. Oh, and (massively unpopular opinion incoming) the _Digimon: Digital Monsters_ title theme is great and I like it _at least_ as much as the original Japanese intro songs (the JP intros are perfectly fine but they could really be from any show, the dub Digimon theme actually captures the quirky tone of the show properly, plus having a heavily electronic theme for a show about a digital world just fits better).
Great video, I wish every anime fan would watch this. It drives me nuts when people think translation is a direct 1:1 and complain that an official translation "changed" something just because they made a different choice than whatever fansub they're used to. For example, I saw someone on Twitter complain that Netflix's Beastars subtitles call Louis "Ruis," even though "Louis," "Luis," and "Ruis" are all valid transliterations of the exact same thing. And even though it's easy to think "Surely the author must have been thinking of the name Louis," I honestly suspect the rights-holders told them what spelling to use, like you mention. Honestly it's pretty sad that in addition to these translators receiving little credit and little pay, fans often seem to hold them in contempt even though we rely on the work of these translators to be able to enjoy these media in the first place. Also, having recently completed AI: The Somnium Files with the Japanese voices, I'm kind of amazed anyone thought that the LGBT comment was shoe-horned in by the localizers. This is so easy to check because the English version of the game lets you hear the Japanese voices, and even see the Japanese text! Of course the people making the complaint don't speak Japanese, but you'd think they could try to find someone who speaks the language and ASK, "Does this seem like an accurate translation?" before leaping to that conclusion. Plus, another character being gay is kind of an important plot point in another route so thinking the translators just made up the LGBT content is just such a bizarre thing to think.
i'm a translator myself, and this video made me quite happy!! i'm very far from being a professional but it does take a lot of work and understanding. what i do now is mostly to brush up on my grammar and recognition of characters, and i have learned a TON since i began over a year ago. thank you for making such an informative video!
To further add to your point, let’s not forget people who write English versions of Japanese songs and have to make sure to keep the meaning and emotion of the original song while still making sure it sounds catchy. Let’s also give credit to the people who write translated subtitles for TH-cam videos.
This reminds me of AmaLee's april fools cover of 'crossing field' the SAO op1. Where she basically respond to people complainng about why she changes the lyrics and doesn't use literal translation for her English covers. Because being literaly makes singing awkward af and sound really off
Tbh I used to be in the "support translators not localizers" team, until last year in english class, in which we had to translate a book to our main language, portuguese. If I had translated it literally, almost nothing would've made sense. Like, if I had translated the idiom "piece of cake" as "pedaço de bolo", no one would get that, so I had to change it to "mamão com açúcar", which conveys the same idea. It wouldn't have made sense if I was doing the opposite and translated "mamão com açúcar" as "papaya with sugar" either, after all. That being said, I wish sometimes some sort of "afterword" was included in anime and manga translation, kinda like TL notes but instead of taking half of the screen, it'd be in it's own separate place. I believe this would clear lots of misconceptions if the translator had a place to say, for example, "that character was actually talking about the LGBT community, we did not make this shit up".
That's a good example and i also got out of that whole to and like i said in my comment i made sadly the elitist extremist fans and the community in general aren't gonna listen to this video thanks to the far alt-right anti-sjw grifters that only came to the fandoms just to start crap and make money off of it and sadly the side of the anime fandom that listens to them are still gonna eat up there bullcrap and continue to be cultists of them and have a bad understand on stuff, but who knows if one day they will end up finding the truth and seeing the bullcrap from not only the people the anti-sjw's swore to be against but both the extremist fake poser sjw's and the anti-sjw's as well
That's one of my favorite things from the Fairy Tail manga, actually. The end of each volume has several pages of translator's notes explaining any time they had to make a judgement call during translation or just explaining something your typical English speaker might not get. For example, there's an old man character who in the original Japanese had an onomatopoeia for his shuffling his dentures around in his mouth that doesn't really have an English equivalent, so the translator changed it to him clearing his throat constantly.
That's a great idea, actually! I would love a bonus feature clip of all the translators talking about their work and how they chose to translate the material included in a physical release of the show. Hearing people talk about their process is something I love and this would be a great way to finally be able to explain their process. If I had to guess that's probably the main issue with these paranoid types. They don't care much about the process as they think, so they never get to hear the way translators handle material. Those 'SJW' lines they hated sounded like throwaway gags the team thought would be funny. I've seen this done a lot with comedic shows where the team will take some liberties (usually with the approval of the Japanese staff) be it the translators or even the VAs improvising jokes that the director found too funny to not keep in. It happens, and most of the time it's just for fun. Funimation's localization has always been fine for me, but pretty dry. You can tell their team doesn't have the best writers (ie. people with refined diction so a lot of characters' speech pattern sound similar) so to me it made sense they'd want to let loose in comedy shows. I can see why fans would be upset that they added something so out of left field, but all this talk of politics and propaganda just sounds like paranoid conspiracy. If they heard one of the translators admit 'oh we were having lunch and someone thought it would be funny so we added it in' maybe they'd just have their ragefit and move on instead of trying to start a hatred movement for an important part of the translation process.
@@grimgracious I think you're giving these types too much credit. They wouldn't ragefit and go away, they'd call the people involved liars and say they're making up a story so they can get their SJW propaganda through without getting questioned.
4Kids' cheapness and overall incompetence is the reason why a truly unreasonable number of people treat terrible joyless literal translations of Japanese media as a gold standard to aspire to. I have paid for and subsequently been disappointed and horrified by manga translations I can only describe as having been written by people with a vendetta against the English language. I lay the blame at 4Kids' feet for convincing a generation that localization is the devil.
Yeah, as a native English speaker who's learning Japanese, I can 1000% confirm that localization is necessary, and the go to example I always use to explain it is Schezo from Puyo Puyo. To try and explain, in the Japanese version, Schezo's general "gimmick" is to walk up to someone and say "おまえ が…ほしい！" (Omae ga hoshi!) which literally translates to "You am want!" when the original intention is that Schezo accidentally sounds like he's about to rape whoever he's talking to before clearly stating what he actually wants. Most of the time, fan translations either localize it as "I want you!" if they're trying to be literal while still making grammatical sense in English, or as "Become my desire!" to try and keep the idea that he's supposed to sound creepy. However, when we finally got an officially localized Puyo Puyo game, they changed the way Schezo talks so that instead of just saying "I want you!" to everyone he meets, he just makes a bunch of sexual innuendos, such as "Expose yourself!" when looking for someone, "I'll help you wrestle that book cover to cover, and under the covers too!" when saving Klug from being possessed from the evil demon in his book again, and "Insert whatever you like" in response to another person saying "I should insert some manners into this conversation" which does a far better job at getting the idea of a creepy guy who sounds like he wants to rape you across
Crystal Queen Oh I know, I meant it’s a good example and of such an impactful subject that it should work really well to convey just how complex translating can be.
I feel like you are misrepresenting the argument though by phrasing it as "You am want" and not pointing out there is a very easy straight to English translation "You want it".
Yes!! The Ai: The Somnium Files scene discourse always ruffles my feathers. There's an option within the game to use the Japanese audio, where you would hear a similar sentiment being spoken.
Isn't that the game where underage characters have fully modeled panties and cameltoe? Yeah, that and the locker room talk sure makes it a great piece of pro-LGBT media. 🙄
Man, this reminds me of a controversy that recently happened in Italy when the Netflix dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion got handed to one of those purist "localization is artistic murder" types, and he proceeded to create an utterly incomprehensible hackjob that made zero grammatical sense, was awful to hear and, cherry on top, outright IGNORED Anno's word of god on how to translate the word "shito" (that is, angel), and to top THAT cherry with another cherry, it later turned out that, when scrutinized by people who had an actual degree in Japanese, the translation wasn't even actually adherent to the original text, and the localization had often added meanings where there were none at all in the original text purely according to the personal taste of the guy in charge, and what he thought the authors meant, rather than what they openly stated they meant.
The same thing happened with the new English version. Netflix absolutely massacred Eva and it makes me sooo sad that the new translation is gonna be a lot of people’s first (and likely only) exposure to the series. My favorite blunder example is their replacing of Kowaru‘s line to Shunji, “In other words I love you”, with the more literal translation “you are worthy of my grace”, because “I love you” isn’t really used in Japanese. But that change COMPLETELY erases the ambiguous romantic subtext between Shinji and Kowaru that was present in the original Japanese. NOT TO MENTION, the line “in other words, I love you” is also a brilliant reference to the final line in Eva’s outro song “Fly Me To The Moon”, which the 2nd translation team apparently missed completely But yeah weebs, please tell me more about how the new translation is the superior one because it’s “more faithful” to the original Japanese
The Cannarsi situation is precisely what I think about localization/translation. He is an example of why literal translation just doesn't work, but at the same time this highlights why the original Italian version worked so good: It was a FAITHFUL localization, when words and specific expression were changed It was only to transmit the same concepts in a way that worked in italian. The reason why I still don't unilaterally stand against fuckers with phrases like "we want translators not localizers" is what was done to Fire Emblem in some games. Many scenes are completely butchered and their meaning changed, with some characters that were basically changed in their motivations and reasons. 3 Houses is a pretty good translation, but it's plenty of choices that are... Debatable at best. There is an entire support between two characters that is changed in mood, what's being said and how the characters end It. If your only source saw that the english localization, you would have a completely different perspective about a character. The case of Somnium is the perfect counter example, with fans talking out of their asses.
@@HauntedHarmonics I heard about the controversy regarding the "I Love You" part, at least in the Neutral Spanish dub the line was translated as "Te Amo" (I Love You), people were worried they would translated as "Me Gustas" (I Like You). Curiously, Evangelion was dubbed into Neutral Spanish 3 times, and Shinji is the only character whose voice actor was never replaced
@@Hyperversum3 He's also notorious for translating most of the Ghibli films... and how he ruined them. In Princess Mononoke, he directly translated "Shishigami" to "Dio Besta", much to the fury of Italian fans.
I agree that localization workers don't get the credit they deserve. I can't remember which game I played that made me positively aware of the localization effort, but when you realize how well something was localized, the feeling is like this wholesome, wholebody awareness. We definitely need to promote these people more! Also, I've always thought your videos are incredibly insightful and well-researched, but your continued support for fellow anitubers and your promotion specifically for Beyond the Bot are especially inspiring. Thanks for being such an amazing class act!
I've long seen proper translation as a bit of a balancing act. Make it too literal, and you end up with something that sounds extremely artificial and can in some cases actually be just as incomprehensible as just not translating it. Take too many liberties, and you end up with something that might make sense but is effectively a different story entirely. A lot of 4Kids dubs fall into the latter camp. Not an anime example, but the closest I've seen to the latter in an official product is the English translation for The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, with lines like "Even without being told, we understand" or "If it's something that can be stopped, then try to stop it!", both of which are lines where I can easily tell *exactly* what the Japanese was because they translated them practically word for word. (For the record, it was "言われなくても分かる" and "止められるもんなら止めてみろ". I have not actually looked at the Japanese text in the game but I *guarantee* that those lines were either exactly that, or very slight variations on it.) The dub of Pokémon also sometimes falls into this, especially in movies, while somehow *also* falling into the problem of being too liberal. Like, Team Rocket's lines are rewritten to hell and back, whereas almost every other character speaks incredibly stiff and "translationese", as a friend of mine calls it.
As a non native English speaker, I definitely understand how you can't translate something word for word. I speak a specific subculture slang of English with my English speaking friends. If I just paste it in Google Translate it will produce a gibberish. That what I want in an anime translation is to be as close as possible and the translator to not make funny assumptions, like that the people who watch are too stupid to not understand a foreign culture. imo translation of jokes or poetry are nearly impossible to be translated without some "cheating".
So this actually reminded me of a story my mom would tell me about my Grandmother who came from Greece while my mom was growingup; whenever my mom would tell her to "shut up", my grandma would reply with "Don't you call me Shut Up" because the closest thing to "shut up" in Greek with the tone and anger was closer to calling someone a bad name than it was telling them to be quite. This is why the "Shut Up" scene from The Princess Diaries will always be extra funny in our family.
When it comes to stuff like the patriarchy line I always try to look up what a more literal translation would be and then see how they localized it so I have a better sense of what their thought process was
Honestly my main issue with it is moreso related to how it often - the Dragon Maid patriarchy line, for example - feel like some sort of fourth wall breaking quip. Like dora the explorer is about to turn towards the audience and go «can you say buzzword?»
Good localization: Kero-chan talks in slang. Bad localization: "Bunny" Tsukino in Norma's Sailor Moon Horrific translation: The fansub who misunderstood the German feminine article/plural "die" and English verb "die", which resulted in "Muere Zauberflüte" instead of "La Flauta Mágica" Bonus points: renaming characters whose original name is offensive for the intended audience.
Yeah about the last i don't know. For example in italian, the real name of Goku "Kakarot" was changed into "Kaarot" because it could have been easly missheard as "Shit-Burp" (caca - rotta). I mean, you would have kept Shitburp as the main hero name?
@@LynnHermione not if the intended audience are school aged kids with limited or no knowledge of Japanese. Zapato was renamed to Zagato because a villain named "shoe" doesn't fit the story, and Chichi... well, it's slang for vagina. Card Captor Sakura characters kept their Japanese names, while Cardcaptors didn't. Madison who? Nobody remembers. Tomoyo, on the other hand...
I work translating English to my native language and I started it for fun. Some stuff, like expressions, jokes and picking appropriate words based on the context and the character's personality makes sense. However, my "issue" with funanimation or any other work is when they completely change the meaning. For example, in Danganronpa 3 Despair, there is a line in which the protagonist inner monologue after recalling an advice, he calls the attention about having deadline, that he has 7 days to decide, which is important for the context of the story. US dub? He recalls the advice and it was basically a 'check your privilege, dude'. It didn't have to synchronize with his mouth and only made him sound bitter, detracting from the original intention. This is the kind of translation that gets in my nerves and, as someone who works with this, made me upset.
I got into a smaller fandom at around the time the official localization of the light novel arrived. Having only had unofficial translation lovingly made by fans, sometime, the official translation really made me fumes about changing certain sentences or names. However, comparing the work made by unofficial translater vs official translation is just not fair, official translater are on a thight schedule, at a miserable pay for something they may not be familiar with (compared to fan who works for free when they have time simply because they love the work so much). So of course, some localization change may not be exactly what I imagined, but I support and always will support the official translation by buying the novels, because it's bringing the thing I love to the attention of more fans! It's awesome to have an official translation because that means I can share the thing I love more easily with more people. Also, if anyone wondering, read Baccano!
One of my favorite examples of this were people complaining that Funimation removed a "sexual joke" in a dub (that was in the subs) when, in actuality, removing the sexual joke made it more accurate and there was no sexual joke to begin with. The subs made it up.
