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Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

As a manga reader, one of my biggest frustrations is with censorship.

10 years ago, Viz and Tokyopop dominated English published manga, yet they each had very spotty records with regards to translation quality, editorial decisions and censorship.

I didn’t want to read Full Metal Alchemist or Dragon Ball or Initial D knowing that random instances of blood would be erased or religious symbols replaced or weird editorial changes would change the tone. And unlike the edited anime airing on TV, there was no “uncut” version I could buy and even finding lists of changes was difficult.

So, I kind of learned to avoid buying North American manga. Only recently have I started buying some releases from publishers like Kodansha and Dark Horse that, from what I can tell, have a better track record.

But ultimately that’s the problem - you shouldn’t make a customer guess what they’re getting. I want to collect way more manga than I do, but my confidence in the industry was shaken very early on, and that’s hard to gain back.

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Translation really is a major problem with Anime/manga. The unfortunate thing is the pirated versions often have better translations and translation notes vs the official release. Why? Because it's mostly just a bunch of nerds trying to share what they love.

It seems like the studio translators are very often just trying to churn out a translation as fast as possible. It gets a little better when dubbing is involved (because someone ACTUALLY has to speak the line, which makes bad translations/awkward phrases a lot more apparent)... But, like you said, there's often a lot of editorial choices to make sure things are palatable to the widest portion of the English speaking population.

Ironically, I think deepL has made this better for novels. It's shocking how good human-edited deepL transitions can be, and how fast they can be to produce compared to fully human translation.

Before anyone brings it up, it doesn't remove the need for a bilingual translator. They still have to do (sometimes significant) editing.

It might be unfair to generalize, because there are some shoddy fan translations out there, and I’m sure there are some studios / professionals that do great work.

But it can be jarring to see fan-translated versions put more care into preserving intent and readability in translations, and even preserve artwork like onomatopoeia while also providing context, only to see what appears to be sloppy disregard in the official release.

It feels like an industry where you as the customer never really know what you’re getting, because the standards are all over the place.

For all the legit criticisms, anime has at least generally evolved to have a minimum acceptable standard by which most studios operate, with considerable blow back when that doesn’t happen (see early Netflix dubs that they later re-dubbed based on complaints). The same can’t be said for manga, afaik.

Manga does pretty well with fanlations since there is less overall text. It's when you get into webnovels / light novels things get hairy and you pretty much have to lower your standard to the proper nouns being consistent and nothing else.

But the alternative is to wait 2+ years for yen press to ship (Overlord addict here).

As a former reader of "The Irregular in Magic High School", official translations are not proof against poor quality. I get it, the original author used lots of arcane and formal Japanese, but good lord it was terrible.

My experience with fan-translated versions is that they often prioritize clumsy, literal translations over readable, fluent translations and it’s the exception when you find a really good translation. It’s not uncommon to see random untranslated words, or an over-reliance on translator’s notes.

The most infamous example is “keikaku”, which was from an anime fan translation. It just means “plan”.

I suppose you think the timing of that was an accident [dramatic pause]

I kind of prefer transliteration over fluency unless it's really clumsy; overly 'helpful' translations that prioritize ease over engagement can lead to incongruities, like characters in a medieval or fantastic setting saying 'OK!' rather than 'certainly' or 'of course'.

Trying to judge the translation by this kind of accuracy implies it was well-written in the original language which sadly is, uh, not often true.

Japanese isn't actually a great language to write Western settings in. In particular Final Fantasy games have surprisingly boring scripts in Japanese; the FFXIV pirate city doesn't sound piratey at all, just kind of military.

It's a clash of ideals, for sure. A commercial company avoids literal translations for obvious reasons; you want to ingratiate yourself with as large an audience as possible and using terminology that most people don't understand is alienating. Putting a translator's note to educate viewers about Japanese culture isn't really an option.

Fan translations don't have the same restrictions in place and while it can lead to infamous examples like the keikaku one you mentioned, it can be much more enlightening, enriching, and enjoyable. Most of the time they help provide cultural context and some of these are widespread enough in anime fandom that even the official translations will use things like honorifics.

Ultimately, I think it's good to have both. I view it as sort of the "introductory" level and the "intermediate" level of anime watching.

