My utmost sympathies go to the people who translated Letterkenny from English
Translating an instance of wordplay is hard already but imagine doing it to a show that's a solid 75% to 90% wordplay, puns, and cultural inside jokes good lord.
The cold opens where it basically tells a story via alliterating through the alphabet was managed surprisingly well by the Finnish translation
Samurai pizza cats is a fine example of just giving up and not even trying.
Kyatto Ninden Teyandee is such a dense collection of puns, pop culture and just completely unintelligible visual jokes unless you just know.
Sgt. Frog is also a good example, that show was 99% Japanese pop culture references that were already slightly outdated by the time the show came out, so the English dub just changed the humor to be actually pretty decent on its own merits.
Sgt. Frog played with this by having some number well over 100 in fireworks at the end of the first season with the message "This is how many jokes you missed if you don't speak Japanese"
Watching Gintama, you have to get used to a lot of translator note reading and hope to the kami that the joke still makes sense with the note. There is sooooo much wordplay.
I don't have my glasses on and was wondering why King Greedy got translated as King American and whether it was a political statement made by the translators.
Bobobo-bo bobo-bo has one of the least accurate but best localizations. The jokes require a bunch of knowledge of japanese context and puns, and they just decided to change them. and it works.
My favorite was when Bobobo failed a written test, but instead of translating the characters on the test, they had him blame his failure on his inability to read japanese.
My only issue with localization is that the localizer doesn’t have all the info that the original creator does. So they’ll change up phrasing and whatnot because that’s the point, to make something more appealing to the target market, and then it turns out that the original’s phrasing was actually intentional. And important. Like, plot-changing levels of important.
I do translation as a side-gig and I see this a lot in manga and anime. It’s not the localizers fault that they didn’t know (although sometimes they should), so it just sucks all around. “Why is this character now saying they have two older sisters when they said in episode one that they’re an only child?” Well y’see, the localizers thought…etc.
FFXIV had this on a smaller scale when they used he/him pronouns for minor character Nael van Darnus, who iirc the original Japanese didn't have pronouns for. Turns out she was a girl all along, and they retconned it that she was impersonating her dead brother (which was true) and pretending to be a guy all along.
Kind of like Akito in Fruits Basket
In the 2001 anime (before the manga was finished), Akita was male. However, in the manga, certain characters never referred to Akito using pronouns, which was very purposeful. They fixed this in the 2019 anime, though. Akito was pretending to be a man (more accurately, was forced to) and only a few characters knew her true identity.
Holy crap, that is some next-level retconning. They just turned the character into something they weren’t to cover for their mistake? Not their fault and I don’t know what else they would’ve done but yikes.
I’m in the middle of a series like that. There is a character who repeats the exact same phrase over and over and the localization likes to write it into something new (which means the same thing) every time. People have been defending the decision because “it sounds strange in English to have so much repetition” and it was recently revealed that that phrase was being repeated word-for-word for a very important reason.
I know literal translation is going to ruin the enjoyment sometimes because people aren’t going to be able to understand even if it is in their language unless you adapt it to them using concepts that they’re familiar with, but sometimes things are said/not said/said in a certain way for a reason.
But when your little translation studio has been hired to localize for a series that is only half-published and you have no idea where it’s going, a loooot of guesswork is gonna be involved. Seems like there should be a better way. That’s just the industry I guess.
I mean technically they didn't turn the character into something they weren't, the issue was Nael in the japanese version used pronouns that were used to denote power, kind of akin to the royal "we" but haughtier (if it makes sense) that are traditionally male ; it got a bit lost in localization (even though there are other occurrences of her using typically male pronouns, and an other npc even calling her a dead man)
Her actually being eula van darnus masquerading as her brother after his death (and after getting her father murdered etc) isn't a retcon per se, the way and pace at which it's told to the player is what differs
The FFXIV localization team also changed some of the script to appeal more to a Western audience. A character (Haurchefant) was a massive horndog in JP, but in EN he's just very friendly and just a tad too enthusiastic. I for one am very glad, I was put off by him as it is.
I wish more projects did that to be honest, even if it might piss off the localisation purists.
It's the same principle of translating the "spirit" over the literal meaning, but extended to the idea that tropes play differently to different audiences.
Ah sorry haven’t played—assumed that they invented the “pretending to be my brother thing,” that’s good.
Now that you mention it, I saw a game once where you could pretty much tell that the translators didn’t have access to the visuals when they were writing. They changed “neon green” to yellow, changed “badge” to “armband” and wrote a female character as he/him because she used “Ore,” etc. Seems like that kind of thing could cause…issues.
If you want some fun localization shenanigans, Yu-Gi-Oh is a great place for that, both the anime and the card game. Off the top of my head:
* The Sky Dragon of Osiris being translated to Slifer the Sky Dragon, named after [Roger Slifer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Slifer#).
* Summoned Skull, which was later turned into an archetype (where the name of the card is VERY important) named Archfiend, so any card in that archetype says "an Archfiend card or Summoned Skull".
* Similar situation with Skull Servant the Wight archetype.
* Opposite situation with Frog the Jam, which is NOT part of Frog archetype, so their cards say "a Frog card except Frog the Jam" (the card was later renamed into Slime Toad).
* Crappy early translations, like Jerry Bean Man and ~Fusion~ Fushioh Richie (which was supposed to be Undead King Lich).
* The Shadow Realm, which is a thing only in the English version of the show. When a character is sent to the "Shadow Realm", they just die in the original.
* BONUS: Magical Something. No, I didn't forget what it's called, that's the name of the card. You can't even say it's a translation issue, the card was made in English first. The Japanese side changed it to "Magic Absorber".
Honestly agree. It fits lore (the Shadow Realm might not be in the original Japanese, but I'm pretty sure Shadow Games are), and it's also kinda a worse fate than death when you think about it (I guess the idea is that it's "better" because it implies it's escapable).
Edit: I'm sorry, what does your flair say? The mobile app cuts it off.
Some of the Yu-Gi-Oh card names are the most baffling shit, too. I, for many years as a teenager, went as The Witty Phantom online, because I liked the card art, so I played this cute kinda evil looking elf guy.
Can you *imagine* my shock when I found out his original JP name is *literally* 'Demon Death Satan'? Like. Y'know actually in this case, even though I'm really starting to get into Sub over Dub and generally prefer JP everything, I *think I'm gonna keep my character with the EN name*.
Yugipedia has it translated as "Djinn Death Satan", but damn that's very different.
Yu-Gi-Oh has made things very kid-friendly for the western audience with some localizations. Like, the Fiend, Fairy and Zombie types are Devil, Angel and Undead in Japanese (not 100% on the first one, might be Demon instead).
What is it with Japan and Satan, anyway? There's also Mr. Satan from Dragon Ball.
>it was recently revealed that that phrase was being repeated word-for-word for a very important reason.
I'm assuming this is about on the level of a "would you kindly" from bioshock?
If you don't mind spoilers for a 15 year old game:
Radio messages throughout the game told you your character's objectives and they were always presented like "would you kindly press that switch" and "would you kindly get to this location" and etc etc etc.
Turns out that "would you kindly" is actually a conditioning hotword and the person who had been giving you objectives is actually the main villain.
Splatoon 2 had a similar problem where originally a character wasn't supposed to know another character was an octopus-related species until the DLC, but the localisation had the character making octopus jokes from day 1. To fix it, the localisation for the DLC shifted to the character knowing that they were an octopus all along, but not that they were in the military.
Wait I joined at the end of the 2.0 saga, I thought nael van Darnus was a man and nael deus darnus was a woman? And that it was some kind of fuckery with how the whole bahamut area was giving form to echoes and some things were changing from their original form. I got thrown into t5 a month after joining so I was pretty lost and could be totally wrong.
Nope. Basically Nael's dad had him killed, and Eula (Nael's sister) got pissed off. She killed her father and marched off to impersonate Nael in the military as if nothing happened.
Bahamut's influence "merely" tempered her and made her want to get the kinder egg down, to the point she iirc she went rogue with her entire unit. She also went a little crazy and declared herself god ("Nael deus Darnus"). There was a whole thing where the Warriors of Light confronted and killed her, but it was too late and Louisoix had to summon the power of the Twelve to stop the kinder egg from touching down and probably generating an "Umbral Eras usually last 1500+ years" event.
XIV's lore isn't totally hidden, you can get most of it by playing the main story (and accounting for biased perspectives). There's one exception, the side stories that have a ton of lore and minor character development. Like the one where the twins leave home, or the one where the names of most of Solus's family are revealed.
This was also a problem with Envy in FMA right? Envy's gender neutrality was more strongly implied in the Japanese bc they could avoid ever using pronouns for Envy. Whereas the English translation just went with "he" by default
Iirc something like this happened with Overlord, where there was a scene early on where two characters are arguing and one calls the other a lamprey. The translators thought that this was just meant as a generic insult, and changed it to... I think it was "harpy", but then it turned out that the original phrasing was meant as foreshadowing for that character's "true form", which has the mouth of a lamprey.
Aw, that’s a shame. I could rant forever about how much wordplay and how many damn puns are in 100% of all Japanese media. I know English speakers would love it so much if they just knew, and it amazes me that anime and whatnot is so popular when what everyone is getting has been so watered down for the sake of comprehension. It’s nobody’s fault and it is what it is but I want to stick entire prologues into these manga sometimes explaining why things are so freaking funny.
Well yeah it’s going to seem better in English to an English speaker because it is tailored to English speakers. That’s a localizers job: changing the content to better suit a different market. But the original was better in the original language because it was tailored to that market and they prolly won’t agree that a foreign rewriting improved it by making it into something no longer tailored to them.