@@laboon344 For context. The most popular sub for the show takes the scene, where she's suddenly forced to do an interview for winning a tournement. The original line is basically that she stumbles over her sentence, mumbling a few words really badly. The most popular sub wanted to convey "She said something stupid and is embaressed by it" by adding the line "I took a pounding but I liked it" (because she tanks the fuck out of enemies with her armour and giant shield). This translation isn't bad, in that its something you could believe someone would actually mistakingly say while under heavy pressure and be embaressed over it, but its a completely added joke and a sex joke at that. The dub had her say "It was tough but I'm hoppy" (instead of happy). Kinda a shitty line to be honest but completely legit to the original mistake she makes (mis-says Desu as more like Deshu (with the e partially devoiced).
One of my favorite examples of a localization choice being made it in the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya's dub. Most anime fans are aware of how significant calling people by their first names is in Japan, it's a very common anime trope. So in a heartfelt scene between Kyon and Yuki Nagato (who he'd only referred to as Nagato-san/Miss Nagato), as it starts snowing, he says "yuki" the Japanese word for snow. The scene is ambiguous as to whether or not he refers to her by her first name, or if he's just noticing the snow (or both). It's a powerful moment that I think of often, but it left a dilemma for the dub. The scene is pretty much impossible to translate literally, if you decide on him saying "Yuki" or "Snow" in that moment, all the ambiguity is lost, and the moment is less powerful. It's a shame such a powerful moment had to kinda be lost, but what the dub did was great: "Yuki... means snow, doesn't it?" Kyon pauses for a moment, and brings back the ambiguity as to whether he addressed her by her name, or if he just made a comment about it. While I think the simplicity of the original Japanese moment was better, clearly the "yuki means snow" line resonated with fans. I still hear it quoted. I am very much impressed at how they salvaged this conundrum.
One of the best translations of manga I've ever read was the Arabic translation of Beastars. It's so amazing how the translators could use Arabic poetry that was so perfectly writing at the ending of each chapter to sum it. It's like the icing on the cake. If you're reading this, good job guys I'm so proud of you. I believe some of the potes used are real poetry by famous poets.
This reminds me of my brief period doing scanlation work. I was the person who used photoshop to edit the pages to add the translated sound fx, side notes, conversation, etc to a manga. It takes a lot communication and cooperation with the translator since they usually assist w/ copy editing to make sure the material flows in a similar fashion to the original manga. It's a lot of hard work ESPECIALLY for the people doing the translating - they're the ones localizing the work to make it relevant for English speaking audiences. It's hard work and no, you never want a literal translation... What ppl want is a pretty faithful translation. That's the difference.
Yeah alot of fandom's ( except for some ) have become really toxic this year and age I'm mean look at the star wars fandom for example, and the doctor who and marvel and dc fandom and going in anime territory look at how the my hero academia fandom became to those fandoms have become so toxic thanks to grifters spreading lies and making fans only look at the mistakes rather then the positivity they mostly done but I'm not saying it's all the fandoms fault half the blame does go to the companies as well for some choices they made which caused a huge alienation because of how they didn't think before they do what there going to do
@@alastor-yw7og Star Wars turned into such a shit-show, you don't need the fandom to do that. Marvel sales are going down the drain and the films are becoming creatively draining. DC is rudderless. MHA became a chore to read and I stopped. What happened to that fandom?
When you are on the outside you don't know everything. Sometimes you have stuff like the English Dub of Stg. Frog where they try to punch up the jokes, make it slightly raunchier and make the characters sassier. It's still funny but. I prefer the sub it's funnier and much more innocent. You can tell wich jokes were added and which ones weren't.
I think you should take some of the concerns of the people who say they prefer literal > localized translations in better faith. To understand and oppose someone else's opinion, you should interpret the words of what people say by what they think the word means. When they say "literal vs localized" , they don't mean 'google translate vs trying to convey the meaning of the text', then mean 'messy, but culturally Japanese and true to the words in the text vs clean but culturally altered interpretation'. Even if they are wrong about what the dictionary, or industry professionals say the word means, what you should be concerned with is the ideas that are actually in their head, not the semantics of their wording. I think that there is a meaningful tradeoff between those two conceptions. Obviously every work has to fall somewhere in the middle, but I think its fair for certain fans to express that they want a translation that allows them to use their knowledge of Japanese culture, and to do their own interpretation, even if there are other costs. For example, I think there is a very fair argument to be made about the Sailor Moon example that the last sentence should be as it is in the literal translation. Because she does not make an absolute evaluation of her own worth in the original Japanese like 'I [absolutely] am a loser', rather she implies that she is lesser than Sailor V. I think if you leave it as "compared to her, I'm...", the astute english watcher will understand the implication of her words through context, just like the Japanese watcher. The localization really does to some extent 'dumb down' the line, by removing any ambiguity in what Sailor Moon says, and in some way belittles the audience's ability to figure it out themselves. Also I just want to note that the other lines in the 'literal translation' are pretty ungenerous to the literal translation. Another word in the dictionary definition of "関係ない" is 'unconcerned', which conveys the meaning of her words a lot better while still fitting the dictionary definition. I don't think its good to strawman the literal side into entailing only picking the first result in the dictionary, or even picking any result in the dictionary for any word. Finally, to note on the 'partriarchy' and 'gamer gate' dubs, I agree that alot of the outrage is likely culture war bullshit, but I do think that there is something to be said about the importance of trust between the translator and the reader. When things like this happen, where it becomes clear to the audience that the translation is severely off, it destabilizes their reading of other works of fiction, under the thought of 'if this line was so off, how many other lines are off that I just didn't realize'. So even if its a minority of cases I think translators should be concerned about acts which may make them seem less trustworthy to readers.
Yeah i also agree that culture war is stupid to and considering I'm now fully going with the looking at both sides of the spectrum view now I understand that there are words that break off what the series spirit is but there either not always there or they are sometimes on par or actually similar to what the Japanese context is mainly conveying depending on the setting that said series is in
You have valid arguments, but the arguably largest (or at least loudest) group of people who complain about that stuff are "gamers™" who don't want "polidics in their vidiya", so it makes sense that she primarily addresses those guys.
@@Alias_Anybody The only time they were really in the wrong was with the AI game since the original also mentioned LGBTQ+, other than most other criticisms made by that crowd are against censorship where there was clearly an insertion of politically charged words in works that didnt have them initially and also didn’t even fit the original message either.
as someone who translates for a living (though not for anime/manga), i really love this video- i think people don't understand what localization means- yeah, sometimes it can mean making it make sense to a local audience by removing all native cultural references, but more often than not, it means just taking something that makes no sense literally, and re-wording it as something that better gets across the original intent- sometimes it's a real struggle to let go of your first, more literal translation that you worked out because it's kind of your baby and you worked hard on it, but after re-wording it to make sense, you become proud of that version even more, because you can imagine being someone who knows nothing about the native culture reading it and understanding what the original was trying to say without losing any authenticity (because, for those who don't know, maintaining authenticity IS something that localization does that translation does not!) This isn't to say that localizations are always perfect, but translation is an art form- there's a lot of subjectivity involved ("does it sound more natural like this or like this?") and sometimes you just... miss the mark- yeah, sure, sometimes translators are intentionally trying to send a specific message, but more often than not, there's a lot more love and care put into these translations than people realize- also just to put this out here, a direct, word-for-word translation isn't a sign of a good translator, but rather the sign of an incompetent one- it shows you don't understand the language well enough to pick up on idiomatic expressions and insinuations or tone, and it shows that you certainly are not skilled enough to translate professionally, because google translate can do the exact same thing that you do, spitting out incomprehensible lines like that.
13:51 I'm glad you like Urusei Yatsura! I feel like more and more people are giving it some recognition than before lately. I remember it wasn't well-known several years ago.
That's so interesting to see how the US had the hack dubs when here in brazil a lot of animation fans in general are having a translation appreciation renaissance. A lot of people have the same complaints but I've seen a bunch of more anime fans praising the Yu Yu Hakusho dub here, which imo is pretty funny and well localized. A lot of brazilian dubs in general have been getting a lot of praise on the internet for its localization which is great, we do have our fair share of bad translations though xD
I think dubs in Brazil are particularly well-done; mostly because the best of them don't even try to be 100% literal, and go for meaning/feeling instead; Yuyu Hakusho is pretty much a gold standard in that regard. Not 100% precise, but funny as heck and able to give different characters unique voices. Beign that the japanese immigrant community/japanese culture has an outsized visibility compared to its size, many of the "onigiri/doughnut" problems could be avoided either by familiarity or by just asking a japanese brazilian what the heck "x" meant
Croatia has also had a crap ton of hack dubs - from cartoons, TV shows and movies. 😩 I remember watching the Croatian dub of Winx Club when I was 7 years old and how I thought that was the perfectly acceptable version (granted, my English knowledge was very limited at that time and I didn't understand Italian at all). And when I became more confident with my English, I began watching the RAI English dub of Winx Club and realized just how botched the Croatian translation was.
Honesty, my stance is make changes but only where they need to be made. Good localization to me is an art-form that is spectacular when done well and a train wreck when done wrong. Straight-up, I love the changes that are super clever in keeping the original intent. That being said, at the end of the day I would rather have something like p5 that didn’t localize enough (this becomes especially apparent when you look at the spin-offs, the dancing game‘a script has a lot more flavor to it than the original game) than fe fates that 4kids the thing. Edit: Also Holy shit I own that Japanese idiom book
I dabble in Visual Kei lyric translations and, even though it’s just a fun way to practice my Japanese, I always put a lot of time and energy into making my English version as natural as possible. Sometimes this takes the form of changing the “voice” to convey the nuances in phrasing and sometimes it means changing the lines completely because the original would not be comprehensible (or the original is supposed to sound dramatic but would sound silly to an English speaker). I have seen how disastrous Netflix translations can be when I have watched American comedies with my Japanese friend. The Japanese subs are pretty literal and he’ll be completely unaware that a line was supposed to be a joke. It was commonplace for me to pause something when I saw that the subs were incorrect so I could explain what was actually said
If you know the Visual Novel "Narcissu", in the french version you can choose between two translation from the menu : one that is quite litteral and one that is more localized. By two differents teams and they did a little resume of their point of view in the "translation select screen" I found it funny and quite nice ! I still don't know if the one i choose was the "best" hahaha
As a foreign language teacher, you encapsulated exactly how my job feels sometimes whenever the students ask stuff like "how do you say ___". Cuz /I/ would say X but that's my own opinion and "localization" on the language that I would say X
You know what grind my gears from translations is when they put memes in the script. It makes it dated real quick. Remembers some of Nintendo's translations during 3ds/with era.
I agree with you, but at the same time I think it depends on the meme/popculture reference that's being translated. A few months ago, I saw an example of a manga translation that took NicoNico/Japanese youtube comment memes and translated it into a twitch stream chat, including "Poggers" and other extremely twitch-only memes. I'm really sad that I can't remember what it was from or who translated it, but I was in awe at the translation. It perfectly captured what the author wanted to convey with the Niconico chat and made it uniquely western.
A few I didn’t mind, a few I can see being an issue. Basically I liked the doge meme in triforce heroes because we lost nothing there. Sadly Fate’s was filled with jokes that it took away important dialog, even if I found some things funny, it was quite damaging.
oh, you thought 3DS era was bad? What about the leet speak hammer bro’s from partners in time? It’s so dated it’s iconic. Also what about all the dated slang in Thousand Year Door? 10s era meme references were pretty bad, tho. Wonder if they’ll eventually be nostalgic like the dated slang and leet speak?
An hilarious one from Italy. In the Italy- Uruguay match of 2014 world cup, the uruguaian player Suarez bit the Italian player Chiellini, wich became a meme in Italy. Then in black bullet italian sub, when a loli bit the protagonist he said "I am not Chiellini".
This applies not only to Japanese media, which is precisely why I think it's so important. I'm an Indian so I can talk about that well. Indian media isn't as easily accessible as Japanese media for a variety of reasons, but ignoring subjective reasons, the subs created for them are often very literal. They rely on good understanding of Indian culture, and sometimes even the language that the movie was in to even interpret them, and frankly, a lot of subs aren't good as they have poor English. That has been changing because the rights holders have realized there is a huge market of largely people like me and my family, Indians who live outside India, but the vast majority of it is still exactly what you talked about, a lot of literal translations with very little though into conveying the sentiment in English. Oftentimes it's just Indian slang English, which may not make sense to a non-Indian. To put it simply, I agree with wholeheartedly and think localization is the lens through foreign media is accessible. That is in my opinion why the biggest film industry isn't talked about much outside of those who understand their languages. (even if I prefer anime :P)
I still get angry over funi over the dragon maid bit because I haven't heard a good explanation of why their change made sense. Also it changed her character from not being socially aware to being very aware.
So, as someone who is in the process of rewatching Dragon Maid and has only heard that line for the first time in this video, it doesn't seem nearly as offensive as I'd been lead to believe. It just seems like the equivalent of saying "The MAN made me do it!" in reference to the government/police. Also, Lucoa (and Fafnir) both, at least to me, have a pretty low opinion of humans outside their immediate circle of association. Now, all this said, I seem to recall there being another line where Tohru straight up says, "Down with the patriarchy", which, I got nothing. There's no equivalent moment in the subs (again, that I'm aware of), and it stinks of legit agenda pandering.
@@kirbyfanprime I mean even in the video she explains that 'agenda pandering' based on like one or two instances in some random anime isn't a thing: nobody is risking their job for bloody Dragon Maid, and nobody is going to be using bloody Dragon Maid to make some larger point about society. The more likely explanation is that they threw in the line for a laugh and the joke simply didn't land, with a bunch of people taking a throwaway line way too seriously. Assuming that they must be pUsHiNg aN aGeNdA is a pretty big leap.
@@Nocturne22 even then, i wouldn't want to hear far right talking points either. if it's not relevant i don't want to hear real life controversial talking points.
A great Localization example I think is the inside out scene where she eats brócoli as a baby, I think in Japan (?) the scene was changed to show bell peppers because they're the more widely "disliked" vegetable there.
As a native spanish speaker, I want you to know that, MOST of the time, english subs are better than spanish ones, in spanish they can't even midly curse ("turd" for example), and they tend to gloss over details, I don't watch spanish subs in crunchyroll anymore, english ones are hella better. They are not perfect, but ceirtainly work well. This issue probably gets worse the less popular the language is, and how "professional" their industry is. That's probably why Brazilian dubs and Mongolian subs have such a hilarious reputation lol
I follow translators on social media (one being the translator for Torture Princess light novels which has a beautiful translation and another being Steiner, because I love the translation for the Dies Irae vn) and because of that I was able to understand more about the localizations for various mediums and I'm highly grateful for that.