> fan-translated versions put more care into preserving intent and readability in translations

There's a reason for this - money. If there's a particularly high quality scanlation, it's because someone has paid a group to do it.

There's a lot of relatively skilled work that goes into translating a manga from Japanese to English: Translation, Proofreading, Redrawing (removing Japanese glyphs and literally re-drawing what they covered), Typesetting, QA. Some of these steps can take minutes per chapter, some take days. And like all skilled labor, they're typically paid. Especially the translators - you can't not pay them if you want both quality and stability.

That payment can take several forms - Patreon accounts direct payments to have a particular manga translated (probably most manga produced will never get an official translation), and tip jars. Many scanlation groups would love to go legit - purchasing the American distribution licenses - but it's a hard road.

Also, the scanlation scene provides something very valuable for the Japanese publishers: free market valuation. It's why the Japanese publishers who hold the English publication rights rarely go after scanlation groups and sites - it tells them which of their properties are worth licensing off to American companies. It's these companies that go after the scanlations, and most groups give in peacefully - often glad for the opportunity to reward bringing manga to their countries.

Ironically, the skilled labor I called out above? It's the same thing that causes poor quality official translations. It requires a lot of labor, lots of time, and probably comparatively small profit margins.

No, they don't secretly like scanlations, they just can't afford the lawyers to take them down. English manga publishers frequently won't license a series if it's been scanlated because they think nobody will buy it.

It's only because the market is so big now that places like Seven Seas can afford to try and do it anyway.

> English manga publishers frequently won't license a series if it's been scanlated because they think nobody will buy it.

How is it that companies cam fail so hard at understanding their customers. So many fans would love to throw cash into their passion, support the people doing truly quality work, and encourage the production of more of the same. Honestly, plenty of fans just love their favorite franchises so much they'll buy stuff of pretty terrible quality too just to be able to put it on a shelf.

I really don't understand japan's take on copyright either, it seems lax in some ways and extreme in others, but people in japan seem to have little issue getting around it and are still putting out all kinds of infringing content for themselves and the rest of the world to enjoy so maybe it's a good balance.

It's always a bit jarring when the ara-ara anime lady with big breasts and no inhibitions about showing them off, drops a reference to "toxic masculinity" in the dub.

Culture collision. A lot of things embraced in Anime and Manga in Japan are drastically taboo outside of Japan.

The lusty 1,000 yo vampire inhabiting a girl's body is but one such example.

Sure, but that seems less like cultural adaptation and more like Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire recording anti-smoking lines for a character who is clearly enjoying smoking.

> The unfortunate thing is the pirated versions often have better translations and translation notes vs the official release.

Depends on the team doing it, really. I've seen some fan translations before that are so obsessed with delusions of purity or faithfulness to the source that it beckons the question why they even bothered rendering it into English if it's going to be not so much translated as transliterated. We're talking guys who will unironically refer to the manga as "Boku no Hīrō Akademia" instead of "My Hero Academia"...even though the translated English title is literally in the logo:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5a/Boku_no_Hero_...

What's wrong with referring to it by the Japanese title? I often look for the Japanese title specifically when looking for manga or anime.

You can index by both easily enough. But how are you searching for the Japanese version? Are you typing in “僕のヒーロー”? Or “Boku no hiro”? Or “Boku no hiirou”? “Boku no hero”?

If you get a Japanese copy of the manga, in Japan, it will say, at the top, “My Hero Academia” in English. There’s no excuse for using some other title. You can always add alternative names to your indexing system—just like you might search for “In Search of Lost Time” and find a book titled “Remembrance of Things Past”—but the English translation would never be called “À la recherche du temps perdu”. That would be silly.

If you're looking for Japanese results, searching using the Japanese name makes the most sense.

I'm not sure what people expect to find searching for something by its romaji title.

Not all titles are translated the same. This is particularly a problem with Japanese titles, which can be frustratingly different sometimes.

For example, the following is the title as used in the Anime: "Graced by the Gods". However, a more literal translation (and the one the novel was originally (unofficially) translated under) was "The Man Picked Up By the Gods". Compared with the romanji "Kamitachi ni Hirowareta Otoko", which is much more consistent to find it by.

Separately, there's also titles that translate like: "I Came to Another World as a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None to Journey while Relying on Quickness"...