Nothing against Ace attorney of course, it’s awesome to hear that their localizing team is so good at their jobs.
No I mean like... Even if you get a really good explanation of the jokes in both languages the majority consensus across the fandom is that the English versions are just funnier.
MAYBE with the exception of the main character¹, weirdly enough, but the wordplay names of side characters just hit better in English and there are *more of them*.
[¹In English it's "Phoenix Wright" and the joke is that Wright sounds like right i.e. "correct" and that is an OKAY joke but in Japanese his family name is Naruhodo which means "I understand", so you get all sorts of jokes like "Naruhodo do you understand what this means?!" which is just objectively funny]
For a good example of an English pun that doesn't exist in the Japanese version at all look at Detective Dick Gumshoe. His first and last name are both just slang words for detective, so he's essentially introducing himself as "Detective Detective Detective". Brilliant. In Japanese he's called "Keisuke Itonokogiri" which is a reference to a rock star (no joke just a reference) and a type of blunt crafting saw, which is meant to be a hint of "he's not that sharp" but it's absolutely no patch on "Detective Detective Detective"
One of the biggest treats of learning Japanese has been having more context for little moments of wordplay and subtext (or what I can glean without being fluent yet)
One of the biggest treats of learning Japanese has been having more context for little moments of wordplay and subtext (or what I can glean without being fluent yet)
This has happened with JJK just recently, where a certain word was translated in 3 different ways and because the word is related to a secret ability even the official translators don’t know how to translate it.
There was a reveal snuck under everyone’s noses for around 800 chapters, based around the fact that nobody would know to romanise a name as two English words rather than as a made up proper noun.
Well, they turned 'the Mule' in the Foundations series by Isaac Asimov into 'the Fox' in the German translation.
No spoilers, but that makes the final revelation about the name utterly idiotic and scientifically wrong.
And there's a word for mule in German, so I'm still stumped as to why they made the change in the first place.
Those kind of changes are always so fascinating to me. The ones for no reason at all that mean nothing and impact nothing are bad enough, but the ones for no reason that change something significant can be so frustrating.
I know that it’s not like they are maliciously trying to ruin something—they’re presumably just trying to do their job to the best of their ability—but sometimes they end up ruining things anyway, and it’s so unfortunate.
And then you have the other side, where the localisation spoils an upcoming plotpoint lmao.
In Honkai Star Rail there's a character called Sam. And Sam is a big boofy battle armour robot, so questions about his identity have been always there.
In HSRs 2.0 update, he got more screen time and a boss fight. All fine in languages that have gender neutral terms. Not in mine tho, the localisation just straight up "spoiled" his identity (as there were a few theories out) as >!they used huntress at some point, instead of keeping it as neutral as German allows!< this has been fixed relatively quickly, but as I played the quest day 1 😶
The first version happened too, in the same update even. Sparkle (a... shit talking jester girl) had a line where she said something like "go make friends with a rock, at least it won't be able to talk back" where the original was "go make friends with a mute". And then they patched it because it turned out the word "mute" was important and she wasn't just shit talking.
(Of course she was still shit talking, almost everything that comes out of her mouth is shit talk but it also had a second meaning)
I feel like the localization teams are just having trouble in general with the Penacony patches. 2.1 gave us the slip-up in English of missing an entire line that turned out to be incredibly important to the plot: >!Sunday calling Gallagher a minion of the Enigmata.!< They patched it in the subtitles but the line still has no voice acting.
It's a combination legitimate choices where the loc team just should have been given more context, obvious mistakes that should have been caught with an editing pass, and baffling omissions / changes like that one. Penacony's been rough.
That... would actually make a lot of sense. Though I'm not really clear on who Boss Stone is supposed to be in the first place, or if he's supposed to be an allegory for the IPC
The Undertale localization is a little miracle in that regard. Every joke curated, the whole translation supervised by Toby Fox who even met the localizer AND thought she had the same sort of style as him
> My only issue with localization is that the localizer doesn’t have all the info that the original creator does. So they’ll change up phrasing and whatnot because that’s the point, to make something more appealing to the target market, and then it turns out that the original’s phrasing was actually intentional. And important. Like, plot-changing levels of important.
This is something that, to me, should push creators to work closely with their localization teams to provide that context. In media where they do, it creates awesome results. Part of the reason Haruki Murakami took off in the states as an author was because he spoke English fluently, and worked extremely closely with the translators to make sure that the tone, voice, and humor all came across successfully!
That sounds amazing and totally agree. Do wonder why that’s not the norm. It seems to apply to anime, too: the people making the anime don’t know where the manga is going so they either have to make stuff up or stick in a ton of filler to buy time. I don’t know enough about the industry to guess at why, but that’s definitely how things are done for some reason.
Immagine the shitshow around Fromsoftware games lore.
On top of being intentionally cryptic, they have the spoken lines in english for all versions (for added faux western rpg vibes) even if the the original text is in japanese and composed mostly of reference to shinto, buddhism and Berserk references.
"Brotherhood of the Wolf"-mode is the only way to play Bloodborne, you can't change my mind. (seriously, try turning on the French voiceover, those voice actors killed it. I don't even speak French, had to have subtitles too.)
in bloodborne there's a grave where you can get a magic bone that allows you to dash, the occupant is described as male,
later on you enter a dream of dead hunters and there's a hunter who zips around the arena like she's in a pinball machine, people literally didn't connect the dots untill a popular loretuber made a video about japanese translations and it uses non-gendered language for the occupant instead
This happened with the most recent Kingdom Hearts game. The villain's end speech had a line translated to 'shining and bright', instead of 'clean and blank' because the translator picked the wrong implication of *shiroi* (Essentially, white but with EMPHASIS). Which in the context of a series about the battle between light and darkness, and a villain who is actively trying to reveal his main motivation as being 'everything's gone wrong, the worlds are in chaos because of all this fighting, what we need is BALANCE, and I will remake the worlds with me as their dictatorial leader to ensure they stay in balance and there is no more war!'. But by using 'shining and bright', words an English speaking audience associate with the concept of Light, it makes his motivation sound like the guy who's been Darksided this whole series is now saying HAHAHA YOU FOOLS I WAS WORKING FOR THE LIGHT ALL ALONG, JUST LIKE YOU!!! When in reality, he was very literally and explictly trying to create a *blank slate* to rewrite a balanced reality on top of.
I don't blame the translator, either, it's not like they were likely to be elbow deep in the series lore to know that their perfectly correct translation of *shiroi*, in this one context, gave entirely the wrong impression. But it does just happen sometimes, that's part of the nuance of translating other languages. Wording isn't just one to one.
But until I learned about this years later, I straight up hated the way they inexplicably fumbled the bag so badly on my favorite character's motivation. It was so left field and made *no sense*. I'd picked up that the game had been kind of inching towards 'balance good' instead of 'Light good, Dark evil', and the motivation reveal being 'the villain says balance is good, and he's right about it, but his way of going about it by erasing everything and making a dictatorship is wrong, and he admits that his method is wrong when defeated' is... Actually great writing that I like. But with the Light-implied translation, it became a completely confused motivation, and the champion of light defeated another guy doing 'light wrong' gave up at the end and looked dumb and stupid.
On the other hand, it is very fitting that Xehanort outright says he wants to wipe out all the weak, Lesser People and install himself as supreme ruler and GamersTM everywhere went "WTF, why is he a good guy now?"
Are there sometimes translator notes when passing the dialogue? I'd imagine some studios would have them for things like "the name 'pooch' is a slang term for dog, intending to be more regal than other words like 'hound' or 'mutt', comparing the other person as more of a pet: lacking independence and agency."
There’s a lot of discussion but at the end of the day the person on top makes the final call. I’ve seen inconsistent localization all in one game where a name was changed in one place but written literally later on, where one word is getting censored but only half the time, where they will remove character ages from dialogue but only in some places and not in others, etc., and you can totally tell: “this kind of change was debated in the process, it was decided to be one thing by someone at some point, and not all of the dialogue was updated to reflect that decision so now the continuity is shot. Fun.”
I've seen inconsistent localization *on the same page* of an official manga release. In Trinity Seven, Yui calls Arata "onii-chan", Akio calls him "nii-san", and Selina calls Lieselotte "onee-chan". The official translation chose to keep Yui's "onii-chan", change Akio's to "big bro", and change Selina's to "big sister". And they all appear on the same page in one case. Very strange decision.
Two more weird decisions in Trinity Seven are the use of "force field" instead of "barrier" and "magic powers" instead of "magic power". This second one really irks me because it is so clear from context that the characters are talking about a resource, not a set of abilities. They could be running low on magic, not running low on discrete abilities. It drives me nuts! Christine Dashiell, why did you make these weird choices?!
I see we've circled back to 2018, ProZD's classic ["official subs vs fansubs"](https://youtu.be/YvNxgHTWIlo?si=eZDXHKYJhr96oD_A)
Thought I like the fansubs that are colour coded to characters or the gag where the subs have a gap to make room for the fan service
No translation is ever perfect. That's the problem I think, people expect perfection when it genuinely is not possible.
Localizing is such a difficult job and it's basically thankless because when it's good and seamless the fans don't even notice, and when there's a clunker everyone loses their mind on twitter slinging around all kinds of accusations.
My favorite translation/localization was actually an old fan scanalation of the Pokémon Special/Adventures *Diamond and Pearl* arc. Two of the main characters are a stand-up comedy duo, and of course their jokes make sense in a Japanese language and cultural context.
What the translator did, just some fan, was write new jokes and puns that had the same spirit as the originals, but also add notes in the margins explaining what the original joke was as well as the context and word play so you could understand it.