I am still very upset that Viz Media refused to change the localization of Zolo back to Zoro in the western release of One Piece. Every time I read it, I feel like Im read early scanslations.
At this point it's probably just a matter of being consistent for readers who don't follow behind the scenes stuff. Imagine being a super casual fan and all of a sudden a main character's name changes between volumes. And reprinting older releases is also a huge volumes since there's SO DMAN MANY of them, it's not worth it just to change 1 characters name. Maybe they thought at one point they thought about doing a deluxe edition when it ended but.... y'know.
On a related note, the Spanish Latin American dub for Magic Knight Rayearth rename Zapato to Zagato because naming the main antagonist of the first season "shoe" didn't fit the character.
I think its important to see translation as an art in itself, the creative choices made during translation really adds another layer to any text (and especially in situation where one is able to compare the original to the translation) it can tell you a lot about someone elses interpretation of the text, which is just so fascinating
I think there's a conflict here between what laymen understand as "literal translation" vs what translators think when they hear the word. I think when random watchers say they want a "literal translation" they just want something that preserves the original script uncensored, but what translators understand under "literal translation" is 1:1 keeping words and structure which is completely impossible.
Literal translation vs faithful translation, its a shame this wasnt addresed in the video because really its the main argument being made just with a poor choice of words
I have to agree, I mean...while it's not like there AREN'T people who argue for "literal translation" in the way she describes, it's really quite few, and most are actually arguing for "faithful translation" as stated above. So...she kinda makes a strawman here just to take it down for being absurd, which few people would actually disagree with in the first place (hence it being a strawman). She also glosses over the censorship/agenda issue and I think misses the main worries behind it and overcasually dismisses the points she does bring up. Those sub/dub lines being changed back was DUE to people kicking up a fuss, so doing so by the consumer seems to be ABSOLUTELY necessary given her own examples. And consumers worry about every instance because these become the PERMANENT way that the work is seen from that point out by a lot of people. Anyway, I almost feel like I should just make this a separate thread, or hell a counterargument video (yeah, like I'll do THAT), but what would be the point?
Yeah, fans just hates when people changes the meaning of sentences or whole conversations. So it's understandable if you want to read/hear what the characters actually supposed to talk about. And sadly for example funamation and crunchy very much unable to make it happen, in lot of cases.
I think the bigger problem is that the defense of crappy localization is usually "but we're localizing the content" which has gotten this disconnect. So I completely blame the bad apple localizations and the people behind them for this effect where "localization" has become a dirty word. I don't want to watch what in the actual script being a touching moment between parent and child only for some craphead to decide that they need 110% more "rawr, I'm a dragon" or a thoughtful conversation between two assassins being reduced to 4 lines of ellipses, just to name a few. I think that last part you brought up is pretty key, too, because if we actually knew who was behind a lot of the better localizations, we'd probably be a lot more keen to stand behind them. But it's kind of hard to stand behind localizers in a world where "FUNNY" quips like muh gamergate and muh patriarchy are shoehorned into scripts. Just want the scripts to reflect the actual situations and characters presented. If that disconnects from what we already knew (since I am more than sure people were already familiar with those specific properties, Dragon Maid in particular), it's GOING to cause backlash, and that backlash will leak onto even actual good translations (like that LGBT one) because it does seem like something the bad apples would try to shoehorn in, even if it wasn't.
UGH THANK YOU FOR THIS. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT'S STILL AN ARGUMENT. I do Japanese translation as a freelancer while working for a Japanese company. I basically refuse to do low rates for freelance. Yes, it means I get less freelance work, but I'd rather work with good companies/artists who appreciate and credit my efforts than get paid and have nothing else to show from it. I do both translation and localization for my full-time desk job, which brings in an element that you didn't speak on in this otherwise basically flawless video: the input from the Japan team. A hands-off Japan team will be one that understand that their grasp on the target language is not greater than that of the native speaker. They will ask to have some things explained, but will mostly leave it up to the target language speakers themselves. A hands-on Japan team, however, can absolutely WRECK what might have otherwise been a great localization. I've worked under both types of leadership, and I cannot stress how MASSIVE the pressure can be from a hands-on, controlling team in Japan. I'm not sure if this is as big of an issue in the pop culture industry, but I can say that it is in the food, manufacturing, and beauty business--assuming the Japan team is protective of their brand, which is hella common. Also, something to go off of your note on how contextual Japanese is in particular--languages are on a scale of low-context to high-context. German, for example, is quite low-context--pretty straight-forward culturally and ergo is linguistically not too much of a challenge to understand what they mean. Japanese, however, is VERY high-context. Depending on your status, age, sex, and so on, the meaning of a phrase may change drastically. That's why certain languages are easier to translate and localize to English, while Japanese and some others are not. Anyway, thank you for this video, I will be sharing it to as many people as I can while trying not to scream with joy.
As someone studying Japanese, I've always seen the two as intertwined. There's so many nuances, think of it like how some people call carbonated drinks "soda, coke, and pop". Sure they all mean the same thing, but it depends where you are to what's going to make sense to your audience.
I know it was only brought up VERY briefly but just a note about the Evangelion 3.0 thing - the rumour that the movie was redubbed due to a representative from Khara being upset at how the English audience reacted to the theatrical dub is unsubstantiated. There's a partial camrip of the theatrical dub available, and the scenes talked about in the original forum post this rumour was born from are almost completely unchanged, the very liberal translation was not edited for the Bluray (seriously, rewatch the bedroom scene with the dub on. Khara could not have cared about this for that to not have changed LOL). From what I've seen, the redubbing was done to better handle the lore of the movie, as both the theatrical dub and the theatrical subtitles were a bit messy. Unsure why it took so long for the English version to come out, but it seems like Funimation approached Khara for help and not the other way around. This is an anal as hell comment but I do see this reiterated a lot with nothing to back it up. Generally people use it to justify what happened with the Netflix release, and I really do not think there's anything to support the idea that the audience reactions to the theatrical dub had anything to do with that.
Cardcaptor Sakura has a funny dub history. You've got the original 4kids style dub which mangled the whole thing. It redid the opening, cut out almost all of the romantic themes and changed the number and order of episodes and the title to emphasize Li. Then later a dub was made in Hong Kong and this one has pretty subpar acting but it's more true to the source material. Except in one episode where Li confesses to being gay and they literally just didn't dub it. It's just silence and subtitles.
Had never heard the complaints about this before, tbh i never heard localization in this context before. The fact that we are allowed to watch such amazing shows like evangelion etc without learning a new language is amazing to me. Have not thought about or thanked translators enough at all. Thanks for making this video and bringing light to this.
This is a fantastic video, you’ve explained everything so concisely, I thoroughly enjoyed watching it and you’ve helped me grasp a topic that I’ve probably never given enough thought. Thank you!
19:00 Okay so I NEVER see this brought up, but regarding the Evangelion controversy, IT WAS ALWAYS SUPPOSED TO BE “In other words, I love you”. I know this for a FACT. How? Because the phrase is word-for-word the same as the final line in Eva’s outro song “Fly Me To The Moon”. Kowaru’s line is supposed to be a reference to the end credits theme.
one of my favourite games was actually made gayer by the localisation! In the Japanese, while you could 'marry' a character the same gender as your character, it was called the 'best friends system' (just gals being pals amiright). But! the Western localizers made the decision to actually call it marriage, use the words husbands and wives, and get rid of the 'just BFFs' angle of some of the dialogue. It was the opposite of censorship!
@@stevedoidoultimate4815 eh, poor word use from me then, I just meant it was the opposite of what often happens when LGBT+ stuff gets localised also for the record they were completely transparent about the changes, anyone who looks it up can see what the original is like
I'm starting an internship at a linguistic research project about fan-subtitles of Korean TV-dramas and how they try to cross cultural gaps, so I count watching this video as practically being work-related! :D
The literal translation myth is something that must be created by people (idk why but i see them as americans) who can only speak one language. At least literal translation can be funny in the similar way to google translated text after 30 translations.
@@stayskeptic3923 Technically most people know 2 or even 3 languages (at least in western world) but most often they can only speak in very basic sentences or can't communicate at all, for example on paper i can speak in 3 langues one of wich is german but i know only around 30 words in german...
not necessarily. I've taken japanese classes to fill a language requirement for my degree. while i understand that some things are lost in translation (puns), and explaining them in translators notes looks sloppy, i still prefer it that way... possibly because I'm listening enough to fill in the blanks.
@@adaj.8723 There's two things going on here. One is that there is a debate within the translation community on whether to prioritize the source or the target, ie stay closer to the text even if it gives a target that's an unreadable mess, or stay closer to the target even if that makes you stray a bit from the letter of the source for the sake of getting across the source's point. Different translators take different views on this and their work reads somewhat differently. Here's the thing though. Neither of those approaches are direct translation, since it's a debate about priorities, not process. To take an example from the video even a source-ist translation would be closer to keeping the word "senpai", taking the view that it's a defined concept and that you want to keep some kind of reminder that the source is Japanese. A target-ist translator might say that if you're translating something you can't assume your readers know the language you're translating from, or they wouldn't be reading your translation, so they might change it to something like "upperclassman". If you want to see what direct translation looks like just feed a script through Google Translate and call it a day, ie "keikaku means plan".
I like to think about translation and localization like this: Translation is the lyrics of a song. Localization is someone who can sing performing that song, taking into account the notes played by the melody, their own register, the intonation of what they sing, etc. It takes a lot of training and understanding of your craft to make that all work and make it sound great. Censorship, in most contexts (as with 4Kids for example), is a radio station that wants to air specific songs but need to consider what the context of the song is, if/when they can play it and if it needs adjustments for their specific audience and limitations (an easy example would be the "Sh--" instead of "shit" on channels that have a family audience). People who cry for "literal" translation more often than not speak only 1 language which makes the translation process seem much easier and haven't tried to understand the work that goes into localization. If you are one of those people, asking for literal translations, do you really think that the _entire industry_ would localize when they could just get one single translator doing a basic translation and not pay for all those people specialized in localization? Sure, some entities do that bs (like 4Kids), but you know who's out of business because of stuff like that among other things? 4Kids
There's people like myself who kinda feel that localisation sometimes goes to far. While I don't agree with a literal translation sometimes the odd line in localisations sometimes comes across as odd for the character. Anyway I wanted to give another example of "hack dubs" that is still around and still fucking up things. NISA... Look into everything they do. I think when companies like this still exist is it any wonder people don't trust localisations. Another thing I'd love to see is translator notes, it's a thing I love from fan subs. I love learning as I'm watching something.
NISA goes beyond hack dub because they somehow introduce new bugs and issues into the games they translate. I don't even know how that's possible or gets past QA.
@@Toukozuki NISA is truly impressive all they are mean to do is add the Eng dub and text but yet somehow they fuck with unrelated programming. It's clear they have no respect for the media they localise.
People usually mean "literal translation" as actually translating what being said, while localizers are infamous for making huge changes that hardly resembles the actual things that being said.
So, very interesting video so far and I intend to comment after I’m finished too for more engagement. I have to tell you that the extreme example of censorship is currently happening right now on Netflix with shows like glitter force. Though I get what you mean, most people only bring up 4kids. I’m just shocked at how much of the most kiddy show ever precure is censored on netflix. Edit: I would actually argue that what Netflix is doing to precure is actually worse than 4kids. Since in glitter force they have edited every single scene where a character is crying.
You are technically right, but it was Saban who made these changes since they have aquired the american rights of Pretty Cure, as they hope to met the same success as Power Rangers. The edits are so bad that Toei basically bought the Glitter Force trademark to stop anyone from licensing the rights outside of Japan ever again. Italy was very lucky to brought Pretty Cure to their audience way earlier and continue to air it in uncensored form until HeartCatch, to which they stopped airing after that for unknown reason.
GF should be talked about more in hack-dub discussions because of how recent it is. Most of the dubs I see criticized are over 10 years ago, whereas GF was released only 5 years ago. I don't know a lot about current kids' any dubs, but GF has to be THE heaviest-edited dub in recent years.
Oh, this was really good. I've been thinking about translation a lot lately (since I'm anxiously awaiting Hanyou No Yashahime!), and as a fellow medieval nerd and as a linguistics nerd, I'm so damn tired of translation drama. Ultimately, I think it's important to make the tone understandable to the audience, which means some stuff is just gonna get lost in translation. If you really don't wanna lose those bits, you have to learn the language. That's just how it is. I feel like a lot of the "Literal translation" crowd wants to have their cake and eat it too, and also doesn't know how hard it is to make a cake...anyway, I really hope this video inspires some action for translator workers' rights, because YIKES.
Yeah the extremists anime fans just want to follow the anti-sjw mindset of everything is sjw even though most of the time there really isn't and just want to find something to whine about
A term I like to use is Adaptation. You adapt a work for a new media/audience while keeping the same message of the original author/sensations and feelings of the original audiences.
![ลองสุ่มไอโฟน 990 โกงมั้ย? [ โกงมั้ยครับ ep.101 ] | DOM](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/bfsWe0j492k/mqdefault.jpg)
That sailor moon censorship will always be one of my favorite things ever, because of how hard it failed. You went from normal lesbian couple to incestuous lesbians. How did this improve anything?
Sweet Home Alabama
I think I do get their logic, flawed as it was: if they'd tried to cover up the relationship by saying they were just close friends the gay subtext would've still been overt enough to make people suspect more was going on, by making them cousins they assumed that it would throw off suspicion in the audience, i.e. "those two couldn't possibly be closer than friends because they're cousins.".
By making it incestuous 😂.
you should see what happened to the sailor stars
@@muffinzetta3670 Stars was so wild, I can't believe it aired without censorship in Latin America! Did Stars ever aired in the US?
As someone watches a LOT of Asian dramas, this hits so hard. Things like idioms, slang and references are so baked into a language that literally translating them results in gibberish. Last night, three friends of mine had to explain to a Spanish friend the difference between dumb and dumbass, because that distinction apparently doesn’t exist in Castilian Spanish.
The French for "I gave her a kiss" and "I fucked her" are literally one syllable off, and it's also super reliant on context and sentence structure, and anything I can write here is an oversimplication. That's going between to languages that are influenced super heavily by Latin, I can't imagine going from an incredibly old Chinese and Korean influenced language to a mostly Latin and Germanic one. That's not even touching cultural differences, jelly donuts aside.
If you ever want to see this sort of thing in reverse, the word "get" in English is basically impossible to translate literally in all the ways it's used. I can get a joke, while I get in the car, to run to the store and get some cat food, realize I don't have the money for it, and get caught trying to shoplift it. This makes sense in English, but that example is an absolute nightmare anywhere else.
