Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

>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.

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?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com