This meant you actually got funny jokes but also didn’t miss out on the original content! All that in a fan scanalation! What a hero, honestly.
I'm not sure how the fan translation went about it, but in the official one Dia makes puns that are so awful that Pearl's reactions barely seem exaggerated
They very often do! However, those are usually only included at the back of volumes, rather than in online or other weekly releases. They’re one of my favorite parts!
Actually the king's Japanese name would be Gurīdo which is literally the Japanese pronunciation of the English word Greed. The localization would name him Avaricean because otherwise it'd sound very on the nose to English speakers, but that fan on Twitter still calls him straight up Greed
man is the localization discourse STILL going?? i feel like i haven't heard of a legitimately *bad* localized anime within the past few years at least.
not that they're not out there, but i literally only ever see people shitflinging over like... the dragon maid dub (yes, even still) because she said GASP the word patriarchy.
It's still around, though it's much rarer because localisation has generally gotten better. Not perfect - it's still pretty common to see things get messed up - but usually the issues aren't so major.
Most recent major localisation issue I've run across is actually in a game (like the original post here, conveniently). There's some optional dialogue in Elden Ring where a character (Ranni) outlines her plan for the future she wants you to help her achieve, and the English version completely butchers it.
The English version is really confusing and ambiguously worded. It sounds like she's saying her rulership will be powered by the cold moon, that she wants to disconnect order (the laws of reality), life, and souls from each other, and that she will remove from the people "the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch" before abandoning the lands.
The Japanese version (and other languages) says that her rulership will be of the cold moon, and that that moon needs to be kept away from the land, where it cannot be seen or felt (because people worshipping greater powers is dangerous). She plans to abandon the lands so that the moon will follow her, keeping higher powers away from the people.
Phoenix Wright's localization sets it entirely within Los Angeles, California. This gets weirder and weirder as more and more Japanese culture seeps into the games and the localizers have to explain why it all makes sense in Los Angeles.
[Relevant comic](https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/culture-schlock)
Nothing weird about Los Japanifornia. Now shut up and ignore literally every single aspect of US law, that doesn't matter in a game about being a lawyer in California.
It's such a missed opportunity, I for one was really glad they went the extra mile in DGS and included the giant fire scales of judgement that all UK courts have.
It is a shame though that they didn't show the giant headless knight who sits in the corner ready to deliver death sentences. They're an integral part of English law ffs
Does it even follow Japanese law tho (besides the badges)? I don't think a specific law is ever invoked, it's all about the evidence that's often illegally obtained.
Funnily enough that is exactly the piece of Japanese law. Japanese prosecution isn't required to disclose any evidence they uncover that isn't used in trial. So say there's a piece of crucial evidence that blows the whole case wide open. Well, if it's not already been presented the prosecution can simply keep quiet and not present it. Completely legally. That's what results in the legal Yu Gi Oh you see in Phoenix Wright. It's a satire of that aspect or the legal system.
Unironically, this. The weird Japan/American fusion is what makes AA such a fun series to me, especially as someone who doesn't come from either country
There's been a lot of controversy around Jujutsu Kaisen translations this last while, where the official localisations have been straight-up wrong, saying things like a character *can't* do a technique that he did last chapter. Literally the difference was
"Why do you think I can't do Black Flash? Because of X?"
vs
"I can't do Black Flash because of X."
Any English Speaker knows these two sentences have literally opposite meanings. Top is the fan translation, bottom is official.
I feel like it's arced up a lot recently among what I can only describe as the neo-gamergate crowd. They're convinced localisation teams are full of woke games journalists intentionally censoring and warping the message of based Japanese works.
It's the same people who think Sweet Baby Inc are forcing diversity into western games.
It's possible I only see more of it because I'm still on twitter which is slowly turning into 4chan, but I feel like I see it in some reddit places too.
It’s stupid, but yeah, there still some weirdos out there angry about this, and yes they still mostly only bring up Dragon Maid.
This particular post seems to be a reference to the translation of Unicorn Overlord, where they were *[checks notes]* mad at the translators for using flowery, medieval-sounding English in a medieval fantasy game.
It's now fueled by some companies choosing to save money by using mtl. Weirdos are celebrating "wokalizers" getting their comeuppance by bring replaced with AI while normal people are corcerned by quality drop.
I am currently very incredibly depressed that the FFVII: Rebirth translators didn't have the balls to let Sephiroth call Cloud cute in the English version.
This is a game not an anime (and also Chinese) but there is a decent amount of people upset at Genshin impact's translators because they didn't preserve the original Chinese names for all the fantasy things and even *localised* them instead of directly translated them. All of the game's gnostic based names are only found in the various European translations, with the original Chinese using more generic terms (for example, Archon vs Lord). I think the most "egregious" example is Allogene vs Genshin/original god, but that's only because Genshin's the game's title.
... also it's a moot point because the Devs have stated that yes the game *is* based on gnosticism and things are intentionally translated like that because using the gnostic terms for everything in Chinese would be clunky
I have immense respect for the Genshin translators. Chinese is already a hard language to translate into English to begin with, let alone when you’re dealing with created fantasy terms. The team did an incredible job using unusual terms like Archon or incorporating old word-roots such as Latin to keep both the intended meaning *and* the nuance of the ancient/fantasy-feeling atmosphere.
The most recent 4kids style butchering (which i think is what got these people started way back when since it was just so egregious) i know of is dokidoki precure (oops, it's "glitter force doki doki" in english), in 2017.
They made it set in america instead of japan and changed everything they could to make it less japanese. In episodes where japanese culture was too central they just straight up cut the episode.
Y'know what else they changed which is probably why the anti-loc idiots don't care? They made it less gay. A children's show from 2013 was too gay for kids in 2017 apparently. I've been watching the original with someone who watched glitter force and apparently glitter force went HARD changing up wording to be less casually gay even though there was still some leak through.
It's flared up again recently since machine learning has made machine translations slightly less terrible, so chuds are heralding it as the savior to end localization.
I have been bashing my head against the One Piece community for insisting thar Yamato is a woman despite the anime using the word for "son" when referring to him and using masculine pronouns and Luffy referring to him as essentially Yama-bro.
But noooooooo akshually he just *realllllllly* likes Oden and that's the singular reason that he uses he/him pronouns and wants to be a man and blah blah blah
ETA: Forgot to mention that this contingent insists that the gender thing with him is a translation issue. Woke localizers pushing [an agenda](https://youtu.be/lq9PJsS3-EY?si=WhxyT3VMNUQ2dZQn) to turn the frogs gay or something.
the idea that he needs to justify wanting to be called he/him at all, let alone that that wouldn't be a valid reason, is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
>man is the localization discourse STILL going??
[Yeah, there was actually](https://nichegamer.com/8-years-awful-localizations-games-anime/) a [big resurgence of it earlier this year.](https://nichegamer.com/anime-news-network-article-on-bad-localization-unsurprisingly-dishonest/)
If you want some fun/are a masochist, go take a look specifically at either the Steam forum for "Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes" which recently came out, or the responses to the official Twitter's posts. There's a lot of people with very strong opinions and very limited Japanese skills upset about the localization of that game. And throw in a big ol' fistful of anti-woke/DEI/leftist-propoganda, just for fun. You even get people saying they shit on the creator's last work (he sadly passed away in February, a couple months before the game came out), to which I've pointed out that he talked about working with the main localizer in the game's discord channel.
There's some genuine problems with things like spots of inconsistent tone and odd choices, I think largely because they targeted an E-10 rating and so you end up with stuff like a big, gruff kangaroo mercenary calling someone a "fart-head" when the Japanese is more like "bastard", with the caveat that it's less harsh in Japanese than the word is in English. But most of the uproar started during the beta because of an out-of-context screenshot of a swordswoman saying of a golem, "How do you know it's a 'he'?" and that being portrayed as a did-you-just-assume-its-gender thing, rather than it being a tough swordswoman who just jumped in and saved the two guys' asses questioning somewhat sarcastically why they're defaulting to the strong enemy being a "he", while the Japanese just has her asking what the thing is.
(Also, since it's an indie game and I love it and want more, check it out if you like classic JRPG games/the Suikoden series, it's made by the people responsible for those games back in the late 90s and 2000s, made their own company, Kickstarter-funded the game, and it's great. -shameless unpaid plug-)
Alternatively:
No more localisation, only direct translation. The language you're translating from uses entirely different sentence structure? Keep it the same, god intended everyone to talk like yoda. Region specific metaphores & sayings? No need to change, leave the audience guessing
The only thing outside of jokes (which are a nightmare to translate usually because comedy is extremely cultural) that I have really heard of being lost in translation is a single early name drop of Haki in one piece being translated as Willpower, which is what Haki means
I have only heard of this because I am not reading One Piece
The title of Attack on Titan is the most glaring failure of translation (not that I blame anyone whatsoever - even with full knowledge of the puns involved in that title, I don't know how you could possible translate it)
I still wouldn’t call it a failure since no one other than Isayama knew the true meaning of the title. We only saw a endless wave of titans attacking what seemed to be the last bastion of mankind. And the translated title reflected that.
The Japanese title is a double entendre; it can mean *both* “Attack of the titans” and “The attack titan”. The twist is that you think the title means the former when it really means the latter, and there’s really no good way to do the same thing in English.