@@oreokitty333 Yep. I'm trilingual and it's always way harder to translate an idiom from one language to the other than using the existing structures and words that the language I'm trying to speak in already has to convey the same idea. Often, the results are NOT 1 to 1. Trying to say the same thing in two different languages may have you say something at least slightly different. Different languages make for slightly different THOUGHTS AND IDEAS. That's something that we don't realize, even people who DO speak more than one language.
@@antonioscendrategattico2302We've been making jokes about a Brit asking to "bum a fag" off a Texan for years and yet people still don't understand that language is complex and influenced by culture just like every other human construct. It's like the one Archer idioms joke, with a language that simply doesn't HAVE idioms and Archer continuing to struggle to communicate even with an excellent translator.
Tom Scott has a really good video about machine translation and why it doesn't work on his channel. He talks about how Brits say "That's a brave idea" to say that an idea is impossible and that the listener is stupid, while an American would take it as a complement if they didn't know any better. And that's just friction between two flavors of the same language. This stuff is complicated.
Spanish here, but wouldnt dumb=estupido and dumbass=pendejo invoke the same sort of energy when doing that translation? That's how i would do it anyway. And by no means am i a certified translator, just gut feeling.
psycho idk. we were talking on a discord about a character being a dumbass, and she was upset we were calling him stupid (which a problem in fanfics with this character) and we were trying explain that dumbass =/= dumb
Beyond being scummy, keeping the translators anonymous makes the "localization bad" problem worse. Whenever I read a book that's been translated into English there's almost always a foreword by the translator that talks about the way they chose to approach the material and some of the compromises they made for clarity. That transparency helps to dispel the notion that they're trying to censor or deliberately change it, and it's also just really cool to see them talk about their work.
Great point, there's this obscure ass SNES game I'm planning to play called Adventures of Hourai High, with a fan-translation made back in 2011 by Aeon Genesis. I remember reading the readme file that came with the patch, where the translator talked about his rationale in terms of some of the name changes he made and it instantly got me to trust him. The anime industry, both in Japan and the West needs some massive changes.
YES THIS!!!
fan translations of manga often include translator notes that serve the same purpose as this foreward you mention
As much as I agree with you, in the current climate that only seems to open things for harassment and real vitriol. If there's something this and last year taught me is that people REALLY want there to be a culture war between anime fans and distribuitors. Translators deserve as much credit as they can get. But they don't deserve the huge amount of hate they would get from certain groups if their names were broadcasted in the open.
@@Enchufe92 yeah, but that feels like an excuse a company would give to not give credit where it is sorely due, something along the lines of "we would give you credit but we'll leave your name off on the off chance that the ever capricious twitter mob turns its sights on you specifically." in my mind it's worth the risk if it gives hard working people something they really need, and something that can help them in their career
Translation is knowing "teme" is a rude way of saying you, localization is knowing when it's best to make character A call character B a bastard/asshole or if it's it's best to use tone and/or the VA's delivery to convey character A's rudeness.
Context is king.
I have seen more than one fansub where the person not only mistook "chikusho" for "kuso" (and then go on to always translate it as "shit", even though it's not as inherently vulgar as "shit" is in english).
You (derogatory)
@@alphamone Plus the fact that “kuso”, while *literally* meaning “shit”, is more of a catch-all term for frustration ranging from “darn” all the way up to “fuck” depending on...context!
@@normal6483 I'd put it in a script as
Character(Rudely): YOU blah blah blah
@@JFJD thats still just a proper translation
My German teacher said it best: "When you are communicating a message through a language barrier, adapting the message is much more effective than just translating the words".
and thats from german off all things
@@dragongrandmaster what's bad with that?
@@vivvy_0 they tend to translate everything to german
This is true. Using idioms on both ends of the communication is effective in this regard.
@@dragongrandmaster Yeah and that's why german translations are good for most of the time.
I'm a boring technical Japanese to English translator, but I've got to say as someone who has friends who translate manga and such, THANK YOU for speaking up. They work so damn hard, it takes so much energy and creative talent to translate and localize effectively. They absolutely deserve to be paid more and not get shouted at by monolinguals who don't really understand the big picture. More pressure needs to be put on these companies to pay them fairly.
Well that's ungrateful toxic fans to ya and they do what they do best
Do you translate hentai
@@emeraldbonsai This is a fair point, and is why I work in logistics rather than games. Though I will point out that "putting pressure on companies to pay them fairly" and "demanding raises" is, you know, kinda the same thing.
@@emeraldbonsai Then they're out a job. It's not that simple. Lol no boss reacts well to the "i wanna get paid more or i'll quit" ultimatum.
Well when you stop changing everything to overly political SJW shit that drastically changes characterizations and the story, we'll stop complaining.
as the old joke doesn’t quite go, a translator, a fansubber, and a 4Kids writer walk into a bar, an izakaya, and a McDonalds...
Thank you for summarizing this so effectively. Next question: knowing all this, what’s the maximally ethical way to consume translated Japanese media?
Imo: pirating is the way to go. Especially if you can't afford a streaming service subscription or want to watch a show that isn't on a service you're subscribed to. I'm gonna make this in bullet points because I tend to ramble a bit, but pretty much:
1. The legal anime streaming services do extremely scummy things (elaborating will take a while but there's plenty of videos discussing different controversies related to these companies) and affecting the corporate executives' wallet directly by boycotting them is the only real way for any change to be done to the industry.
2. Specifically for older anime, most pirated sites will use a fansubbed version of the work, either because an official English sub doesn't exist or because they just don't update the episodes they already released. In that case, the person doing the translation isn't an underpaid translator, but someone who did it for free out of passion for what they love. I think the Sailor Moon fansub and the One Piece fansub are the best example of that.
3. One frustration people have with the licensed anime streaming services is the monopoly they take on series. Rather than being a competition of which service is better, it becomes a question of which service has the better exclusive titles, and forces people to either pay for all the services to see all the stuff they want or be forced to pick one or two and miss out on shows they really want to watch. Pirated sites bypass that monopoly altogether and are basically a middle finger to this blatant attempt at squeezing as much money out of people's pockets as possible.
4. Translators are paid by commission, not by how well the show does on official sources, so translators aren't directly affected by it. In that same vane, it doesn't even support the industry much either because most of the money is going to the distributors anyway and the people who worked on the show get pennies if anything from the western audiences. Also, if you want to support the industry, you can support it in other ways without having to buy a Crunchyroll subscription or whatever, like buying official merch and manga (and yes, I know the creators don't get much from that either, but it's about as effective as paying to watch the anime so might as well get a physical product out of it and it's directed specifically at the creators of the show you buy the merch of rather than "the industry", and the path of where that money is going is at least a bit clearer)
5. If you want to watch a show but don't want to support the person who made it for whatever reason, like not wanting to support Nagatoro's creator because he used to draw l*licon or not wanting to support the creator of Rurouni Kenshin because he was found to literally own child p*rn, then pirating the show allows you to enjoy their work while not giving money to people you don't want to give your money to, similarly to the first point about not giving money to scum.
I hope this all made sense lmao, I genuinely think pirating is the most ethical option for consuming anime and manga.
@@toohopeful160 I guess its fine if you do it, but its not the "Most" ethical.
@Projekt Taku great counterargument
@@ProjektTaku If they don't want me to do it. Then make the legal option the easiest
@@tonyflamingo3444 fair, but again, not most ethical.
I remember as a kid once watching a movie with an unofficial sub and it was so literal, we got distracted just reading the subs (we understood both languages so it was just hilarious). The thing that tickled us the most was how the characters often exclaimed 'Oh boy!' in excitement and they translated that as 'Oh, male child' (we have no word for a gendered child) in my native language which made as much sense as it does in English.
Exactly wether they make known or not known much
They want a litteral translation, watch the original 1960s speed racer dub, it was fairly litteral translation and is absolutely unintentionally hilarious because of it
HE'S GOING OVER THAT CLIFF
AAAA
Peter Fernandez had his work cut out ofr him.
@@zuzu1443 they killed that man in the studio to get that scream
Ali LordOfTheSkies jesus
The lip syncing is a huge issue for anime, I remember Death Note actually has episodes edited or even reanimated just so they can match the english dub so it doesn't look weird
Yep! More and more shows are doing that now and even get the original ver without the mouth flaps at all so they can insert their own if that makes sense lol I think CDawgVA talked a bit about it on one of his VA vida
@@mcd08 hey, another fan of cannur
@@ethanbenner6995 aye hello fellow gamer 😎
Better to reanimate than not even fucking try. Like “When they Cry” where words are spoken by one character even when another is speaking because the Japanese VA’s already finished their sentence.
Death Note dub is just really fucking good already and learning this new information reaffirms that in my mind.
4kids managed to deliver with the theme songs, if nothing else.
The Italian opening for Sonic X was a bop.
*YA YO YA YOO*
Gotta go fast is more influential than Go sonic, to the point that sega re released it in a compilation disc exclusive to japan
Mew Mew Power’s theme slapped, the music was the best part of that dub imo.
Their localization of Team Rocket is AMAZING. The New Pokémon dub may be more accurate to the Japanese but Team Rocket is nowhere near as funny as how they were in the old dub.
"I support translation not localisation"
Translation not localisation: "All according to the Keikaku" (Keikaku means plan)
There is no reason why this should be as funny as it is
But it is
@@MixMasterLar They don't think it be like it is, but it do.
that is exactly what i want, because i sure as shit ain't forgetting what Keikaku means now.
I'll never forget the one I saw when I just started watching tokusatsu:
"Kouhai: the opposite of Senpai."
Me, not knowing words yet: huh?
The fact that TV-Nihon still exists is a travesty.
@@kirbyfanprime I think it's awesome they still exist, it's great to see legacy groups around. and I know they aren't the best, but considering that they tend to sub things no one else does, they're better than nothing lol
The not crediting translators thing reminds me how in the early days of video games Atari wouldn't credit their developers, leading to many developers leaving the company and resulting in part of the reason for the 1983 game crash.
Scott Pilgrim "I'm in localization with you."
"If you want something you have to fight for it. Break out the L word."
"Localization?"
"The other L word."
"Localize?"
@IsaacInfernape2000 true
I said localization
*sad music starts playing
Me: *laughs at a joke that didnt get subbed that well.....spends 30mins trying to explain the cultural and language behind whats going on *
I kind of miss translator notes before fansubs
Note: keikaku means plan
I mean, you can still see Translators notes in many current manga and even mahwa.
@@ABlueOrb Caca refers to shit in Spanish. That's why I find it funny as it's 1 sound off.
Another great example of localized translation is the Simpsons dubbed over into Latin Spanish. When I spent summers in Mexico with family I would watch The Simpsons on tv and was really struck by how the jokes and references were changed to fit a Latin American audience. In the episode where Homer asks Mr Burns for money while he’s high on rubbing alcohol Mr Burns hallucinates that he’s the pilsbourghy dough boy. Of course in Mexico pop n’ fresh is not really a well known brand so Burns in Spanish calls him “el osito de pan” the little bread bear, which is the mascot of a popular brand of bread and snack products on Mexico.
There's a great joke in the Mexican dub of the episode 30 Minutes Over Tokyo were Homer (or Homero as we call him) complains about a show saying "can't we watch Dragon Ball Z?", they even made a Ranma 1/2 reference a couple of seasons later. In one recent recent episode they added a joke referencing that the actor who voices Smithers also voices All-Might from MHA.
EL OSITO BIMBO, EN PAZ DESCANSE
bimbo bread?
The best localization I've seen was a scene from the Tagalog(Filipino) dub of the anime "school rumble".The scene is on a rainy day and the male character offered an umbrella to the heroine. She looked worried if the male will be alright, but he replied "don't worry I have a capa". In Tagalog "capa" is cape. But the male came out and wore a Kappa suit and it just so happened that this "Kappa" is a Japanese water demon who was fine in the rain. What a coincidence those two words can be used for a joke.
That's some peak drying pan energy right there.
@@fearedjames brock moment
That's because Japanese is physhically closer to that part of the world, albeit dealing with the ocean.
School Rumble mentioned
As a translator who lives and works in Quebec, Canada, a place that is heavily peppered with localized and translated content, thank you for this video and explaining what this whole thing is about. Of course I'm not a Japanese translator, but an English to French one, and it is very hard to explain to people who don't really need translating into their lives what I do. It's not a word for word thing, unlike math, there's no single right answer, it's about not only translating the words, but also the context that comes with it and shaping the words around it so they make sense, and that the humor, or whatever emotion is conveyed, is brought along with it. It's so important that people understand that before they insult localization and the people who take care of it. It's a very hard part of translation, and for having done fansub for a couple american shows for a French from France audience, we had to work real hard to make some references understandable. It's fun, but it's not easy. People really should do their research before criticizing but...well people be people, y'know.
The Yakuza example is also great, because it shows that at the end of the day the "we want translators, not localizers" crowd don't actually care about the artistic integrity of media as much as they claim. They are happy to champion the "original creator's vision", but then Nagoshi praises the localization of the Yakuza games and attributes the good localization to its success internationally, and all of a sudden his thoughts don't matter.
Also continuing on from your last point, so many people blamed the localisation team for the Yakuza 3 remaster getting rid of a transphobic substory, but didn't realise that it was Nagoshi himself who said it didn't fit the current world view and got rid of it in the JP version too. They don't care about the actual creator's thoughts/opinions, they just want to be mad at something.
When Yakuza 6 was coming out, Scott Strichart and Sam Mullen were doing official SEGA Yakuza livestreams where they would talk about how the team handled certain scenes, text, and differences between both the english and jp version, and watching them honestly encouraged me to want to finish college, and seriously start to persue a career in that field. I found that the changes (like changing Y6's mission objectives to reflect Kiryu's inner thoughts) improved the game's emotional impact, and made me interested in the process of how localization works.
I used to be very heavy on the "wanting translators, not localizers" side, (I mean I made a shit FE Fates video back in 2016 that got ALOT of attention from that crowd that I have since deleted) but I think the Yakuza team opening up about it really helped me get out of that and formed my own opinions on each case.
The internet in a nutshell right here. They'll tart-up their viewpoint to make it sound grand, often under the guise of "supporting the creator's original vision", but it simply comes down to having an excuse that sounds more dignified than "don't take the titties out of ma vidja garms!". Their loyalty extends only so far as when it aligns with their worldview.
@@fireaza And I mean... is there something really wrong with that? isn't that way the way that everyone but a few select gentlemen and gentlewoman behave?
That's rad.
RB: "Could you imagine putting all those hours into translating a project and then not being able to see your name on it and also not being allowed to talk about it?"
Me: WELCOME TO MY LIFE. 😂🤐🥴🙃🙃🙃
Thanks for the lovely video! Well worth the wait.
