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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

> 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_...

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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.

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