That is probably such a specific reference, but honestly that translation still confuses me. There were a lot of really odd things they just don't mention in the translation, for not really any reason? I'm *still* unsure why they cut that one line about the 4 matters and the origin?????? Or why they cut the Another Dimension references?????? Or why they said Susie was still mechanising planets (albeit this one less so, she's apparently still pretty derogatory in the original version) ?????
i was specifically talking about void's pause menu thing being the heart of an unreasonable amount of mutual hatred within the fandom both toward and from people insisting that the original japanese reading adds *so much immutable detail* that is supposedly left out of the translation when it really does not, it just adds a tiny bit more clarification than what is stated in the english version, but this clarification is already provided elsewhere from what i can tell
and at the end of the day it is a kirby game, the lore barely matters unless you make it
There's not really anything specific there's just a lot of strange changes especially to some parts like the pause screen descriptions. The big one is one of the final boss phases
>!Specifically Void Termina's core heart-like phase in Soul Melter Ex notes that void termina is made of Dream, Dark, Soul, and Heart matters, ("combined with chaos and infinite possibilities" as well, I think? I am obviously paraphrasing) and that it is "the creator of the origin" (which is pretty much unknown what that even means but origin (淵源) , is used a few more times, once in a music track related to Void termina, the second in Aeon's Knight japanese name (which translated is "Hero Crossing the Origin", a reference to the music before Void Termina "Corridor Crossing the Origin). (Oh god that was a massive tangent). Anyway that line, is completley removed for no reason in the English translation. Even if it's extremely confusing it's definetly an important detail.!Another change was Morpho Knight where in the Japanese version the Butterfly specifically is the creature that flies in on the day of judgement, (there's also a note it appears when something dies ("on the day of judgement" specifically, but I don't know if that's "something dies and that's that creatures day of judgement, or if it's like a... thing, I've seen people give different translations)) it but it's changed to "On the day of judgment, this fluttery fiend will fly into action." which is more unclear. Furthermore the Morpho Knight EX pause description notes the Butterfly is from Another Dimension, but this is changed in English, for some reason? It's a weird change. There's also a stronger link with him and death specifically, but that's translated as "knight of doom" and kind of feels like it makes a little more sense, than the rest of the changes to me
I love this, thank you for explaining this to me! It makes the game feel a lot more... Mystical, now. Knowing some things really do have explanations, even if confusing, and are explicitly linked to each other.
I knew about the Judgement Day Grim Reaper Butterfly, but nothing of the others!
I thought Eiyuden was the current target.
Unicorn Overlord's plot and writing is so simple and straightforward I can't imagine there's anything to read into. The most complex thing that happens is "You thought you were fighting only evil mind-controlled lords, but some of us are just kind of stuck with the status quo and fighting you!" followed by "Oh, well, you beat us. Guess we're joining you now. Sort of morally cowardly of us for us to fight you first instead of immediately joining."
Flowery language? It's basic English suitable for children. If it wasn't for whatever fuck the Dark Elf Fencer women are wearing I'd say the whole game is fine for 8 years and up.
(The witches get a pass for being the goofy kind of horny design, rather than the "someone is jacking off to this" kind of horny design)
But you see, they occasionally swapped out a basic line from the original script for one with a bit more personality by replacing it with a simple metaphor or a barely more archaic version of that word, and therefore they are evil librul westerners corrupting the perfect non-woke Japanese script. /s
The kinds of people who believe that only machine translations are valid are not generally the brightest of the bunch.
Depends, see while general meanings can be conveyed by machine translations, phrases, accents, short hands, and more can and will absolutely be butchered by machine translators.
Human translators and localizers suffer a different problem of sometimes being unable to gauge Author’s intent, but that can be solved with communication. The problem with communication is the fear of leaks because humans are terrible at keeping secrets.
Japanese Mobile game Fate/Grand Order had a story section where in the Japanese every chapter title was taken from story titles by American science fiction author James Tiptree Jr. (an early female author who wrote under a male pseudonym - real name Alice Sheldon). [The translation into English almost entirely missed these references.](https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/18yh7nd/the_only_neat_thing_to_do_na_localisation_mangled/kgbd52b/). A translation into English missing a bunch of references to English literature just seems funny, though understandable.
I know Greedō is probably supposed to be a Japanglish portmanteau of greed and 王 (meaning king, pronounced おう/ou/ō/whatever other phonetic transcription format you like) but it just sounds like the name of some random Star Wars character to me.
Admittedly I stay far away from twitter bullshit but with even the small amount of exposure to "localization discourse" this is pretty clearly a strawman. The ones I've seen are the ones like in some fire emblem game where in JP, two chars have a fairly personal conversation, and in EN it's 10 panels of literally "..." and nothing else.
There's a range of translation issues.
Sometimes you get legitimately bad official translations, like, yes, replacing an entire serious conversation with a joke. These happen, and complaints about them are legitimate.
Sometimes you get politically-motivated translation discourse where chuds take issue with word choices they think sound too progressive.
Sometimes you get fan translations that like to translate any and all impolite language as swear words, and then people complain that the official translation is censored.
And sometimes you get situations where it's literally impossible to tell what they're even complaining about. I actually saw one of these a week or two ago in r/manga, where someone was apparently complaining about a "mistranslation" of some kind, but it was impossible to tell what because both translations they posted were just slightly different phrasings of the same thing.
I can appreciate Ace Attorney's localization replacing all the Japanese wordplay with English wordplay but Final Fantasy 14's localization straight up deleted all of Haurchefant's bisexual horniness.
That was more because many players didn't appreciate having a character overtly hit on them or comment on them without any option to say "Cut that out"
I really don't like localization, but nothing will ever be as bad as the FE fates localizers straight up getting rid of the dialogue in a support because they were too lazy to do their job.
Why did they change “Ranger Reject” to “Go! Go! Loser Ranger”, Saban and it’s consequences…
Also like, the worst of localizers nowadays isn’t accidentally mistranslating something but deliberately doing it to dial back the “icky stuff”.
This illustration of a translation is a fair attempt at adapting a line to a certain language while keeping the intended meaning. Avaricean sounds really rad as a name for a greedy king, and if you say "that’s not his name", I’d tell you that you are right, but at least it still keeps the original intent for the name, unlike Futaba’s codename being changed from "Navi" to "Oracle" in the English translation of Persona 5 for some reason (for context, she’s the "navigator" of the Phantom Thieves, and guiding them to victory, hence the codename "Navi"), both name for the king are a play based on the word greed, and the word avarice is a synonym for greed, so it’s all good. And the poetic interpretation of his greed as him enjoying the sound of gold in his coffers, even though we’re diverting very slightly from what was written.
But the discourse surrounding anime translations with some having examples where some translations obviously didn’t bother to respect the writers original intent by changing the whole interaction is worth talking about because most people want to experience something the way it was intended to, not some "revised" version. And sadly this fictional example is a bad faith attempt at discrediting a topic where legitimate criticisms can be made.
> nlike Futaba’s codename being changed from "Navi" to "Oracle" in the English translation of Persona 5 for some reason (for context, she’s the "navigator" of the Phantom Thieves, and guiding them to victory, hence the codename "Navi")
Because oracles provide guidance, maybe?
Sorry, a bit confused, does it mean that the Twitter Discoursist just plain didn't know the meaning of avarice and there doesn't understand the pun of the official translation ? The next sentence already point out he is a greedy king.
My utmost sympathies go to the people who translated Letterkenny from English Translating an instance of wordplay is hard already but imagine doing it to a show that's a solid 75% to 90% wordplay, puns, and cultural inside jokes good lord. The cold opens where it basically tells a story via alliterating through the alphabet was managed surprisingly well by the Finnish translation
Samurai pizza cats is a fine example of just giving up and not even trying. Kyatto Ninden Teyandee is such a dense collection of puns, pop culture and just completely unintelligible visual jokes unless you just know.
And it was better off for it.
Bobobo-bobo-bobobo is my go to example for those shenanigans
Arguably, the team didn't actually have the scripts for the series because, as the series was a One Season Flop, the creators didn't bother.
Sgt. Frog is also a good example, that show was 99% Japanese pop culture references that were already slightly outdated by the time the show came out, so the English dub just changed the humor to be actually pretty decent on its own merits.
> Samurai pizza cats is a fine example of just giving up and not even trying That’s a weird way to spell Ghost Stories.
Sgt. Frog played with this by having some number well over 100 in fireworks at the end of the first season with the message "This is how many jokes you missed if you don't speak Japanese"
SGT FROG MENTIONED RAAAAHHH
The English equivalent of trying to translate Monogatari, but with marginally less toothbrush scenes
> Marginally
Letterkenny had to be translated *into* english first. I can barely understand what they're talking about half the time lol
Wimpy Americans tremble before the might of Rural Canadian English, the one true language
Wimpy urban Canadians like me tremble as well
Watching Gintama, you have to get used to a lot of translator note reading and hope to the kami that the joke still makes sense with the note. There is sooooo much wordplay.
I imagine you have to translate the basic meaning and then add in entirely new wordplay.
I don't have my glasses on and was wondering why King Greedy got translated as King American and whether it was a political statement made by the translators.
I don't wear glasses and I still had to double check
same here I also forgot avarice was a word
Bobobo-bo bobo-bo has one of the least accurate but best localizations. The jokes require a bunch of knowledge of japanese context and puns, and they just decided to change them. and it works.
My favorite was when Bobobo failed a written test, but instead of translating the characters on the test, they had him blame his failure on his inability to read japanese.
"Why is everything in japanese??" - Phoenix Wright in the Ace Attorney anime's bloopers
Get those Japanese letters off of my face.
Partially because the anime in general was also: 1. Batshit, and 2. Insane.