Thank YOU for being an excellent translator who makes excellent videos! They helped TREMENDOUSLY for this video!!
@@RedBardIsCool which translation is better literal or localized
@@amerahmed6151 localized
"Nothing beats a jelly-filled donut"!
What's weird is in a few eps after that they just...call them ricebas
@@mitkitty ikr
Xman Evans Should I mention DiC’s Sailor Moon’s food...
@@mitkitty Even dumber when during what I call the "the Todd Snap arc" they CALL THE RICE BALLS WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ARE: FRICKING RICE BALLS!!
Shortly followed by Ash imagining a worst case scenario of him and his friends getting SNIPER ASSASINATED upon seeing a weird lens glare from the grass.
@@fernie-fernandez ?
Ok, so this my personal pet peeve since I'm from a small country and basically everything has to be translated so I'm always super happy when I see a great translation and super mad when I have to switch subtitles to English. Translating something means you have to write the entire book again in a different language and understand your characters enough to know what would they say if they spoke your language. Not to mention that you need to know some creative writing too. I just wanted to thank you translators for your hard and underappreciated work. You're breathtaking. :)
I think a case of bad script localiztion people forget is from Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation, where two of the game's playable characters; assassins named Saizo and Beruka interact with one another. In the original Japanese script the characters are discussing their body count with one another and comparing methods. Here's how the English localization of this conversation plays out.
Saizo: "..."
Beruka: "..."
Saizo: "..."
Beruka: "..."
*conversation ends*
Fates had very cool character designs but the story and character interactions were ass in many ways
@@spade4acer Due to censorship.
The dialogue just being dots is honestly a pretty dang funny way to censor something. Sometimes the silence makes it so you have to interpret it, & it makes it funny that way.
@@ExtremeWreck I never would fucking touch the fate series due to 1. Nintendo consoles in the DS family are region locked FOR NO GOD DAMN GOOD REASON.... 2. Censored beyond belief. If I am paying 30+ dollars, I want ALL OF THE CONTENT.... When it is fucking censored... I view it as stealing someone's hard earned money and saying... " No you can't eat that steak because my infant doesn't have teeth ".
@@ExtremeWreck "haha we kiddified your game and decided to treat you like a dumb toddler, funny right? Thanka for wasting your money on this game sucker"
I'm so glad that this video hints to the fact that not even fan translations are perfect, because they aren't. There are things like the J2E transition of FF4 and the original scanlation of Vento Aureo which are great examples of hack dubs and why a literal translation isn't always the greatest.
I'm an online Chinese translator, and this video is on point. I started off as an editor because of the overly literal translations of Chinese webnovels, and now I've come a long way in understanding how to translate a text into English. One thing online translators do get is recognition, though. Which is very nice. But you also get a bunch of hate for things outside of your control. Some people are better at recognizing it's not our fault, but some people don't care.
I'll admit, I've fallen into the "literal is better" trap a few times, and it's also true the hack dubs/translations of days gone past have left their scars. It certainly doesn't help "localization" sounds like scary word that could be interchangeable with anglicization
It's a nuanced discussion that can often, ironically, be lost in words and poor examples that don't really paint the full picture.
also unionizing would help translators immensely.
Worker rights are rough in a lot of industries, to be honest.
unionizing would also help in a lot of other areas.
The problem is that translators are often freelancers and forming a freelance union is not really easy. There are people trying, in Spain we have various professional associations, which are not the same as unions, but at least they can lobby for better treatment and make things like rates guidelines. ATRAE (the association of audiovisual translators) and ASETRAD (the association of translators and interpreters) do great work, but they have limitations over the power of traditional unions.
It would. This is true in so many industries.
*seizing the means of production
Thank you for talking about how a literal translation is impossible! I'm no translator but I speak both English and Spanish so people talking about literal translations annoys me quite a bit. Even though Spanish and English are similar, it's still really easy to stumble with non-translatable words and translation problems, I can't even imagine the problems that occur when translating from Japanese to English, considering how different those languages are.
Take for example idioms. Attempt to translate them from spanish to english literally and the phrases make no sense.
If you want to take it to the extreme, then imagine making a literal translation that remains loyal to Spanish frequently omitting pronouns.
I was just thinking about this! I was watching Sgt Frog and there's so many jokes that needed to be Americanized to make sense. The dub is SO well rewritten, very funny!!! It's on TH-cam for free, I definitely recommend it!
Don’t translate literally or you’ll end up with shit like “starfruits!”,”you better take your little horse out of the rain”, and my personal favorite: “ball show!”
Reminds me of TRENDY GAME from the original Link's Awakening. Always hated the name of it. And yet it seems to be the official name.
Reminds me of how they translated 'Lethal Drops' here in the Emperor's New Groove game.
Drops in Italy only refers to water, the other meaning translates to 'Burroni', so we got the hilarious 'Gocce Letali', technically right, but nonsensical.
Gregory House I love seeing what hilarious stuff comes up when translating literally, or should I say, “by the foot of the word”?
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Smile Precure/Glitter Force and Dokidoki Precure/Glitter Force Doki Doki considering they got the 4kids treatment in the mid-2010s, and the changes that were made are pretty awful and insensitive.
Oof, yeah. Someone at Saban obviously thought they could easily do with Precure what they do with Super Sentai, while ignoring the fact that very 90s conventions that created Power Rangers might not fly today. Not even Laura Bailey could save that mess.
On top of that, they cut 8 episodes, never did the movie, and deliberately changed the setting from Japan to...pretty much anywhere else since Glitter Force was released everywhere except Asia. Considering the fact these dubs released in 2015 and 2017 respectfully, I’m worried that the kids who watch the dubs will accidentally be culturally insensitive in the future. “Miyuki isn’t a real name! I’m just gonna call you Emily!” “Hey, are you wearing a bathrobe outside?” “Japan? What’s that?”
@@Pixie_Shmixie Didn't they also cut the Ring arc from Doki Doki!? That was a change that really bugged me
@@tiffany-chan1235 I wouldn’t know; I haven’t seen much of the original version of Doki.
I'm glad you touched upon how little paid and crunched translators are, people seem to think these people are expendable and not human, especially when they threaten them over how they are just trying to do their jobs.
Yeah it really sucks that the anime and manga fandom has become just like the other fandoms like star wars a toxic heck whole
Shut up Ultima
@@alastor-yw7og always been
The whole translators getting the shaft reminds me about the working conditions for mangaka and the people who work on anime and manga in Japan.
It’s a logistical nightmare from what I can see.
So, you have the people who work on the anime/manga who’s work condition might not be that good, the company who might not be getting the best deal, the distributors like Crunchyroll or Funimation who need to sell the product, the translators and other employees that aren’t being paid enough and might be getting the short end of the stick, and finally the consumer who either will buy it, not buy it due to price/another factor, or pirate it.
It’s all one big mess and should be fixed but as it is with the current business model, it might be a tough road to divert from.
Today I learned that anime fans hate localization! This really shocked me because I'm a huge Ace Attorney fan so I've only ever heard of localization being talked about with high praise. Btw Janet Hsu, one of the localizers on the Ace Attorney games, wrote a really great blog piece about the process. She talks about how important it is for the audience to feel the right emotions in certain parts of the story and why changes would be made. One of the examples she gives is that looking at a kindergartner's name badge will give Japanese audience members a feeling of nostalgia while the rest of the world either won't know what it is or won't have any emotions towards it.
idk if youtube will let me link it but it's titled "Localization and Ace Attorney" and it's on the capcom-unity website
While I don't represent most anime fans, my feelings toward localization always were against hack dub products. In the cases I'm critical of, we usually have a subbed version that offers one context and meaning (which I automatically assume to be close to origin meaning) and a dubbed version that offers a completely different meaning to the same scene. The kicker being both versions are present from the same source (Funimation, Crucnhyroll, etc.). The question then becomes why are the two versions so different even though they come from the same licensing company, and why does the dub version more often than not inject political leaning that wasn't present in the subs. It may be the case that the dub turns out more accurate to creator intent than the subs, but a typical consumer won't know since they cant understand the original, thus is why I make the assumption that the subs are more accurate to creator intent than the scripted subs are. Those are the types of translations that seem off to me, and makes me feel like im being preached to rather than enjoying a creator's vision.
But on another topic, Ace Attorney is Great! I have the trilogy and wish Capcom would release more from the series to the west, even the notorious Edgeworth investigation games. Glad to see people still appreciate the IP years after the games came out.
I feel like majority of fandom is rather fond of Japanifornia🙃🙂
@@SlavoidUkr Yeah, it's like our inside joke. I mean, if you need to choose a place in America where Japanese culture is prominent, California seems like your best bet.
@@timelordvictorious8610 Subs are often different from dubs for a very obvious reason, they are different mediums with different limitations, in dubbing you have to match mouth flaps and syllables, so that sometimes makes choosing one word or expression over another more convenient, they also have to work better with the expressions, since they are coming from a voice rather than text. Subs have other limitations, usually character limit, (people read characters at certain pace and characters can only be on the screen before the next bit comes, and they ideally can't distract from the scene too much. That leaves subs to be usually more like general ideas, very brief and to the point and also more tame in the choice of words and expressions since, again, they can't distract you (that is why sub is a good practice to avoid explanatory subtitles, and that's why fansubs are full of them). Neither subs or dub is closer to the original text. I have worked as a subtitler and the hoops I had to go to fit a long very quickly said flow of words from English to a nice two lines of 35 characters into would amaze you
@@Elsenoromniano
Well, obviously. I'm well aware of the need to sync with lip flaps, limited scene times, and the need to not distract watchers. Those are basically the main points of the video and many others like it that cover similar related topics. I never said that the dubs and subs had to match exactly, that would be practically impossible to do and maintain a good watching experience. Again, the problem comes more from hack-dub type changes when the scriptwriters seem to place ideas or concepts unrelated from the original work into the show. The Kobayashi and Prison School examples are the most well known and understood, essentially taking a cliche joke based on circumstance and dramatic irony and changing it to some comment about politics or misogyny. The change was unneeded and arguably decreases the enjoyment of the experience since it doesn't help the flow of the story or make much sense in the context of the story presented.
It is interesting to know that neither the sub nor dub are necessarily closer to the original when compared to the other though. I always assumed subs typically were due to their nature, although most dubs don't tend to stray that far off of their sub counterpart anyways so that makes sense.
And your last line reminded me of the Ghost Stories dub where they comment about having to sync the fastest lip flaps and just make random noises. Good stuff right there.
thanks so much for this video it's really well done and if more people knew this the community would be way less toxic, for a personal example: I've lost to much time trying to explain to fellow fate fans thing like that the translation "I see that being right is the only thing you actually care about" is better than "just because your correct doesn't mean your right" because of things like the flow and shit just for them to at the end say and I quote: "if you like to watch a show that was modified by a foreigner, changing words killing the real message, then go ahead" and "I think most anime translators are lazy/they don't know Japanese that well."
it's real story : /
The common perpetrators of such thoughts are always the people who only speak English. Been having this conversation for the last decade that language isn't one to one and that word choice and sentence structure convey different ideas and emotion across languages.
Oof it really be like that. I understand that for some people it can be hard to recognize how different languages can be but it still gets super annoying when people complain about shit like this
@@beepboop7345 exactly. Look at the word chair. In English a chair is a chair. But in my native tongue the word for chair also means throne or high seat. Without localisation you could shift into all 3 meanings of the word in the same conversation, which wouldn't make much sense to the viewer.
It's the same people who shat on the retranslation of the Odyssey for being "sjw propaganda". They literally have no idea how translation works.
@@Matthy63 bold of you to assume they read ANY version of the Odyssey and aren't just scrolling looking to be pissed about something that they have zero interest in to begin with
@@Matthy63 that sounds hilarious who said that?
Remember when they ate rice balls on Digimon and the called them rice balls? Mmmmmmyes.
Digimon and Saban in general, were weird and inconsistent when it came to their dubs. Sometimes you'd get shit like "soda/taco sauce/milkshake" sake and Japanese being "digi-code", and other times they kept all the Japanese influence, including names of people, places, and foods, and reference subjects that would be taboo to a western audience, like religion.
@@lizardlord4k Very true, Digimon was bizarrely inconsistent in terms of what content was allowed. My favourite completely nonsensical aspect was that, in Digimon Adventure, the only deaths that were ever censored were instances of villains killing their underlings, while all the heartbreaking deaths of 100% sympathetic heroic characters were left totally untouched.
Saban‘s Digimon also had that godawful soundtrack.
@@PrimeroJinJusuke Hey, it wasn't that bad, the dub score was very good, in the first two seasons they just weren't always very good at syncing it with a scene's mood correctly or leaving moments silent when appropriate. _Hey Digimon_ is a cute song but again, the problem was they often used it in inappropriate circumstances (they always tried using it as battle theme which it really wasn't suited for, the two best uses of it are the times it _wasn't_ used like that: in the last Adventure episode and in the movie). 02's battle songs were all actually really good and were always used appropriately and effectively. Oh, and (massively unpopular opinion incoming) the _Digimon: Digital Monsters_ title theme is great and I like it _at least_ as much as the original Japanese intro songs (the JP intros are perfectly fine but they could really be from any show, the dub Digimon theme actually captures the quirky tone of the show properly, plus having a heavily electronic theme for a show about a digital world just fits better).
@@PrimeroJinJusukeThat is an opinion.
Great video, I wish every anime fan would watch this. It drives me nuts when people think translation is a direct 1:1 and complain that an official translation "changed" something just because they made a different choice than whatever fansub they're used to. For example, I saw someone on Twitter complain that Netflix's Beastars subtitles call Louis "Ruis," even though "Louis," "Luis," and "Ruis" are all valid transliterations of the exact same thing. And even though it's easy to think "Surely the author must have been thinking of the name Louis," I honestly suspect the rights-holders told them what spelling to use, like you mention. Honestly it's pretty sad that in addition to these translators receiving little credit and little pay, fans often seem to hold them in contempt even though we rely on the work of these translators to be able to enjoy these media in the first place.
Also, having recently completed AI: The Somnium Files with the Japanese voices, I'm kind of amazed anyone thought that the LGBT comment was shoe-horned in by the localizers. This is so easy to check because the English version of the game lets you hear the Japanese voices, and even see the Japanese text! Of course the people making the complaint don't speak Japanese, but you'd think they could try to find someone who speaks the language and ASK, "Does this seem like an accurate translation?" before leaping to that conclusion. Plus, another character being gay is kind of an important plot point in another route so thinking the translators just made up the LGBT content is just such a bizarre thing to think.
i'm a translator myself, and this video made me quite happy!! i'm very far from being a professional but it does take a lot of work and understanding. what i do now is mostly to brush up on my grammar and recognition of characters, and i have learned a TON since i began over a year ago. thank you for making such an informative video!