EDIT: Another advantage of using the Japanese names is you can use fewer words to search/refer by. For example, "The Irregular in Magic High School" is most often referred to simply as "Mahoka" by its fans. Same with Danmachi.

Btw, when an anime is officially called by a short name in English it's because the Japanese side knows the real name is embarrassing because the author is a pervert and are trying to hide it. Case in point "Oreimo" which is a romantic comedy except in the last chapter it ends with the MC marrying his own sister.

Or "Mahouka" whose author is a Japanese nationalist, at one point in the story has them nuke China, and the MC's sister is also in love with him. Huh, kind of a trend there.

"Danmachi" is too bad because the Japanese title is actually a pretty good joke, but it's hard to translate. It's like a pun on deai meaning "random encounter" in a video game but also "encountering" someone in a bar/on a dating app.

Where does GochiUsa go wrong?

Or, more likely, people don't want to say the whole title because it's too long. Weebs being weebs are going to prefer the Japanese abbreviation sometimes.

Is there a version of Hanlon's Razor that goes "Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to convenience?"

>Btw, when an anime is officially called by a short name in English it's because the Japanese side knows the real name is embarrassing because the author is a pervert and are trying to hide it. Case in point "Oreimo" which is a romantic comedy except in the last chapter it ends with the MC marrying his own sister.

I think what you're describing are isolated cases. There are others like "Konosuba" and "Arifureta" which are still quite popular.

>Or "Mahouka" whose author is a Japanese nationalist, at one point in the story has them nuke China, and the MC's sister is also in love with him. Huh, kind of a trend there.

"Mahouka" never struck me as controversial either. In fact, if anything it was quite individualistic.

> I think what you're describing are isolated cases.

There’s also Higehiro recently in the “author is a pervert” category, but before that it was used for like 10 different anime about incest like OniAi. This wisdom comes to me from a marketing director at Crunchyroll.

I think Konosuba is just shortened because the actual name doesn’t really mean anything, but also doesn’t sound memorable when you translate it.

I've seen Higehiro, and the argument is still a stretch as the two main characters (in spite of the initial wishes of one of them) don't act as a couple with each other. If anything, the show is almost an Aesop in how not to be a pervert while dealing (sometimes intelligently and sometimes sophomorically) with the coinciding moral dilemmas that come with trying to a Good Guy(tm).

Domestic no Kanajo involves incest (well, step-incest) and better meets the argument of "author is a pervert" [1]. But yet there's no shortening of the title.

> This wisdom comes to me from a marketing director at Crunchyroll

Was an merely a opinion of his/hers as opposed to actual policy? And if it was actually a policy, do you think it might coincide with other elements (like how long the title of the source material is)?

[1] Although, for some reason, a woman writing a smutty telenovela script as a light novel doesn't generally register "perversion" to most people. I wonder why.

Scanlators and anime fan subtitlers usually use the romanji title, so that's what I use to search. My Hero Academia is popular enough to be common, but others are not so common.

I suspect that searching for an anime/manga by its romaji title is going to yield far fewer results than searching by its English title. Especially in cases like the one highlighted above, where the original work actually uses the English title in its Japanese branding.

A counter point: Danmachi.

You'll get plenty of search hits off it.

That seems like an exception rather than the rule. The official English title is very wordy (Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?), and the romaji title is both easy to spell and rolls off the tongue really well. It's a good shorthand for fans to use.

Conversely, Hagane no Renkinjutsushi is longer and harder to pronounce than Fullmetal Alechemist. I've never seen this name used in lieu of the translated English name.

Japanese people don't call it that. If you say "boku no hero" to a Japanese person they will either go "oh, My Hero" or they won't know what you're talking about. It's an over-literalization.

Similar cases happen in Western video games where they get "completely translated" including all UI elements; JP players actually expect those to be in English.

https://legendsoflocalization.com/games-with-famous-bad-tran...

So if I say Boku no Hero Academia they'll think in English "My Hero Academia?" If so that's interesting, I thought they'd use their own native Japanese names for their own media.

Well, MHA is supposed to feel like an American superhero comic even though it's set in Japan. So it's more like "My Hero Academia" is the title and 僕のヒーローアカデミア is a translation/furigana subtitle.

"Boku no Hero" is also kind of hard to say out loud. But now that I think about it the use of "boku" (which is like an "androgynous" first person pronoun for boys or tomboys) probably means it's specifically about Deku's academic life.