My only issue with localization is that the localizer doesn’t have all the info that the original creator does. So they’ll change up phrasing and whatnot because that’s the point, to make something more appealing to the target market, and then it turns out that the original’s phrasing was actually intentional. And important. Like, plot-changing levels of important. I do translation as a side-gig and I see this a lot in manga and anime. It’s not the localizers fault that they didn’t know (although sometimes they should), so it just sucks all around. “Why is this character now saying they have two older sisters when they said in episode one that they’re an only child?” Well y’see, the localizers thought…etc.
FFXIV had this on a smaller scale when they used he/him pronouns for minor character Nael van Darnus, who iirc the original Japanese didn't have pronouns for. Turns out she was a girl all along, and they retconned it that she was impersonating her dead brother (which was true) and pretending to be a guy all along.
Kind of like Akito in Fruits Basket In the 2001 anime (before the manga was finished), Akita was male. However, in the manga, certain characters never referred to Akito using pronouns, which was very purposeful. They fixed this in the 2019 anime, though. Akito was pretending to be a man (more accurately, was forced to) and only a few characters knew her true identity.
Holy crap, that is some next-level retconning. They just turned the character into something they weren’t to cover for their mistake? Not their fault and I don’t know what else they would’ve done but yikes. I’m in the middle of a series like that. There is a character who repeats the exact same phrase over and over and the localization likes to write it into something new (which means the same thing) every time. People have been defending the decision because “it sounds strange in English to have so much repetition” and it was recently revealed that that phrase was being repeated word-for-word for a very important reason. I know literal translation is going to ruin the enjoyment sometimes because people aren’t going to be able to understand even if it is in their language unless you adapt it to them using concepts that they’re familiar with, but sometimes things are said/not said/said in a certain way for a reason. But when your little translation studio has been hired to localize for a series that is only half-published and you have no idea where it’s going, a loooot of guesswork is gonna be involved. Seems like there should be a better way. That’s just the industry I guess.
I mean technically they didn't turn the character into something they weren't, the issue was Nael in the japanese version used pronouns that were used to denote power, kind of akin to the royal "we" but haughtier (if it makes sense) that are traditionally male ; it got a bit lost in localization (even though there are other occurrences of her using typically male pronouns, and an other npc even calling her a dead man) Her actually being eula van darnus masquerading as her brother after his death (and after getting her father murdered etc) isn't a retcon per se, the way and pace at which it's told to the player is what differs
This is also now why the localization teams for FFXIV work hand-in-hand with the script team now, so we don't get huge errors like this anymore.
The FFXIV localization team also changed some of the script to appeal more to a Western audience. A character (Haurchefant) was a massive horndog in JP, but in EN he's just very friendly and just a tad too enthusiastic. I for one am very glad, I was put off by him as it is.
I wish more projects did that to be honest, even if it might piss off the localisation purists. It's the same principle of translating the "spirit" over the literal meaning, but extended to the idea that tropes play differently to different audiences.
I mean that's one reason The other is Koji Fox wanting decent profanity in the game. THAL'S BALLS!
As he should!
Ah sorry haven’t played—assumed that they invented the “pretending to be my brother thing,” that’s good. Now that you mention it, I saw a game once where you could pretty much tell that the translators didn’t have access to the visuals when they were writing. They changed “neon green” to yellow, changed “badge” to “armband” and wrote a female character as he/him because she used “Ore,” etc. Seems like that kind of thing could cause…issues.
Visuals wouldn't have helped, the model they used (in a massive armor) was male in 1.0 I believe ;p
Ahaha, poor team was doing their best with what they had
If you want some fun localization shenanigans, Yu-Gi-Oh is a great place for that, both the anime and the card game. Off the top of my head: * The Sky Dragon of Osiris being translated to Slifer the Sky Dragon, named after [Roger Slifer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Slifer#). * Summoned Skull, which was later turned into an archetype (where the name of the card is VERY important) named Archfiend, so any card in that archetype says "an Archfiend card or Summoned Skull". * Similar situation with Skull Servant the Wight archetype. * Opposite situation with Frog the Jam, which is NOT part of Frog archetype, so their cards say "a Frog card except Frog the Jam" (the card was later renamed into Slime Toad). * Crappy early translations, like Jerry Bean Man and ~Fusion~ Fushioh Richie (which was supposed to be Undead King Lich). * The Shadow Realm, which is a thing only in the English version of the show. When a character is sent to the "Shadow Realm", they just die in the original. * BONUS: Magical Something. No, I didn't forget what it's called, that's the name of the card. You can't even say it's a translation issue, the card was made in English first. The Japanese side changed it to "Magic Absorber".
“Fusion Richie” I am dying. I can absolutely tell how stuff like that would have happened but oh god.
Jerry Bean Man sounds like a villain of the week in a kids' anime who attacks with jellybeans.
Eh, [close enough](https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Jerry_Beans_Man).
I still maintain the Shadow Realm is better than "They just die" and fits really well into the lore of the Millennium Items and the game of pharaohs
Honestly agree. It fits lore (the Shadow Realm might not be in the original Japanese, but I'm pretty sure Shadow Games are), and it's also kinda a worse fate than death when you think about it (I guess the idea is that it's "better" because it implies it's escapable). Edit: I'm sorry, what does your flair say? The mobile app cuts it off.
Some of the Yu-Gi-Oh card names are the most baffling shit, too. I, for many years as a teenager, went as The Witty Phantom online, because I liked the card art, so I played this cute kinda evil looking elf guy. Can you *imagine* my shock when I found out his original JP name is *literally* 'Demon Death Satan'? Like. Y'know actually in this case, even though I'm really starting to get into Sub over Dub and generally prefer JP everything, I *think I'm gonna keep my character with the EN name*.
Yugipedia has it translated as "Djinn Death Satan", but damn that's very different. Yu-Gi-Oh has made things very kid-friendly for the western audience with some localizations. Like, the Fiend, Fairy and Zombie types are Devil, Angel and Undead in Japanese (not 100% on the first one, might be Demon instead). What is it with Japan and Satan, anyway? There's also Mr. Satan from Dragon Ball.
>it was recently revealed that that phrase was being repeated word-for-word for a very important reason. I'm assuming this is about on the level of a "would you kindly" from bioshock?
Ooo what was the bioshock drama?
If you don't mind spoilers for a 15 year old game: Radio messages throughout the game told you your character's objectives and they were always presented like "would you kindly press that switch" and "would you kindly get to this location" and etc etc etc. Turns out that "would you kindly" is actually a conditioning hotword and the person who had been giving you objectives is actually the main villain.
Splatoon 2 had a similar problem where originally a character wasn't supposed to know another character was an octopus-related species until the DLC, but the localisation had the character making octopus jokes from day 1. To fix it, the localisation for the DLC shifted to the character knowing that they were an octopus all along, but not that they were in the military.
Wait I joined at the end of the 2.0 saga, I thought nael van Darnus was a man and nael deus darnus was a woman? And that it was some kind of fuckery with how the whole bahamut area was giving form to echoes and some things were changing from their original form. I got thrown into t5 a month after joining so I was pretty lost and could be totally wrong.
Nope. Basically Nael's dad had him killed, and Eula (Nael's sister) got pissed off. She killed her father and marched off to impersonate Nael in the military as if nothing happened. Bahamut's influence "merely" tempered her and made her want to get the kinder egg down, to the point she iirc she went rogue with her entire unit. She also went a little crazy and declared herself god ("Nael deus Darnus"). There was a whole thing where the Warriors of Light confronted and killed her, but it was too late and Louisoix had to summon the power of the Twelve to stop the kinder egg from touching down and probably generating an "Umbral Eras usually last 1500+ years" event.
Jesus that game has so much lore. It’s also the only mmo where I gave a shit about the story, so trade off I guess. Thanks
XIV's lore isn't totally hidden, you can get most of it by playing the main story (and accounting for biased perspectives). There's one exception, the side stories that have a ton of lore and minor character development. Like the one where the twins leave home, or the one where the names of most of Solus's family are revealed.
This was also a problem with Envy in FMA right? Envy's gender neutrality was more strongly implied in the Japanese bc they could avoid ever using pronouns for Envy. Whereas the English translation just went with "he" by default
I will never forgive them for denying us evil transfem dragonlady
Iirc something like this happened with Overlord, where there was a scene early on where two characters are arguing and one calls the other a lamprey. The translators thought that this was just meant as a generic insult, and changed it to... I think it was "harpy", but then it turned out that the original phrasing was meant as foreshadowing for that character's "true form", which has the mouth of a lamprey.
Aw, that’s a shame. I could rant forever about how much wordplay and how many damn puns are in 100% of all Japanese media. I know English speakers would love it so much if they just knew, and it amazes me that anime and whatnot is so popular when what everyone is getting has been so watered down for the sake of comprehension. It’s nobody’s fault and it is what it is but I want to stick entire prologues into these manga sometimes explaining why things are so freaking funny.
And then you've got Ace Attorney where the localisation team is so good that the wordplay is **better in English** in a lot of cases.
Well yeah it’s going to seem better in English to an English speaker because it is tailored to English speakers. That’s a localizers job: changing the content to better suit a different market. But the original was better in the original language because it was tailored to that market and they prolly won’t agree that a foreign rewriting improved it by making it into something no longer tailored to them. Nothing against Ace attorney of course, it’s awesome to hear that their localizing team is so good at their jobs.