Shoutout to that one time funimation made a reference to tide pods in Highschool DxD, like wtf
To further add to your point, let’s not forget people who write English versions of Japanese songs and have to make sure to keep the meaning and emotion of the original song while still making sure it sounds catchy.
Let’s also give credit to the people who write translated subtitles for TH-cam videos.
yeah just like dragon ball z kai or pokemon or hell yugioh for that matter
This reminds me of AmaLee's april fools cover of 'crossing field' the SAO op1. Where she basically respond to people complainng about why she changes the lyrics and doesn't use literal translation for her English covers. Because being literaly makes singing awkward af and sound really off
pissing crying myself to sleep about youtube subs not being able to be community added anymore
Tbh I used to be in the "support translators not localizers" team, until last year in english class, in which we had to translate a book to our main language, portuguese. If I had translated it literally, almost nothing would've made sense. Like, if I had translated the idiom "piece of cake" as "pedaço de bolo", no one would get that, so I had to change it to "mamão com açúcar", which conveys the same idea. It wouldn't have made sense if I was doing the opposite and translated "mamão com açúcar" as "papaya with sugar" either, after all.
That being said, I wish sometimes some sort of "afterword" was included in anime and manga translation, kinda like TL notes but instead of taking half of the screen, it'd be in it's own separate place. I believe this would clear lots of misconceptions if the translator had a place to say, for example, "that character was actually talking about the LGBT community, we did not make this shit up".
That's a good example and i also got out of that whole to and like i said in my comment i made sadly the elitist extremist fans and the community in general aren't gonna listen to this video thanks to the far alt-right anti-sjw grifters that only came to the fandoms just to start crap and make money off of it and sadly the side of the anime fandom that listens to them are still gonna eat up there bullcrap and continue to be cultists of them and have a bad understand on stuff, but who knows if one day they will end up finding the truth and seeing the bullcrap from not only the people the anti-sjw's swore to be against but both the extremist fake poser sjw's and the anti-sjw's as well
That's one of my favorite things from the Fairy Tail manga, actually. The end of each volume has several pages of translator's notes explaining any time they had to make a judgement call during translation or just explaining something your typical English speaker might not get. For example, there's an old man character who in the original Japanese had an onomatopoeia for his shuffling his dentures around in his mouth that doesn't really have an English equivalent, so the translator changed it to him clearing his throat constantly.
That's a great idea, actually! I would love a bonus feature clip of all the translators talking about their work and how they chose to translate the material included in a physical release of the show. Hearing people talk about their process is something I love and this would be a great way to finally be able to explain their process.
If I had to guess that's probably the main issue with these paranoid types. They don't care much about the process as they think, so they never get to hear the way translators handle material. Those 'SJW' lines they hated sounded like throwaway gags the team thought would be funny. I've seen this done a lot with comedic shows where the team will take some liberties (usually with the approval of the Japanese staff) be it the translators or even the VAs improvising jokes that the director found too funny to not keep in. It happens, and most of the time it's just for fun. Funimation's localization has always been fine for me, but pretty dry. You can tell their team doesn't have the best writers (ie. people with refined diction so a lot of characters' speech pattern sound similar) so to me it made sense they'd want to let loose in comedy shows.
I can see why fans would be upset that they added something so out of left field, but all this talk of politics and propaganda just sounds like paranoid conspiracy. If they heard one of the translators admit 'oh we were having lunch and someone thought it would be funny so we added it in' maybe they'd just have their ragefit and move on instead of trying to start a hatred movement for an important part of the translation process.
@@grimgracious I think you're giving these types too much credit. They wouldn't ragefit and go away, they'd call the people involved liars and say they're making up a story so they can get their SJW propaganda through without getting questioned.
@12thLevelSithLord you're arguing against people for things they hypothetically might do, and the "sjw propaganda" is like 2 jokes.
4Kids' cheapness and overall incompetence is the reason why a truly unreasonable number of people treat terrible joyless literal translations of Japanese media as a gold standard to aspire to.
I have paid for and subsequently been disappointed and horrified by manga translations I can only describe as having been written by people with a vendetta against the English language.
I lay the blame at 4Kids' feet for convincing a generation that localization is the devil.
Yeah, as a native English speaker who's learning Japanese, I can 1000% confirm that localization is necessary, and the go to example I always use to explain it is Schezo from Puyo Puyo.
To try and explain, in the Japanese version, Schezo's general "gimmick" is to walk up to someone and say "おまえ が…ほしい！" (Omae ga hoshi!) which literally translates to "You am want!" when the original intention is that Schezo accidentally sounds like he's about to rape whoever he's talking to before clearly stating what he actually wants. Most of the time, fan translations either localize it as "I want you!" if they're trying to be literal while still making grammatical sense in English, or as "Become my desire!" to try and keep the idea that he's supposed to sound creepy. However, when we finally got an officially localized Puyo Puyo game, they changed the way Schezo talks so that instead of just saying "I want you!" to everyone he meets, he just makes a bunch of sexual innuendos, such as "Expose yourself!" when looking for someone, "I'll help you wrestle that book cover to cover, and under the covers too!" when saving Klug from being possessed from the evil demon in his book again, and "Insert whatever you like" in response to another person saying "I should insert some manners into this conversation" which does a far better job at getting the idea of a creepy guy who sounds like he wants to rape you across
That’s one hell of an example. Jfc.
They did a great job translating his innuendos. Especially since they had to hit an E10 rating and reach a different culture.
@@psmstr That's because translation is always painfully complex, especially trying to explain it
Crystal Queen Oh I know, I meant it’s a good example and of such an impactful subject that it should work really well to convey just how complex translating can be.
I feel like you are misrepresenting the argument though by phrasing it as "You am want" and not pointing out there is a very easy straight to English translation "You want it".
Yes!! The Ai: The Somnium Files scene discourse always ruffles my feathers. There's an option within the game to use the Japanese audio, where you would hear a similar sentiment being spoken.
Isn't that the game where underage characters have fully modeled panties and cameltoe? Yeah, that and the locker room talk sure makes it a great piece of pro-LGBT media. 🙄
Man, this reminds me of a controversy that recently happened in Italy when the Netflix dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion got handed to one of those purist "localization is artistic murder" types, and he proceeded to create an utterly incomprehensible hackjob that made zero grammatical sense, was awful to hear and, cherry on top, outright IGNORED Anno's word of god on how to translate the word "shito" (that is, angel), and to top THAT cherry with another cherry, it later turned out that, when scrutinized by people who had an actual degree in Japanese, the translation wasn't even actually adherent to the original text, and the localization had often added meanings where there were none at all in the original text purely according to the personal taste of the guy in charge, and what he thought the authors meant, rather than what they openly stated they meant.
The Latin American dub for Renewal had serious pronunciation horrors. My ears still hurt.
The same thing happened with the new English version. Netflix absolutely massacred Eva and it makes me sooo sad that the new translation is gonna be a lot of people’s first (and likely only) exposure to the series.
My favorite blunder example is their replacing of Kowaru‘s line to Shunji, “In other words I love you”, with the more literal translation “you are worthy of my grace”, because “I love you” isn’t really used in Japanese. But that change COMPLETELY erases the ambiguous romantic subtext between Shinji and Kowaru that was present in the original Japanese. NOT TO MENTION, the line “in other words, I love you” is also a brilliant reference to the final line in Eva’s outro song “Fly Me To The Moon”, which the 2nd translation team apparently missed completely
But yeah weebs, please tell me more about how the new translation is the superior one because it’s “more faithful” to the original Japanese
The Cannarsi situation is precisely what I think about localization/translation.
He is an example of why literal translation just doesn't work, but at the same time this highlights why the original Italian version worked so good: It was a FAITHFUL localization, when words and specific expression were changed It was only to transmit the same concepts in a way that worked in italian.
The reason why I still don't unilaterally stand against fuckers with phrases like "we want translators not localizers" is what was done to Fire Emblem in some games.
Many scenes are completely butchered and their meaning changed, with some characters that were basically changed in their motivations and reasons. 3 Houses is a pretty good translation, but it's plenty of choices that are... Debatable at best.
There is an entire support between two characters that is changed in mood, what's being said and how the characters end It. If your only source saw that the english localization, you would have a completely different perspective about a character.
The case of Somnium is the perfect counter example, with fans talking out of their asses.
@@HauntedHarmonics I heard about the controversy regarding the "I Love You" part, at least in the Neutral Spanish dub the line was translated as "Te Amo" (I Love You), people were worried they would translated as "Me Gustas" (I Like You). Curiously, Evangelion was dubbed into Neutral Spanish 3 times, and Shinji is the only character whose voice actor was never replaced
@@Hyperversum3
He's also notorious for translating most of the Ghibli films... and how he ruined them.
In Princess Mononoke, he directly translated "Shishigami" to "Dio Besta", much to the fury of Italian fans.
I agree that localization workers don't get the credit they deserve. I can't remember which game I played that made me positively aware of the localization effort, but when you realize how well something was localized, the feeling is like this wholesome, wholebody awareness. We definitely need to promote these people more!
Also, I've always thought your videos are incredibly insightful and well-researched, but your continued support for fellow anitubers and your promotion specifically for Beyond the Bot are especially inspiring. Thanks for being such an amazing class act!
I've long seen proper translation as a bit of a balancing act. Make it too literal, and you end up with something that sounds extremely artificial and can in some cases actually be just as incomprehensible as just not translating it. Take too many liberties, and you end up with something that might make sense but is effectively a different story entirely. A lot of 4Kids dubs fall into the latter camp. Not an anime example, but the closest I've seen to the latter in an official product is the English translation for The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, with lines like "Even without being told, we understand" or "If it's something that can be stopped, then try to stop it!", both of which are lines where I can easily tell *exactly* what the Japanese was because they translated them practically word for word. (For the record, it was "言われなくても分かる" and "止められるもんなら止めてみろ". I have not actually looked at the Japanese text in the game but I *guarantee* that those lines were either exactly that, or very slight variations on it.) The dub of Pokémon also sometimes falls into this, especially in movies, while somehow *also* falling into the problem of being too liberal. Like, Team Rocket's lines are rewritten to hell and back, whereas almost every other character speaks incredibly stiff and "translationese", as a friend of mine calls it.
As a non native English speaker, I definitely understand how you can't translate something word for word. I speak a specific subculture slang of English with my English speaking friends. If I just paste it in Google Translate it will produce a gibberish. That what I want in an anime translation is to be as close as possible and the translator to not make funny assumptions, like that the people who watch are too stupid to not understand a foreign culture. imo translation of jokes or poetry are nearly impossible to be translated without some "cheating".
There was a manga I read a few years ago and at the end there was a collection of translation and localization tidbits that were really interesting
So this actually reminded me of a story my mom would tell me about my Grandmother who came from Greece while my mom was growingup; whenever my mom would tell her to "shut up", my grandma would reply with "Don't you call me Shut Up" because the closest thing to "shut up" in Greek with the tone and anger was closer to calling someone a bad name than it was telling them to be quite. This is why the "Shut Up" scene from The Princess Diaries will always be extra funny in our family.
When it comes to stuff like the patriarchy line I always try to look up what a more literal translation would be and then see how they localized it so I have a better sense of what their thought process was
...meaning I look for context
That is a good way of looking at it. Helps you come to your own conclusion. Admittly odds are you will hear it from someone first.
Honestly my main issue with it is moreso related to how it often - the Dragon Maid patriarchy line, for example - feel like some sort of fourth wall breaking quip. Like dora the explorer is about to turn towards the audience and go «can you say buzzword?»
Good localization: Kero-chan talks in slang.
Bad localization: "Bunny" Tsukino in Norma's Sailor Moon
Horrific translation: The fansub who misunderstood the German feminine article/plural "die" and English verb "die", which resulted in "Muere Zauberflüte" instead of "La Flauta Mágica"
Bonus points: renaming characters whose original name is offensive for the intended audience.
The intended audience should learn the world is big and their words are not the only ones that exist. Do not translate names.
The last one is so common in Brazil, my favorite is that here Count Dooku because his name sounds like "(I) give ass"
Yeah about the last i don't know.
For example in italian, the real name of Goku "Kakarot" was changed into "Kaarot" because it could have been easly missheard as "Shit-Burp" (caca - rotta).
I mean, you would have kept Shitburp as the main hero name?
@@LynnHermione not if the intended audience are school aged kids with limited or no knowledge of Japanese. Zapato was renamed to Zagato because a villain named "shoe" doesn't fit the story, and Chichi... well, it's slang for vagina. Card Captor Sakura characters kept their Japanese names, while Cardcaptors didn't. Madison who? Nobody remembers. Tomoyo, on the other hand...
Remove Honorifics from Good Localization and we good.
I work translating English to my native language and I started it for fun. Some stuff, like expressions, jokes and picking appropriate words based on the context and the character's personality makes sense. However, my "issue" with funanimation or any other work is when they completely change the meaning. For example, in Danganronpa 3 Despair, there is a line in which the protagonist inner monologue after recalling an advice, he calls the attention about having deadline, that he has 7 days to decide, which is important for the context of the story. US dub? He recalls the advice and it was basically a 'check your privilege, dude'. It didn't have to synchronize with his mouth and only made him sound bitter, detracting from the original intention. This is the kind of translation that gets in my nerves and, as someone who works with this, made me upset.
I got into a smaller fandom at around the time the official localization of the light novel arrived. Having only had unofficial translation lovingly made by fans, sometime, the official translation really made me fumes about changing certain sentences or names. However, comparing the work made by unofficial translater vs official translation is just not fair, official translater are on a thight schedule, at a miserable pay for something they may not be familiar with (compared to fan who works for free when they have time simply because they love the work so much). So of course, some localization change may not be exactly what I imagined, but I support and always will support the official translation by buying the novels, because it's bringing the thing I love to the attention of more fans! It's awesome to have an official translation because that means I can share the thing I love more easily with more people. Also, if anyone wondering, read Baccano!
ah the blizzard argument, you think you do, but you dont....its great that you know better what i need and decide for me.
One of my favorite examples of this were people complaining that Funimation removed a "sexual joke" in a dub (that was in the subs) when, in actuality, removing the sexual joke made it more accurate and there was no sexual joke to begin with. The subs made it up.
Name of anime please
@@laboon344 I think the show is called Bofuri? I'm not 100% sure since it's not a show I watched, but I think that was the one.
@@PrinceMallow oh ok thank you
@@laboon344 For context. The most popular sub for the show takes the scene, where she's suddenly forced to do an interview for winning a tournement. The original line is basically that she stumbles over her sentence, mumbling a few words really badly. The most popular sub wanted to convey "She said something stupid and is embaressed by it" by adding the line "I took a pounding but I liked it" (because she tanks the fuck out of enemies with her armour and giant shield).