Yeah, being mostly unable/unwilling to navigate the spectrum between the commercial censorship overly westernized crap and the fan translation "All according to Keikaku (TL Note: Keikaku means plan)" crap and who has what licenses and how to get quality pirate copies when needed (yet support artists somehow), I have just about given up and determined to just have a JP region kindle, buy on Amazon JP and read everything in the original Japanese.

To be fair, some things are lost in translation. There are many ways to say the word "my" in Japanese, each carrying their own connotation of status / attitude, and it's hard to preserve that connotation in an English translation. Purists might target an audience of readers that, while not fluent in Japanese, have enough interest to learn that much and meet somewhere in the middle, with a bunch of untranslated words sprinkled around.

Keikaku (and most loanwords, like hero) are weird choices to leave untranslated, though.

Not really trying to nitpick here, but I’d say the official translations are usually way better than the pirated translations—but occasionally it’s the other way around.

There are a ton of really bad pirate translations out there. The vast majority of scanlations you’ll find, if you really dig through them, are barely readable. For every top-notch scanlation group out there, there are probably ten groups out there producing garbage.

I’ve seen groups that put out English translations which are translated from the Spanish version of the manga, because the scanlation group has nobody who can read Japanese (but has someone who understands Spanish).

Some translation groups put out super inconsistent work, such as translating names differently from chapter to chapter. Foreign names, especially, have already been transliterated into Japanese and you have to guess what the original name is before transliterating.

One particular offender was “Xerxes” in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, which was spelled as “Cselkcess” in the official Viz translation and something similar in various scanlations. Maybe in the 1990s this would have given you trouble, but these days you just pop over to ja.wikipedia.org and look for クセルクセス, and find out that this is how “Xerxes” is transliterated into Japanese.

Scanlations of the big Shonen were far superior to the official translations. I read one piece and Naruto scanlated first and then through a subscription to shonen jump. The shonen jump translation were awful. Reading yugioh was so bad I just download the scanlations and found them much better. The best official translations I read were the CLAMP manga xxx Holics, tsubasa chronicles, etc. there was a lot of bad scanlations, but the good scanlation was better than the best official.

Something that can cause poor scanlations is, ironically, competition. When there's competition, there's huge incentive to post chapters first. The first releases will get the vast majority of the views (they will often remain listed first, even after other versions come out), and cause other groups to drop the manga - even when their product was superior.

And for some groups, they leverage that to get ad impressions on their own sites (or YouTube videos) before releasing them via the more generic methods.

The best scanlations will usually be niche titles done by one group.

Weird name choices in official translations are often mandated by the Japanese publishers. They do actually oversee the work that gets put out, but that has good and bad sides, because they don't know what they're doing either.

Sometimes it's for other unpleasant legal reasons - if a story is being published in novel and manga form, the translations might intentionally use different names from each other because they don't have the rights to the other translation.

> One particular offender was “Xerxes” in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, which was spelled as “Cselkcess” in the official Viz translation and something similar in various scanlations.

Something really weird is that the demon Mara in Ah My Goddess is "Mārā" in the Japanese and "Māra" in the original Sanskrit name of the Buddhist demon, but for some reason the official English version of the name seems to be "Marller". I can't understand where that came from.

As a person who scanslated (and was active in adjacent TL scenes) in another life (and thus has some bias), I disagree. Yes some groups out there are pretty shoddy and they make cute examples. This was more common in the 90s when anime/manga in the West was new and expectations for translations were low. These days Chinese language translations leak before Japanese language raws (due to weak IP laws in China) and in order to be first, most speed-scanslating groups are scanslated from Chinese translations into English.

If you wait for a quality scanslation, it'll often be as good or better than the original.

> It gets a little better when dubbing is involved (because someone ACTUALLY has to speak the line, which makes bad translations/awkward phrases a lot more apparent)...

I have played a video game (sadly, I forget which one) which had broken English subtitles voiced over in what sounded like a native speaker's pronunciation.

Either someone local really nailed their English pronunciation without managing to absorb the grammar, or the money for a voice actor was good and the studio wasn't open to changing the dialog just because a native speaker didn't like it.

Castle Shikigami 2 and Chaos Wars are classic examples of that one.