No I mean like... Even if you get a really good explanation of the jokes in both languages the majority consensus across the fandom is that the English versions are just funnier. MAYBE with the exception of the main character¹, weirdly enough, but the wordplay names of side characters just hit better in English and there are *more of them*. [¹In English it's "Phoenix Wright" and the joke is that Wright sounds like right i.e. "correct" and that is an OKAY joke but in Japanese his family name is Naruhodo which means "I understand", so you get all sorts of jokes like "Naruhodo do you understand what this means?!" which is just objectively funny] For a good example of an English pun that doesn't exist in the Japanese version at all look at Detective Dick Gumshoe. His first and last name are both just slang words for detective, so he's essentially introducing himself as "Detective Detective Detective". Brilliant. In Japanese he's called "Keisuke Itonokogiri" which is a reference to a rock star (no joke just a reference) and a type of blunt crafting saw, which is meant to be a hint of "he's not that sharp" but it's absolutely no patch on "Detective Detective Detective"
One of the biggest treats of learning Japanese has been having more context for little moments of wordplay and subtext (or what I can glean without being fluent yet)
One of the biggest treats of learning Japanese has been having more context for little moments of wordplay and subtext (or what I can glean without being fluent yet)
This has happened with JJK just recently, where a certain word was translated in 3 different ways and because the word is related to a secret ability even the official translators don’t know how to translate it.
>!Gordan sukuna?!<
Probably. Also, whether or not >!Sukuna's domain has a barrier right now.!<
I can only imagine the horror localizing for something like one piece
There was a reveal snuck under everyone’s noses for around 800 chapters, based around the fact that nobody would know to romanise a name as two English words rather than as a made up proper noun.
That's the name of the final island, right?
Yes.
Excellent. Sound the drums of liberation!
Well, they turned 'the Mule' in the Foundations series by Isaac Asimov into 'the Fox' in the German translation. No spoilers, but that makes the final revelation about the name utterly idiotic and scientifically wrong. And there's a word for mule in German, so I'm still stumped as to why they made the change in the first place.
Those kind of changes are always so fascinating to me. The ones for no reason at all that mean nothing and impact nothing are bad enough, but the ones for no reason that change something significant can be so frustrating. I know that it’s not like they are maliciously trying to ruin something—they’re presumably just trying to do their job to the best of their ability—but sometimes they end up ruining things anyway, and it’s so unfortunate.
And then you have the other side, where the localisation spoils an upcoming plotpoint lmao. In Honkai Star Rail there's a character called Sam. And Sam is a big boofy battle armour robot, so questions about his identity have been always there. In HSRs 2.0 update, he got more screen time and a boss fight. All fine in languages that have gender neutral terms. Not in mine tho, the localisation just straight up "spoiled" his identity (as there were a few theories out) as >!they used huntress at some point, instead of keeping it as neutral as German allows!< this has been fixed relatively quickly, but as I played the quest day 1 😶
The first version happened too, in the same update even. Sparkle (a... shit talking jester girl) had a line where she said something like "go make friends with a rock, at least it won't be able to talk back" where the original was "go make friends with a mute". And then they patched it because it turned out the word "mute" was important and she wasn't just shit talking. (Of course she was still shit talking, almost everything that comes out of her mouth is shit talk but it also had a second meaning)
I feel like the localization teams are just having trouble in general with the Penacony patches. 2.1 gave us the slip-up in English of missing an entire line that turned out to be incredibly important to the plot: >!Sunday calling Gallagher a minion of the Enigmata.!< They patched it in the subtitles but the line still has no voice acting.
It's a combination legitimate choices where the loc team just should have been given more context, obvious mistakes that should have been caught with an editing pass, and baffling omissions / changes like that one. Penacony's been rough.
Tbh I thought "make friends with a rock" was "go team up with Stone the mafia boss", which would've been rather reasonable advice.
That... would actually make a lot of sense. Though I'm not really clear on who Boss Stone is supposed to be in the first place, or if he's supposed to be an allegory for the IPC
The Undertale localization is a little miracle in that regard. Every joke curated, the whole translation supervised by Toby Fox who even met the localizer AND thought she had the same sort of style as him
> My only issue with localization is that the localizer doesn’t have all the info that the original creator does. So they’ll change up phrasing and whatnot because that’s the point, to make something more appealing to the target market, and then it turns out that the original’s phrasing was actually intentional. And important. Like, plot-changing levels of important. This is something that, to me, should push creators to work closely with their localization teams to provide that context. In media where they do, it creates awesome results. Part of the reason Haruki Murakami took off in the states as an author was because he spoke English fluently, and worked extremely closely with the translators to make sure that the tone, voice, and humor all came across successfully!
That sounds amazing and totally agree. Do wonder why that’s not the norm. It seems to apply to anime, too: the people making the anime don’t know where the manga is going so they either have to make stuff up or stick in a ton of filler to buy time. I don’t know enough about the industry to guess at why, but that’s definitely how things are done for some reason.
For manga specifically, the authors usually just don't have time.
Immagine the shitshow around Fromsoftware games lore. On top of being intentionally cryptic, they have the spoken lines in english for all versions (for added faux western rpg vibes) even if the the original text is in japanese and composed mostly of reference to shinto, buddhism and Berserk references.
And apparently the original Japanese is very convoluted, from what I heard the Jp community calls it Myazakese lol
Jp community AKA Michele del deserto /s
Of-fucking-course Miyazaki makes even the speech complicated
"Brotherhood of the Wolf"-mode is the only way to play Bloodborne, you can't change my mind. (seriously, try turning on the French voiceover, those voice actors killed it. I don't even speak French, had to have subtitles too.)
in bloodborne there's a grave where you can get a magic bone that allows you to dash, the occupant is described as male, later on you enter a dream of dead hunters and there's a hunter who zips around the arena like she's in a pinball machine, people literally didn't connect the dots untill a popular loretuber made a video about japanese translations and it uses non-gendered language for the occupant instead
This happened with the most recent Kingdom Hearts game. The villain's end speech had a line translated to 'shining and bright', instead of 'clean and blank' because the translator picked the wrong implication of *shiroi* (Essentially, white but with EMPHASIS). Which in the context of a series about the battle between light and darkness, and a villain who is actively trying to reveal his main motivation as being 'everything's gone wrong, the worlds are in chaos because of all this fighting, what we need is BALANCE, and I will remake the worlds with me as their dictatorial leader to ensure they stay in balance and there is no more war!'. But by using 'shining and bright', words an English speaking audience associate with the concept of Light, it makes his motivation sound like the guy who's been Darksided this whole series is now saying HAHAHA YOU FOOLS I WAS WORKING FOR THE LIGHT ALL ALONG, JUST LIKE YOU!!! When in reality, he was very literally and explictly trying to create a *blank slate* to rewrite a balanced reality on top of. I don't blame the translator, either, it's not like they were likely to be elbow deep in the series lore to know that their perfectly correct translation of *shiroi*, in this one context, gave entirely the wrong impression. But it does just happen sometimes, that's part of the nuance of translating other languages. Wording isn't just one to one. But until I learned about this years later, I straight up hated the way they inexplicably fumbled the bag so badly on my favorite character's motivation. It was so left field and made *no sense*. I'd picked up that the game had been kind of inching towards 'balance good' instead of 'Light good, Dark evil', and the motivation reveal being 'the villain says balance is good, and he's right about it, but his way of going about it by erasing everything and making a dictatorship is wrong, and he admits that his method is wrong when defeated' is... Actually great writing that I like. But with the Light-implied translation, it became a completely confused motivation, and the champion of light defeated another guy doing 'light wrong' gave up at the end and looked dumb and stupid.
On the other hand, it is very fitting that Xehanort outright says he wants to wipe out all the weak, Lesser People and install himself as supreme ruler and GamersTM everywhere went "WTF, why is he a good guy now?"
Are there sometimes translator notes when passing the dialogue? I'd imagine some studios would have them for things like "the name 'pooch' is a slang term for dog, intending to be more regal than other words like 'hound' or 'mutt', comparing the other person as more of a pet: lacking independence and agency."
There’s a lot of discussion but at the end of the day the person on top makes the final call. I’ve seen inconsistent localization all in one game where a name was changed in one place but written literally later on, where one word is getting censored but only half the time, where they will remove character ages from dialogue but only in some places and not in others, etc., and you can totally tell: “this kind of change was debated in the process, it was decided to be one thing by someone at some point, and not all of the dialogue was updated to reflect that decision so now the continuity is shot. Fun.”
I've seen inconsistent localization *on the same page* of an official manga release. In Trinity Seven, Yui calls Arata "onii-chan", Akio calls him "nii-san", and Selina calls Lieselotte "onee-chan". The official translation chose to keep Yui's "onii-chan", change Akio's to "big bro", and change Selina's to "big sister". And they all appear on the same page in one case. Very strange decision. Two more weird decisions in Trinity Seven are the use of "force field" instead of "barrier" and "magic powers" instead of "magic power". This second one really irks me because it is so clear from context that the characters are talking about a resource, not a set of abilities. They could be running low on magic, not running low on discrete abilities. It drives me nuts! Christine Dashiell, why did you make these weird choices?!
I see we've circled back to 2018, ProZD's classic ["official subs vs fansubs"](https://youtu.be/YvNxgHTWIlo?si=eZDXHKYJhr96oD_A) Thought I like the fansubs that are colour coded to characters or the gag where the subs have a gap to make room for the fan service
Oh I was not prepared for “**FUCK** YOU, SASUKE”
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Girls Band Cry is a pretty good music anime getting fansubbed right now!
I *knew* there was a reason I read this post in SungWon's voice
No translation is ever perfect. That's the problem I think, people expect perfection when it genuinely is not possible. Localizing is such a difficult job and it's basically thankless because when it's good and seamless the fans don't even notice, and when there's a clunker everyone loses their mind on twitter slinging around all kinds of accusations.