This translation isn't bad, in that its something you could believe someone would actually mistakingly say while under heavy pressure and be embaressed over it, but its a completely added joke and a sex joke at that. The dub had her say "It was tough but I'm hoppy" (instead of happy). Kinda a shitty line to be honest but completely legit to the original mistake she makes (mis-says Desu as more like Deshu (with the e partially devoiced).
@@fearedjames I think you mean popular character
Thank you so much for this video. I've always been interested on the translation industry, so I loved every second of the video.
I arrived so early last person who claimed to write My Inmortal was Rose Christo
One of my favorite examples of a localization choice being made it in the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya's dub.
Most anime fans are aware of how significant calling people by their first names is in Japan, it's a very common anime trope. So in a heartfelt scene between Kyon and Yuki Nagato (who he'd only referred to as Nagato-san/Miss Nagato), as it starts snowing, he says "yuki" the Japanese word for snow. The scene is ambiguous as to whether or not he refers to her by her first name, or if he's just noticing the snow (or both). It's a powerful moment that I think of often, but it left a dilemma for the dub.
The scene is pretty much impossible to translate literally, if you decide on him saying "Yuki" or "Snow" in that moment, all the ambiguity is lost, and the moment is less powerful. It's a shame such a powerful moment had to kinda be lost, but what the dub did was great: "Yuki... means snow, doesn't it?" Kyon pauses for a moment, and brings back the ambiguity as to whether he addressed her by her name, or if he just made a comment about it. While I think the simplicity of the original Japanese moment was better, clearly the "yuki means snow" line resonated with fans. I still hear it quoted.
I am very much impressed at how they salvaged this conundrum.
One of the best translations of manga I've ever read was the Arabic translation of Beastars. It's so amazing how the translators could use Arabic poetry that was so perfectly writing at the ending of each chapter to sum it. It's like the icing on the cake. If you're reading this, good job guys I'm so proud of you.
I believe some of the potes used are real poetry by famous poets.
This reminds me of my brief period doing scanlation work. I was the person who used photoshop to edit the pages to add the translated sound fx, side notes, conversation, etc to a manga. It takes a lot communication and cooperation with the translator since they usually assist w/ copy editing to make sure the material flows in a similar fashion to the original manga. It's a lot of hard work ESPECIALLY for the people doing the translating - they're the ones localizing the work to make it relevant for English speaking audiences. It's hard work and no, you never want a literal translation... What ppl want is a pretty faithful translation. That's the difference.
My favorite ongoing series, fans don’t know crap and talk out their asses.
Yeah alot of fandom's ( except for some ) have become really toxic this year and age I'm mean look at the star wars fandom for example, and the doctor who and marvel and dc fandom and going in anime territory look at how the my hero academia fandom became to those fandoms have become so toxic thanks to grifters spreading lies and making fans only look at the mistakes rather then the positivity they mostly done but I'm not saying it's all the fandoms fault half the blame does go to the companies as well for some choices they made which caused a huge alienation because of how they didn't think before they do what there going to do
@@alastor-yw7og Star Wars turned into such a shit-show, you don't need the fandom to do that. Marvel sales are going down the drain and the films are becoming creatively draining. DC is rudderless. MHA became a chore to read and I stopped. What happened to that fandom?
Well for the my hero academia fandom they went to crazy with shipping and some even attacked horikoshi on Twitter
When you are on the outside you don't know everything. Sometimes you have stuff like the English Dub of Stg. Frog where they try to punch up the jokes, make it slightly raunchier and make the characters sassier. It's still funny but. I prefer the sub it's funnier and much more innocent. You can tell wich jokes were added and which ones weren't.
I appreciate you and the translators willing to speak up regarding this subject. 💕
I think you should take some of the concerns of the people who say they prefer literal > localized translations in better faith. To understand and oppose someone else's opinion, you should interpret the words of what people say by what they think the word means. When they say "literal vs localized" , they don't mean 'google translate vs trying to convey the meaning of the text', then mean 'messy, but culturally Japanese and true to the words in the text vs clean but culturally altered interpretation'. Even if they are wrong about what the dictionary, or industry professionals say the word means, what you should be concerned with is the ideas that are actually in their head, not the semantics of their wording. I think that there is a meaningful tradeoff between those two conceptions. Obviously every work has to fall somewhere in the middle, but I think its fair for certain fans to express that they want a translation that allows them to use their knowledge of Japanese culture, and to do their own interpretation, even if there are other costs.
For example, I think there is a very fair argument to be made about the Sailor Moon example that the last sentence should be as it is in the literal translation. Because she does not make an absolute evaluation of her own worth in the original Japanese like 'I [absolutely] am a loser', rather she implies that she is lesser than Sailor V. I think if you leave it as "compared to her, I'm...", the astute english watcher will understand the implication of her words through context, just like the Japanese watcher. The localization really does to some extent 'dumb down' the line, by removing any ambiguity in what Sailor Moon says, and in some way belittles the audience's ability to figure it out themselves.
Also I just want to note that the other lines in the 'literal translation' are pretty ungenerous to the literal translation. Another word in the dictionary definition of "関係ない" is 'unconcerned', which conveys the meaning of her words a lot better while still fitting the dictionary definition. I don't think its good to strawman the literal side into entailing only picking the first result in the dictionary, or even picking any result in the dictionary for any word.
Finally, to note on the 'partriarchy' and 'gamer gate' dubs, I agree that alot of the outrage is likely culture war bullshit, but I do think that there is something to be said about the importance of trust between the translator and the reader. When things like this happen, where it becomes clear to the audience that the translation is severely off, it destabilizes their reading of other works of fiction, under the thought of 'if this line was so off, how many other lines are off that I just didn't realize'. So even if its a minority of cases I think translators should be concerned about acts which may make them seem less trustworthy to readers.
Yeah i also agree that culture war is stupid to and considering I'm now fully going with the looking at both sides of the spectrum view now I understand that there are words that break off what the series spirit is but there either not always there or they are sometimes on par or actually similar to what the Japanese context is mainly conveying depending on the setting that said series is in
Underrated comment.
You have valid arguments, but the arguably largest (or at least loudest) group of people who complain about that stuff are "gamers™" who don't want "polidics in their vidiya", so it makes sense that she primarily addresses those guys.
@@Alias_Anybody it's not that "gamers" don't want politics in their games, they just don't want their games covered with bumper stickers.
@@Alias_Anybody The only time they were really in the wrong was with the AI game since the original also mentioned LGBTQ+, other than most other criticisms made by that crowd are against censorship where there was clearly an insertion of politically charged words in works that didnt have them initially and also didn’t even fit the original message either.
as someone who translates for a living (though not for anime/manga), i really love this video- i think people don't understand what localization means- yeah, sometimes it can mean making it make sense to a local audience by removing all native cultural references, but more often than not, it means just taking something that makes no sense literally, and re-wording it as something that better gets across the original intent- sometimes it's a real struggle to let go of your first, more literal translation that you worked out because it's kind of your baby and you worked hard on it, but after re-wording it to make sense, you become proud of that version even more, because you can imagine being someone who knows nothing about the native culture reading it and understanding what the original was trying to say without losing any authenticity (because, for those who don't know, maintaining authenticity IS something that localization does that translation does not!)
This isn't to say that localizations are always perfect, but translation is an art form- there's a lot of subjectivity involved ("does it sound more natural like this or like this?") and sometimes you just... miss the mark- yeah, sure, sometimes translators are intentionally trying to send a specific message, but more often than not, there's a lot more love and care put into these translations than people realize-
also just to put this out here, a direct, word-for-word translation isn't a sign of a good translator, but rather the sign of an incompetent one- it shows you don't understand the language well enough to pick up on idiomatic expressions and insinuations or tone, and it shows that you certainly are not skilled enough to translate professionally, because google translate can do the exact same thing that you do, spitting out incomprehensible lines like that.
13:51 I'm glad you like Urusei Yatsura! I feel like more and more people are giving it some recognition than before lately. I remember it wasn't well-known several years ago.
That's so interesting to see how the US had the hack dubs when here in brazil a lot of animation fans in general are having a translation appreciation renaissance. A lot of people have the same complaints but I've seen a bunch of more anime fans praising the Yu Yu Hakusho dub here, which imo is pretty funny and well localized. A lot of brazilian dubs in general have been getting a lot of praise on the internet for its localization which is great, we do have our fair share of bad translations though xD
I think dubs in Brazil are particularly well-done; mostly because the best of them don't even try to be 100% literal, and go for meaning/feeling instead; Yuyu Hakusho is pretty much a gold standard in that regard. Not 100% precise, but funny as heck and able to give different characters unique voices.
Beign that the japanese immigrant community/japanese culture has an outsized visibility compared to its size, many of the "onigiri/doughnut" problems could be avoided either by familiarity or by just asking a japanese brazilian what the heck "x" meant
Croatia has also had a crap ton of hack dubs - from cartoons, TV shows and movies. 😩
I remember watching the Croatian dub of Winx Club when I was 7 years old and how I thought that was the perfectly acceptable version (granted, my English knowledge was very limited at that time and I didn't understand Italian at all). And when I became more confident with my English, I began watching the RAI English dub of Winx Club and realized just how botched the Croatian translation was.
Honesty, my stance is make changes but only where they need to be made. Good localization to me is an art-form that is spectacular when done well and a train wreck when done wrong.
Straight-up, I love the changes that are super clever in keeping the original intent.
That being said, at the end of the day I would rather have something like p5 that didn’t localize enough (this becomes especially apparent when you look at the spin-offs, the dancing game‘a script has a lot more flavor to it than the original game) than fe fates that 4kids the thing.
Edit: Also Holy shit I own that Japanese idiom book
I dabble in Visual Kei lyric translations and, even though it’s just a fun way to practice my Japanese, I always put a lot of time and energy into making my English version as natural as possible. Sometimes this takes the form of changing the “voice” to convey the nuances in phrasing and sometimes it means changing the lines completely because the original would not be comprehensible (or the original is supposed to sound dramatic but would sound silly to an English speaker). I have seen how disastrous Netflix translations can be when I have watched American comedies with my Japanese friend. The Japanese subs are pretty literal and he’ll be completely unaware that a line was supposed to be a joke. It was commonplace for me to pause something when I saw that the subs were incorrect so I could explain what was actually said
If you know the Visual Novel "Narcissu", in the french version you can choose between two translation from the menu : one that is quite litteral and one that is more localized. By two differents teams and they did a little resume of their point of view in the "translation select screen"
I found it funny and quite nice ! I still don't know if the one i choose was the "best" hahaha
As a foreign language teacher, you encapsulated exactly how my job feels sometimes whenever the students ask stuff like "how do you say ___". Cuz /I/ would say X but that's my own opinion and "localization" on the language that I would say X
You know what grind my gears from translations is when they put memes in the script. It makes it dated real quick. Remembers some of Nintendo's translations during 3ds/with era.
I agree with you, but at the same time I think it depends on the meme/popculture reference that's being translated. A few months ago, I saw an example of a manga translation that took NicoNico/Japanese youtube comment memes and translated it into a twitch stream chat, including "Poggers" and other extremely twitch-only memes.
I'm really sad that I can't remember what it was from or who translated it, but I was in awe at the translation. It perfectly captured what the author wanted to convey with the Niconico chat and made it uniquely western.
Treehouse. Woof.
A few I didn’t mind, a few I can see being an issue.
Basically I liked the doge meme in triforce heroes because we lost nothing there. Sadly Fate’s was filled with jokes that it took away important dialog, even if I found some things funny, it was quite damaging.
oh, you thought 3DS era was bad? What about the leet speak hammer bro’s from partners in time? It’s so dated it’s iconic. Also what about all the dated slang in Thousand Year Door? 10s era meme references were pretty bad, tho. Wonder if they’ll eventually be nostalgic like the dated slang and leet speak?
An hilarious one from Italy.
In the Italy- Uruguay match of 2014 world cup, the uruguaian player Suarez bit the Italian player Chiellini, wich became a meme in Italy.
Then in black bullet italian sub, when a loli bit the protagonist he said "I am not Chiellini".
This applies not only to Japanese media, which is precisely why I think it's so important. I'm an Indian so I can talk about that well.
Indian media isn't as easily accessible as Japanese media for a variety of reasons, but ignoring subjective reasons, the subs created for them are often very literal. They rely on good understanding of Indian culture, and sometimes even the language that the movie was in to even interpret them, and frankly, a lot of subs aren't good as they have poor English. That has been changing because the rights holders have realized there is a huge market of largely people like me and my family, Indians who live outside India, but the vast majority of it is still exactly what you talked about, a lot of literal translations with very little though into conveying the sentiment in English. Oftentimes it's just Indian slang English, which may not make sense to a non-Indian.
To put it simply, I agree with wholeheartedly and think localization is the lens through foreign media is accessible. That is in my opinion why the biggest film industry isn't talked about much outside of those who understand their languages. (even if I prefer anime :P)
I still get angry over funi over the dragon maid bit because I haven't heard a good explanation of why their change made sense. Also it changed her character from not being socially aware to being very aware.
That's the kind of bad localization that I hate. It was one of the big reasons why I switched to only watching subs.
So, as someone who is in the process of rewatching Dragon Maid and has only heard that line for the first time in this video, it doesn't seem nearly as offensive as I'd been lead to believe. It just seems like the equivalent of saying "The MAN made me do it!" in reference to the government/police. Also, Lucoa (and Fafnir) both, at least to me, have a pretty low opinion of humans outside their immediate circle of association.
Now, all this said, I seem to recall there being another line where Tohru straight up says, "Down with the patriarchy", which, I got nothing. There's no equivalent moment in the subs (again, that I'm aware of), and it stinks of legit agenda pandering.
@@kirbyfanprime I mean even in the video she explains that 'agenda pandering' based on like one or two instances in some random anime isn't a thing: nobody is risking their job for bloody Dragon Maid, and nobody is going to be using bloody Dragon Maid to make some larger point about society. The more likely explanation is that they threw in the line for a laugh and the joke simply didn't land, with a bunch of people taking a throwaway line way too seriously. Assuming that they must be pUsHiNg aN aGeNdA is a pretty big leap.
very
@@Nocturne22 even then, i wouldn't want to hear far right talking points either. if it's not relevant i don't want to hear real life controversial talking points.
A great Localization example I think is the inside out scene where she eats brócoli as a baby, I think in Japan (?) the scene was changed to show bell peppers because they're the more widely "disliked" vegetable there.