Legal factors can also arise; such as one very popular franchise where many of the characters are named after western pop/rock bands or fashion icons, which are deliberately mistranslated by the publishers to avoid trademark infringement. It's still enjoyable, but loses some comedic/thematic elements of the original.

> Translation really is a major problem with Anime/manga. The unfortunate thing is the pirated versions often have better translations and translation notes vs the official release. Why? Because it's mostly just a bunch of nerds trying to share what they love.

This is rarely actually true; what happens is that fans learn a little Japanese, but only enough to be dangerous, so they start complaining that the translation doesn't include the few words they hear and ignore all the reasons it's good. That's why translations end up including a few honorifics like "-san", but rather than being literal, they actually end up translating other rarer honorifics into "-san" because it's better than actually explaining them.

I do think a valid complaint is when translators include modern slang which is being correctly used, but ESL speakers don't understand it. "Badly translated Japanese" is kind of a universal language they do understand.

A lot of the comments here on official and fan translation are rather uninformed. As an active scanlator I will try and clear them up.

With regards to translation quality, there is considerable variability with officials almost always coming out on top. A native-speaking friend ranked translation quality as follows—Viz/Kodansha>=very best scanlators>=Yen Press/Seven Seas/others>average scanlation>poor scanlation/MTL. Naturally it depends considerably on the effort the given scanlation team puts in to translation and editing. Some are exceptional, most are not. The average scanlation is worse than a mediocre official.

Regarding sound effects, there is no one way to do these. Both officials and scanlations vacillate between panel notes/in-panel subs/redraws. Officials are generally better and more consistent although again YMMV. What any given publisher picks is a product of their house style, what you prefer is a product of your personal taste.

Editing-wise, there have certainly been instances of overzealous editing and censorship in the past. But it is far less common and less egregious than it used to be. Seven Seas has their own smut line for publishing particularly daring titles, for instance. And it’s not as though fan translators have never been known to produce intentionally biased translations, insert panel notes of their own views with no relevance to the content, and the like.

Fan translators are dedicated, dedication which (even if you dislike fan translation as a practice) should be commended. But that dedication doesn’t always (or even often) translate into a high quality result.

This is becoming even more widespread despite immense negative feedback from fans and it is really concerning. Companies like Crunchyroll carry around a laundry list of translation (as well as other) controversies but for most American anime fans there is no alternative, you either watch on Crunchy or you don't watch at all.

Or you steal it. It's really weird how some of the companies mentioned in this thread are run. I like this stuff, have the money, and I am more than willing to pay, but as others pointed out the quality is usually much worse than the same thing posted online for free. Whether fixing these quality issues would lead to less piracy overall I don't know but they'd have at least one more customer in me.

Also, wrt to physical manga, availability is often time an issue. I don't want to read everything on a screen.

I can think of at least 3 major groups doing anime in the USA:

1. Crunchyroll (aka: merged with Funimation)

2. Netflix

3. Hidive (aka: Sentai Filmworks)

Amazon Prime tried to do a thing (and still holds some licenses), but I don't think they have done any recent anime. (Especially with the stupid "double-paywall", requiring both Amazon Prime + an anime-specific subscription to get access... it was doomed from the start by bad business decisions)

Btw, HiDive/Sentai are owned by AMC now.

There's also Retrocrush and Discotek.

I pay Viz and Shonen Jump as a subscriber in their apps. Whats frustrating is that I only get a tiny subset of their catalogue. I can't ready some of their older series. I'm even willing to buy them if given the option but I'm only offered new stuff that I'm not really interested in.

It is frustrating when you want to do the right thing and pay for a product that you have great demand for, but which nobody is offering to you.

You're in north America, I'm in Brazil. I have HBO Max, and I know for a fact that even on HBO dubs and subtitles are heavily censored. If you don't speak English, you'll think that the harshest word in The Sopranos is "damn".

How prevalent is censorship of imported anime/manga today? American media in general has become far less puritanical over the last 15 years. I can't imagine those changes being made to Fullmetal Alchemist today.

Don't get me started on the original (the later omnibus is way better) official english publication for Inuyasha... even ignoring flipping the reading direction and not updating references to which hand someone is using (so referring in text to a right hand, but visually a left hand) the amount of translation errors and swapped text bubbles was just maddening.

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