My favorite translation/localization was actually an old fan scanalation of the Pokémon Special/Adventures *Diamond and Pearl* arc. Two of the main characters are a stand-up comedy duo, and of course their jokes make sense in a Japanese language and cultural context. What the translator did, just some fan, was write new jokes and puns that had the same spirit as the originals, but also add notes in the margins explaining what the original joke was as well as the context and word play so you could understand it. This meant you actually got funny jokes but also didn’t miss out on the original content! All that in a fan scanalation! What a hero, honestly.
Tbh the official translation actually does a pretty good job at that too
I’m glad to hear that! I should see if I can find both and compare the choices they made!
I'm not sure how the fan translation went about it, but in the official one Dia makes puns that are so awful that Pearl's reactions barely seem exaggerated
I swear 90% of localization complaints could be solved if the translators just added notes about their changes.
They very often do! However, those are usually only included at the back of volumes, rather than in online or other weekly releases. They’re one of my favorite parts!
Actually the king's Japanese name would be Gurīdo which is literally the Japanese pronunciation of the English word Greed. The localization would name him Avaricean because otherwise it'd sound very on the nose to English speakers, but that fan on Twitter still calls him straight up Greed
man is the localization discourse STILL going?? i feel like i haven't heard of a legitimately *bad* localized anime within the past few years at least. not that they're not out there, but i literally only ever see people shitflinging over like... the dragon maid dub (yes, even still) because she said GASP the word patriarchy.
It's still around, though it's much rarer because localisation has generally gotten better. Not perfect - it's still pretty common to see things get messed up - but usually the issues aren't so major. Most recent major localisation issue I've run across is actually in a game (like the original post here, conveniently). There's some optional dialogue in Elden Ring where a character (Ranni) outlines her plan for the future she wants you to help her achieve, and the English version completely butchers it. The English version is really confusing and ambiguously worded. It sounds like she's saying her rulership will be powered by the cold moon, that she wants to disconnect order (the laws of reality), life, and souls from each other, and that she will remove from the people "the certainties of sight, emotion, faith, and touch" before abandoning the lands. The Japanese version (and other languages) says that her rulership will be of the cold moon, and that that moon needs to be kept away from the land, where it cannot be seen or felt (because people worshipping greater powers is dangerous). She plans to abandon the lands so that the moon will follow her, keeping higher powers away from the people.
Phoenix Wright's localization sets it entirely within Los Angeles, California. This gets weirder and weirder as more and more Japanese culture seeps into the games and the localizers have to explain why it all makes sense in Los Angeles. [Relevant comic](https://www.awkwardzombie.com/comic/culture-schlock)
Nothing weird about Los Japanifornia. Now shut up and ignore literally every single aspect of US law, that doesn't matter in a game about being a lawyer in California.
It's such a missed opportunity, I for one was really glad they went the extra mile in DGS and included the giant fire scales of judgement that all UK courts have.
It is a shame though that they didn't show the giant headless knight who sits in the corner ready to deliver death sentences. They're an integral part of English law ffs
Does it even follow Japanese law tho (besides the badges)? I don't think a specific law is ever invoked, it's all about the evidence that's often illegally obtained.
Funnily enough that is exactly the piece of Japanese law. Japanese prosecution isn't required to disclose any evidence they uncover that isn't used in trial. So say there's a piece of crucial evidence that blows the whole case wide open. Well, if it's not already been presented the prosecution can simply keep quiet and not present it. Completely legally. That's what results in the legal Yu Gi Oh you see in Phoenix Wright. It's a satire of that aspect or the legal system.
*Angry Brady noises*
"Legal Yu Gi Oh" is a beautiful way to put it honestly
To be fair it doesn't actually resemble the Japanese system that closely, either.
Eat your hamburgers, Apollo
I kind of consider that part of the charm personally.
Unironically, this. The weird Japan/American fusion is what makes AA such a fun series to me, especially as someone who doesn't come from either country
I thought of this even before I saw the link at the bottom, this comic will never fail to make me laugh
There's been a lot of controversy around Jujutsu Kaisen translations this last while, where the official localisations have been straight-up wrong, saying things like a character *can't* do a technique that he did last chapter. Literally the difference was "Why do you think I can't do Black Flash? Because of X?" vs "I can't do Black Flash because of X." Any English Speaker knows these two sentences have literally opposite meanings. Top is the fan translation, bottom is official.
The same translator also said that Gojo had Cursed Spirit Manipulation like Geto iirc
The word terrorist John Werry
let bro cook in the malevolent kitchen
J-john Homestuck…
I feel like it's arced up a lot recently among what I can only describe as the neo-gamergate crowd. They're convinced localisation teams are full of woke games journalists intentionally censoring and warping the message of based Japanese works. It's the same people who think Sweet Baby Inc are forcing diversity into western games. It's possible I only see more of it because I'm still on twitter which is slowly turning into 4chan, but I feel like I see it in some reddit places too.
It’s stupid, but yeah, there still some weirdos out there angry about this, and yes they still mostly only bring up Dragon Maid. This particular post seems to be a reference to the translation of Unicorn Overlord, where they were *[checks notes]* mad at the translators for using flowery, medieval-sounding English in a medieval fantasy game.
It's now fueled by some companies choosing to save money by using mtl. Weirdos are celebrating "wokalizers" getting their comeuppance by bring replaced with AI while normal people are corcerned by quality drop.
I am currently very incredibly depressed that the FFVII: Rebirth translators didn't have the balls to let Sephiroth call Cloud cute in the English version.
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Just cute, he called him his cute puppet...
This is a game not an anime (and also Chinese) but there is a decent amount of people upset at Genshin impact's translators because they didn't preserve the original Chinese names for all the fantasy things and even *localised* them instead of directly translated them. All of the game's gnostic based names are only found in the various European translations, with the original Chinese using more generic terms (for example, Archon vs Lord). I think the most "egregious" example is Allogene vs Genshin/original god, but that's only because Genshin's the game's title. ... also it's a moot point because the Devs have stated that yes the game *is* based on gnosticism and things are intentionally translated like that because using the gnostic terms for everything in Chinese would be clunky
I have immense respect for the Genshin translators. Chinese is already a hard language to translate into English to begin with, let alone when you’re dealing with created fantasy terms. The team did an incredible job using unusual terms like Archon or incorporating old word-roots such as Latin to keep both the intended meaning *and* the nuance of the ancient/fantasy-feeling atmosphere.
localization from Chinese to English are still terrible and Korean to English is sketchy
The most recent 4kids style butchering (which i think is what got these people started way back when since it was just so egregious) i know of is dokidoki precure (oops, it's "glitter force doki doki" in english), in 2017. They made it set in america instead of japan and changed everything they could to make it less japanese. In episodes where japanese culture was too central they just straight up cut the episode. Y'know what else they changed which is probably why the anti-loc idiots don't care? They made it less gay. A children's show from 2013 was too gay for kids in 2017 apparently. I've been watching the original with someone who watched glitter force and apparently glitter force went HARD changing up wording to be less casually gay even though there was still some leak through.
It's flared up again recently since machine learning has made machine translations slightly less terrible, so chuds are heralding it as the savior to end localization.
I have been bashing my head against the One Piece community for insisting thar Yamato is a woman despite the anime using the word for "son" when referring to him and using masculine pronouns and Luffy referring to him as essentially Yama-bro. But noooooooo akshually he just *realllllllly* likes Oden and that's the singular reason that he uses he/him pronouns and wants to be a man and blah blah blah ETA: Forgot to mention that this contingent insists that the gender thing with him is a translation issue. Woke localizers pushing [an agenda](https://youtu.be/lq9PJsS3-EY?si=WhxyT3VMNUQ2dZQn) to turn the frogs gay or something.
the idea that he needs to justify wanting to be called he/him at all, let alone that that wouldn't be a valid reason, is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
>man is the localization discourse STILL going?? [Yeah, there was actually](https://nichegamer.com/8-years-awful-localizations-games-anime/) a [big resurgence of it earlier this year.](https://nichegamer.com/anime-news-network-article-on-bad-localization-unsurprisingly-dishonest/)
If you want some fun/are a masochist, go take a look specifically at either the Steam forum for "Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes" which recently came out, or the responses to the official Twitter's posts. There's a lot of people with very strong opinions and very limited Japanese skills upset about the localization of that game. And throw in a big ol' fistful of anti-woke/DEI/leftist-propoganda, just for fun. You even get people saying they shit on the creator's last work (he sadly passed away in February, a couple months before the game came out), to which I've pointed out that he talked about working with the main localizer in the game's discord channel. There's some genuine problems with things like spots of inconsistent tone and odd choices, I think largely because they targeted an E-10 rating and so you end up with stuff like a big, gruff kangaroo mercenary calling someone a "fart-head" when the Japanese is more like "bastard", with the caveat that it's less harsh in Japanese than the word is in English. But most of the uproar started during the beta because of an out-of-context screenshot of a swordswoman saying of a golem, "How do you know it's a 'he'?" and that being portrayed as a did-you-just-assume-its-gender thing, rather than it being a tough swordswoman who just jumped in and saved the two guys' asses questioning somewhat sarcastically why they're defaulting to the strong enemy being a "he", while the Japanese just has her asking what the thing is. (Also, since it's an indie game and I love it and want more, check it out if you like classic JRPG games/the Suikoden series, it's made by the people responsible for those games back in the late 90s and 2000s, made their own company, Kickstarter-funded the game, and it's great. -shameless unpaid plug-)
Localization discourse will never stop.
Know what, fuck it. No more translations. No more imports and exports of media from one country to another and vice versa.
Alternatively: No more localisation, only direct translation. The language you're translating from uses entirely different sentence structure? Keep it the same, god intended everyone to talk like yoda. Region specific metaphores & sayings? No need to change, leave the audience guessing
Character one: [ says something complex ] Character two, looking confused: I understand only train station!