As a native spanish speaker, I want you to know that, MOST of the time, english subs are better than spanish ones, in spanish they can't even midly curse ("turd" for example), and they tend to gloss over details, I don't watch spanish subs in crunchyroll anymore, english ones are hella better. They are not perfect, but ceirtainly work well.
This issue probably gets worse the less popular the language is, and how "professional" their industry is. That's probably why Brazilian dubs and Mongolian subs have such a hilarious reputation lol
I follow translators on social media (one being the translator for Torture Princess light novels which has a beautiful translation and another being Steiner, because I love the translation for the Dies Irae vn) and because of that I was able to understand more about the localizations for various mediums and I'm highly grateful for that.
I am still very upset that Viz Media refused to change the localization of Zolo back to Zoro in the western release of One Piece. Every time I read it, I feel like Im read early scanslations.
I agree. My concern is that with the american copyright system they might get sued for ripping of Zorro, somehow.
At this point it's probably just a matter of being consistent for readers who don't follow behind the scenes stuff. Imagine being a super casual fan and all of a sudden a main character's name changes between volumes. And reprinting older releases is also a huge volumes since there's SO DMAN MANY of them, it's not worth it just to change 1 characters name. Maybe they thought at one point they thought about doing a deluxe edition when it ended but.... y'know.
I’m fairly certain that Zoro not under copyright because it’s an older story and the copyright has expired, so it shouldn’t be an issue.
Also Viz portrait Goku same way Funiamiation, is pretty weird hear Goku let Vegeta live because kill is bad.... same goku kill a tons Ribbon Red Army
On a related note, the Spanish Latin American dub for Magic Knight Rayearth rename Zapato to Zagato because naming the main antagonist of the first season "shoe" didn't fit the character.
I think its important to see translation as an art in itself, the creative choices made during translation really adds another layer to any text (and especially in situation where one is able to compare the original to the translation) it can tell you a lot about someone elses interpretation of the text, which is just so fascinating
I think there's a conflict here between what laymen understand as "literal translation" vs what translators think when they hear the word. I think when random watchers say they want a "literal translation" they just want something that preserves the original script uncensored, but what translators understand under "literal translation" is 1:1 keeping words and structure which is completely impossible.
Literal translation vs faithful translation, its a shame this wasnt addresed in the video because really its the main argument being made just with a poor choice of words
I have to agree, I mean...while it's not like there AREN'T people who argue for "literal translation" in the way she describes, it's really quite few, and most are actually arguing for "faithful translation" as stated above. So...she kinda makes a strawman here just to take it down for being absurd, which few people would actually disagree with in the first place (hence it being a strawman). She also glosses over the censorship/agenda issue and I think misses the main worries behind it and overcasually dismisses the points she does bring up. Those sub/dub lines being changed back was DUE to people kicking up a fuss, so doing so by the consumer seems to be ABSOLUTELY necessary given her own examples. And consumers worry about every instance because these become the PERMANENT way that the work is seen from that point out by a lot of people. Anyway, I almost feel like I should just make this a separate thread, or hell a counterargument video (yeah, like I'll do THAT), but what would be the point?
Yeah, fans just hates when people changes the meaning of sentences or whole conversations. So it's understandable if you want to read/hear what the characters actually supposed to talk about. And sadly for example funamation and crunchy very much unable to make it happen, in lot of cases.
I think the bigger problem is that the defense of crappy localization is usually "but we're localizing the content" which has gotten this disconnect. So I completely blame the bad apple localizations and the people behind them for this effect where "localization" has become a dirty word. I don't want to watch what in the actual script being a touching moment between parent and child only for some craphead to decide that they need 110% more "rawr, I'm a dragon" or a thoughtful conversation between two assassins being reduced to 4 lines of ellipses, just to name a few. I think that last part you brought up is pretty key, too, because if we actually knew who was behind a lot of the better localizations, we'd probably be a lot more keen to stand behind them.
But it's kind of hard to stand behind localizers in a world where "FUNNY" quips like muh gamergate and muh patriarchy are shoehorned into scripts. Just want the scripts to reflect the actual situations and characters presented. If that disconnects from what we already knew (since I am more than sure people were already familiar with those specific properties, Dragon Maid in particular), it's GOING to cause backlash, and that backlash will leak onto even actual good translations (like that LGBT one) because it does seem like something the bad apples would try to shoehorn in, even if it wasn't.
In 10 years, who's going to get Trump and GG references, let alone viewers in 20 years?
UGH THANK YOU FOR THIS. I CANNOT BELIEVE IT'S STILL AN ARGUMENT.
I do Japanese translation as a freelancer while working for a Japanese company.
I basically refuse to do low rates for freelance. Yes, it means I get less freelance work, but I'd rather work with good companies/artists who appreciate and credit my efforts than get paid and have nothing else to show from it.
I do both translation and localization for my full-time desk job, which brings in an element that you didn't speak on in this otherwise basically flawless video: the input from the Japan team.
A hands-off Japan team will be one that understand that their grasp on the target language is not greater than that of the native speaker. They will ask to have some things explained, but will mostly leave it up to the target language speakers themselves. A hands-on Japan team, however, can absolutely WRECK what might have otherwise been a great localization.
I've worked under both types of leadership, and I cannot stress how MASSIVE the pressure can be from a hands-on, controlling team in Japan. I'm not sure if this is as big of an issue in the pop culture industry, but I can say that it is in the food, manufacturing, and beauty business--assuming the Japan team is protective of their brand, which is hella common.
Also, something to go off of your note on how contextual Japanese is in particular--languages are on a scale of low-context to high-context. German, for example, is quite low-context--pretty straight-forward culturally and ergo is linguistically not too much of a challenge to understand what they mean. Japanese, however, is VERY high-context. Depending on your status, age, sex, and so on, the meaning of a phrase may change drastically. That's why certain languages are easier to translate and localize to English, while Japanese and some others are not.
Anyway, thank you for this video, I will be sharing it to as many people as I can while trying not to scream with joy.
As someone studying Japanese, I've always seen the two as intertwined. There's so many nuances, think of it like how some people call carbonated drinks "soda, coke, and pop". Sure they all mean the same thing, but it depends where you are to what's going to make sense to your audience.
I know it was only brought up VERY briefly but just a note about the Evangelion 3.0 thing - the rumour that the movie was redubbed due to a representative from Khara being upset at how the English audience reacted to the theatrical dub is unsubstantiated. There's a partial camrip of the theatrical dub available, and the scenes talked about in the original forum post this rumour was born from are almost completely unchanged, the very liberal translation was not edited for the Bluray (seriously, rewatch the bedroom scene with the dub on. Khara could not have cared about this for that to not have changed LOL). From what I've seen, the redubbing was done to better handle the lore of the movie, as both the theatrical dub and the theatrical subtitles were a bit messy. Unsure why it took so long for the English version to come out, but it seems like Funimation approached Khara for help and not the other way around.
This is an anal as hell comment but I do see this reiterated a lot with nothing to back it up. Generally people use it to justify what happened with the Netflix release, and I really do not think there's anything to support the idea that the audience reactions to the theatrical dub had anything to do with that.
Cardcaptor Sakura has a funny dub history. You've got the original 4kids style dub which mangled the whole thing. It redid the opening, cut out almost all of the romantic themes and changed the number and order of episodes and the title to emphasize Li. Then later a dub was made in Hong Kong and this one has pretty subpar acting but it's more true to the source material. Except in one episode where Li confesses to being gay and they literally just didn't dub it. It's just silence and subtitles.
Had never heard the complaints about this before, tbh i never heard localization in this context before. The fact that we are allowed to watch such amazing shows like evangelion etc without learning a new language is amazing to me. Have not thought about or thanked translators enough at all. Thanks for making this video and bringing light to this.
This is a fantastic video, you’ve explained everything so concisely, I thoroughly enjoyed watching it and you’ve helped me grasp a topic that I’ve probably never given enough thought. Thank you!
19:00 Okay so I NEVER see this brought up, but regarding the Evangelion controversy, IT WAS ALWAYS SUPPOSED TO BE “In other words, I love you”. I know this for a FACT. How? Because the phrase is word-for-word the same as the final line in Eva’s outro song “Fly Me To The Moon”. Kowaru’s line is supposed to be a reference to the end credits theme.
I playing through the trails series and my God the xseed script of the sky games is a masterpiece especially with the chests
I really like your pfp
When it comes to translation/localization jobs:
They need to stop making this shit a per line, per page, or per episode basis. SALLARIED WORK PLEASE.
Hourly work not salary
one of my favourite games was actually made gayer by the localisation! In the Japanese, while you could 'marry' a character the same gender as your character, it was called the 'best friends system' (just gals being pals amiright). But! the Western localizers made the decision to actually call it marriage, use the words husbands and wives, and get rid of the 'just BFFs' angle of some of the dialogue. It was the opposite of censorship!
Wow that's awesome, what game is it?
@@joaofilbida Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town
@@stevedoidoultimate4815 eh, poor word use from me then, I just meant it was the opposite of what often happens when LGBT+ stuff gets localised
also for the record they were completely transparent about the changes, anyone who looks it up can see what the original is like
Ooh, the new Harvest Moon
I'm starting an internship at a linguistic research project about fan-subtitles of Korean TV-dramas and how they try to cross cultural gaps, so I count watching this video as practically being work-related! :D
The literal translation myth is something that must be created by people (idk why but i see them as americans) who can only speak one language.
At least literal translation can be funny in the similar way to google translated text after 30 translations.
They seem like the people who think there's no problem with the "Keikaku means plan" meme is perfectly fine as a translation.
@@stayskeptic3923 Technically most people know 2 or even 3 languages (at least in western world) but most often they can only speak in very basic sentences or can't communicate at all, for example on paper i can speak in 3 langues one of wich is german but i know only around 30 words in german...
not necessarily. I've taken japanese classes to fill a language requirement for my degree. while i understand that some things are lost in translation (puns), and explaining them in translators notes looks sloppy, i still prefer it that way... possibly because I'm listening enough to fill in the blanks.
Not really i have seen people who are bilingual or more advocating for direct translation
@@adaj.8723 There's two things going on here.
One is that there is a debate within the translation community on whether to prioritize the source or the target, ie stay closer to the text even if it gives a target that's an unreadable mess, or stay closer to the target even if that makes you stray a bit from the letter of the source for the sake of getting across the source's point. Different translators take different views on this and their work reads somewhat differently.
Here's the thing though. Neither of those approaches are direct translation, since it's a debate about priorities, not process. To take an example from the video even a source-ist translation would be closer to keeping the word "senpai", taking the view that it's a defined concept and that you want to keep some kind of reminder that the source is Japanese. A target-ist translator might say that if you're translating something you can't assume your readers know the language you're translating from, or they wouldn't be reading your translation, so they might change it to something like "upperclassman".
If you want to see what direct translation looks like just feed a script through Google Translate and call it a day, ie "keikaku means plan".
I like to think about translation and localization like this: Translation is the lyrics of a song. Localization is someone who can sing performing that song, taking into account the notes played by the melody, their own register, the intonation of what they sing, etc. It takes a lot of training and understanding of your craft to make that all work and make it sound great. Censorship, in most contexts (as with 4Kids for example), is a radio station that wants to air specific songs but need to consider what the context of the song is, if/when they can play it and if it needs adjustments for their specific audience and limitations (an easy example would be the "Sh--" instead of "shit" on channels that have a family audience).
People who cry for "literal" translation more often than not speak only 1 language which makes the translation process seem much easier and haven't tried to understand the work that goes into localization. If you are one of those people, asking for literal translations, do you really think that the _entire industry_ would localize when they could just get one single translator doing a basic translation and not pay for all those people specialized in localization? Sure, some entities do that bs (like 4Kids), but you know who's out of business because of stuff like that among other things? 4Kids
There's people like myself who kinda feel that localisation sometimes goes to far. While I don't agree with a literal translation sometimes the odd line in localisations sometimes comes across as odd for the character.
Anyway I wanted to give another example of "hack dubs" that is still around and still fucking up things. NISA... Look into everything they do. I think when companies like this still exist is it any wonder people don't trust localisations.
Another thing I'd love to see is translator notes, it's a thing I love from fan subs. I love learning as I'm watching something.
NISA goes beyond hack dub because they somehow introduce new bugs and issues into the games they translate. I don't even know how that's possible or gets past QA.
@@Toukozuki NISA is truly impressive all they are mean to do is add the Eng dub and text but yet somehow they fuck with unrelated programming. It's clear they have no respect for the media they localise.
Infelious Kazkari Least a few series came out well. Danganronpa is pretty loved for what it is, tho some are aware of the dubs mistakes.
People usually mean "literal translation" as actually translating what being said, while localizers are infamous for making huge changes that hardly resembles the actual things that being said.
So, very interesting video so far and I intend to comment after I’m finished too for more engagement. I have to tell you that the extreme example of censorship is currently happening right now on Netflix with shows like glitter force. Though I get what you mean, most people only bring up 4kids. I’m just shocked at how much of the most kiddy show ever precure is censored on netflix.
Edit: I would actually argue that what Netflix is doing to precure is actually worse than 4kids. Since in glitter force they have edited every single scene where a character is crying.
You are technically right, but it was Saban who made these changes since they have aquired the american rights of Pretty Cure, as they hope to met the same success as Power Rangers. The edits are so bad that Toei basically bought the Glitter Force trademark to stop anyone from licensing the rights outside of Japan ever again. Italy was very lucky to brought Pretty Cure to their audience way earlier and continue to air it in uncensored form until HeartCatch, to which they stopped airing after that for unknown reason.
GF should be talked about more in hack-dub discussions because of how recent it is. Most of the dubs I see criticized are over 10 years ago, whereas GF was released only 5 years ago.
I don't know a lot about current kids' any dubs, but GF has to be THE heaviest-edited dub in recent years.
Oh, this was really good. I've been thinking about translation a lot lately (since I'm anxiously awaiting Hanyou No Yashahime!), and as a fellow medieval nerd and as a linguistics nerd, I'm so damn tired of translation drama. Ultimately, I think it's important to make the tone understandable to the audience, which means some stuff is just gonna get lost in translation. If you really don't wanna lose those bits, you have to learn the language. That's just how it is. I feel like a lot of the "Literal translation" crowd wants to have their cake and eat it too, and also doesn't know how hard it is to make a cake...anyway, I really hope this video inspires some action for translator workers' rights, because YIKES.
Yeah the extremists anime fans just want to follow the anti-sjw mindset of everything is sjw even though most of the time there really isn't and just want to find something to whine about
so uhhh...what happened to Interspecies Reviewers?
A term I like to use is Adaptation.
You adapt a work for a new media/audience while keeping the same message of the original author/sensations and feelings of the original audiences.
Interpretation is another term too.
Yet puritans would resent this. I've checked with them.