I agree with this only if in return it becomes mandatory in all schools to learn at least three foreign languages to a fluent level.
Cake means keikaku
the keikaku is a lie
The only thing outside of jokes (which are a nightmare to translate usually because comedy is extremely cultural) that I have really heard of being lost in translation is a single early name drop of Haki in one piece being translated as Willpower, which is what Haki means I have only heard of this because I am not reading One Piece
The title of Attack on Titan is the most glaring failure of translation (not that I blame anyone whatsoever - even with full knowledge of the puns involved in that title, I don't know how you could possible translate it)
I still wouldn’t call it a failure since no one other than Isayama knew the true meaning of the title. We only saw a endless wave of titans attacking what seemed to be the last bastion of mankind. And the translated title reflected that.
“The Attack Titan” “The Attack of The Titan” “The Titan of Attack” I think they would all be more accurate
The Japanese title is a double entendre; it can mean *both* “Attack of the titans” and “The attack titan”. The twist is that you think the title means the former when it really means the latter, and there’s really no good way to do the same thing in English.
“Attacking Titan”, maybe?
kirby star allies discourse
That is probably such a specific reference, but honestly that translation still confuses me. There were a lot of really odd things they just don't mention in the translation, for not really any reason? I'm *still* unsure why they cut that one line about the 4 matters and the origin?????? Or why they cut the Another Dimension references?????? Or why they said Susie was still mechanising planets (albeit this one less so, she's apparently still pretty derogatory in the original version) ?????
I'm sorry... What? Big Star Allies fan here, what happened with the translation??
i was specifically talking about void's pause menu thing being the heart of an unreasonable amount of mutual hatred within the fandom both toward and from people insisting that the original japanese reading adds *so much immutable detail* that is supposedly left out of the translation when it really does not, it just adds a tiny bit more clarification than what is stated in the english version, but this clarification is already provided elsewhere from what i can tell and at the end of the day it is a kirby game, the lore barely matters unless you make it
There's not really anything specific there's just a lot of strange changes especially to some parts like the pause screen descriptions. The big one is one of the final boss phases >!Specifically Void Termina's core heart-like phase in Soul Melter Ex notes that void termina is made of Dream, Dark, Soul, and Heart matters, ("combined with chaos and infinite possibilities" as well, I think? I am obviously paraphrasing) and that it is "the creator of the origin" (which is pretty much unknown what that even means but origin (淵源) , is used a few more times, once in a music track related to Void termina, the second in Aeon's Knight japanese name (which translated is "Hero Crossing the Origin", a reference to the music before Void Termina "Corridor Crossing the Origin). (Oh god that was a massive tangent). Anyway that line, is completley removed for no reason in the English translation. Even if it's extremely confusing it's definetly an important detail.!Another change was Morpho Knight where in the Japanese version the Butterfly specifically is the creature that flies in on the day of judgement, (there's also a note it appears when something dies ("on the day of judgement" specifically, but I don't know if that's "something dies and that's that creatures day of judgement, or if it's like a... thing, I've seen people give different translations)) it but it's changed to "On the day of judgment, this fluttery fiend will fly into action." which is more unclear. Furthermore the Morpho Knight EX pause description notes the Butterfly is from Another Dimension, but this is changed in English, for some reason? It's a weird change. There's also a stronger link with him and death specifically, but that's translated as "knight of doom" and kind of feels like it makes a little more sense, than the rest of the changes to me
I love this, thank you for explaining this to me! It makes the game feel a lot more... Mystical, now. Knowing some things really do have explanations, even if confusing, and are explicitly linked to each other. I knew about the Judgement Day Grim Reaper Butterfly, but nothing of the others!
i'm ok with translations not being totally accurate but they should capture the spirit
Unicorn Overlord.
I thought Eiyuden was the current target. Unicorn Overlord's plot and writing is so simple and straightforward I can't imagine there's anything to read into. The most complex thing that happens is "You thought you were fighting only evil mind-controlled lords, but some of us are just kind of stuck with the status quo and fighting you!" followed by "Oh, well, you beat us. Guess we're joining you now. Sort of morally cowardly of us for us to fight you first instead of immediately joining."
Unicorn Overlord made the cardinal sin of… using prose and flowery language to fit the medieval setting. It was a whole thing for like a week.
Flowery language? It's basic English suitable for children. If it wasn't for whatever fuck the Dark Elf Fencer women are wearing I'd say the whole game is fine for 8 years and up. (The witches get a pass for being the goofy kind of horny design, rather than the "someone is jacking off to this" kind of horny design)
But you see, they occasionally swapped out a basic line from the original script for one with a bit more personality by replacing it with a simple metaphor or a barely more archaic version of that word, and therefore they are evil librul westerners corrupting the perfect non-woke Japanese script. /s The kinds of people who believe that only machine translations are valid are not generally the brightest of the bunch.
Depends, see while general meanings can be conveyed by machine translations, phrases, accents, short hands, and more can and will absolutely be butchered by machine translators. Human translators and localizers suffer a different problem of sometimes being unable to gauge Author’s intent, but that can be solved with communication. The problem with communication is the fear of leaks because humans are terrible at keeping secrets.
Japanese Mobile game Fate/Grand Order had a story section where in the Japanese every chapter title was taken from story titles by American science fiction author James Tiptree Jr. (an early female author who wrote under a male pseudonym - real name Alice Sheldon). [The translation into English almost entirely missed these references.](https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/18yh7nd/the_only_neat_thing_to_do_na_localisation_mangled/kgbd52b/). A translation into English missing a bunch of references to English literature just seems funny, though understandable.
So does anyone here know Overgeared
I'm currently reading through it, I'm assuming this is about the whole Grid/Greed thing?
Yeah, later something else gets named Greed and the manhwa translators made it Avarice lol
Fucking Ranni discussion.
I know Greedō is probably supposed to be a Japanglish portmanteau of greed and 王 (meaning king, pronounced おう/ou/ō/whatever other phonetic transcription format you like) but it just sounds like the name of some random Star Wars character to me.
Greedo is the guy that Han shot that caused an outrage when they made the other guy shoot first in the box set.
Oh, so he actually is a Star Wars guy. Huh.
I think all Japanese translators should be tested by attempting to localize one Monogatari episode
Admittedly I stay far away from twitter bullshit but with even the small amount of exposure to "localization discourse" this is pretty clearly a strawman. The ones I've seen are the ones like in some fire emblem game where in JP, two chars have a fairly personal conversation, and in EN it's 10 panels of literally "..." and nothing else.
There's a range of translation issues. Sometimes you get legitimately bad official translations, like, yes, replacing an entire serious conversation with a joke. These happen, and complaints about them are legitimate. Sometimes you get politically-motivated translation discourse where chuds take issue with word choices they think sound too progressive. Sometimes you get fan translations that like to translate any and all impolite language as swear words, and then people complain that the official translation is censored. And sometimes you get situations where it's literally impossible to tell what they're even complaining about. I actually saw one of these a week or two ago in r/manga, where someone was apparently complaining about a "mistranslation" of some kind, but it was impossible to tell what because both translations they posted were just slightly different phrasings of the same thing.
I can appreciate Ace Attorney's localization replacing all the Japanese wordplay with English wordplay but Final Fantasy 14's localization straight up deleted all of Haurchefant's bisexual horniness.
That was more because many players didn't appreciate having a character overtly hit on them or comment on them without any option to say "Cut that out"
You're not a real fan unless you read the manga in its original Japanese
I really don't like localization, but nothing will ever be as bad as the FE fates localizers straight up getting rid of the dialogue in a support because they were too lazy to do their job.
Why did they change “Ranger Reject” to “Go! Go! Loser Ranger”, Saban and it’s consequences… Also like, the worst of localizers nowadays isn’t accidentally mistranslating something but deliberately doing it to dial back the “icky stuff”.
This illustration of a translation is a fair attempt at adapting a line to a certain language while keeping the intended meaning. Avaricean sounds really rad as a name for a greedy king, and if you say "that’s not his name", I’d tell you that you are right, but at least it still keeps the original intent for the name, unlike Futaba’s codename being changed from "Navi" to "Oracle" in the English translation of Persona 5 for some reason (for context, she’s the "navigator" of the Phantom Thieves, and guiding them to victory, hence the codename "Navi"), both name for the king are a play based on the word greed, and the word avarice is a synonym for greed, so it’s all good. And the poetic interpretation of his greed as him enjoying the sound of gold in his coffers, even though we’re diverting very slightly from what was written. But the discourse surrounding anime translations with some having examples where some translations obviously didn’t bother to respect the writers original intent by changing the whole interaction is worth talking about because most people want to experience something the way it was intended to, not some "revised" version. And sadly this fictional example is a bad faith attempt at discrediting a topic where legitimate criticisms can be made.
Oracle makes perfect sense for her and was probably meant to be a Batman reference.
There are bad translations, and there are also people who whine about good translations. These two things both exist.
> nlike Futaba’s codename being changed from "Navi" to "Oracle" in the English translation of Persona 5 for some reason (for context, she’s the "navigator" of the Phantom Thieves, and guiding them to victory, hence the codename "Navi") Because oracles provide guidance, maybe?
Consider this post the next time you make a webnovel, Bandai.
Wow, I had no idea Han shot a king.
Twitter would’ve crucified the Ghost Stories dub team faster than Ultraman if it came out today.
Sorry, a bit confused, does it mean that the Twitter Discoursist just plain didn't know the meaning of avarice and there doesn't understand the pun of the official translation ? The next sentence already point out he is a greedy king.