Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

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At the moment the extent of it is mostly that sometimes dubs or subtitles are changed by overeager translators trying to leave their mark, in the process changing the meaning or intent of the dialog. Rough examples that come to mind are changing jokes that can potentially be interpreted as sexist or even less justifiable cases of changing dialog for the sake of adding in meme language like "sus". There are also cases of trying to get rid of features of japanese like honorifics because of the samewhat strange assumption that western audiences can't be expected to understand them, despite them being pretty normal to the anime community. Personally I also miss the approach that older fan subtitles used to have of including TL notes for things that don't necessarily translate cleanly, it was a nice way to respect the original material.

For now, it doesn't really have too much of an effect since Crunchyroll and Netflix's subtitles already don't really have a good reputation. But it's certainly a sign that if they could get away with it, they'd definitely do more.

> sometimes dubs or subtitles are changed by overeager translators trying to leave their mark, in the process changing the meaning or intent of the dialog.

This is a meme that has mostly been spread by people who don't really speak Japanese, but have picked up a few words and are convinced they know better than bilingual professional translators.

> adding in meme language like "sus"

I remember seeing this example making the rounds -- IIRC, it was a translation of the word きょどる, which is a slang term that was coined fairly recently (90s). It's a contraction of 挙動不審, which means roughly "acting/moving suspiciously as though you're trying to hide something". So not only does it accurately convey the meaning, but turning a slang Japanese term into a non-slang English translation would be less faithful to the original intent.

Of course, the anime fans who complained about the translation don't know this, because the word isn't in any of their Japanese-English dictionary sites, and they can't read well enough to just Google it. On top of that, many of them have gotten so accustomed to stilted translations that they think the stiltedness is somehow a reflection of the original Japanese dialogue itself, and therefore any translations that sound more natural in English must be somehow "inauthentic".

And certain anime fans are absolutely convinced that "progressive" values are entirely unheard of in Japan, and therefore could only have been introduced by "Western influence". So they will seize on any shred of evidence that seems to support this narrative, no matter how flimsy.

So you're saying "bilingual professional translators" are doing a better job when they translate the Dragon Maid common yuri trope line "But we're both girls..." into a strong statement the human protagonist is straight and as I recall would never be interested in dragons? When Jamie Marchi who made that change for the dub admits to it: https://archive.ph/0XeRq This was a major change to the entire tone of the relationship that was going to develop between the two main characters of the work.

You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century. But claiming our complaints about major and minor changes to works by Crunchyroll, the entity which officially bought Right Stuff Inc. are bogus do not stand up to examination.

And needless to say there's a lot more where the above came from. For another major corporate example see Seven Seas which just can't stop censoring and altering the work of the "bilingual professional translators" who are native Japanese speakers they hire and credit who are not at all happy about it, for doing that silently and without consulting them reflects on their professionalism.

Without knowing the context, I would tentatively agree that your example seems more like a mistranslation. Nevertheless, in my experience those tend to be the exception rather than the rule. I've seen a lot more cases of subtitles (both professional and fansubs) erring by being overly stiff and literal than the opposite.

> You really think "sus" will stand the test of time, be intelligible to viewers years and decades from now? It's at least a debatable point although you're comparing it to Japanese that by your own admission has survived a quarter century.

Well, "sus" has been on Urban Dictionary for about 20 years, and Wiktionary has a citation from 1972, so it's not like it's some radically new term that is likely to come and go in a short period of time. Besides, plenty of creative works use language that becomes dated over time, and that doesn't make them bad.

"Without knowing the context, I would tentatively agree that your example seems more like a mistranslation."

What does the context matter when the person who made the change, not mistranslation, freely admits to it!

How can you claim to be an authority about these issues when you're not aware of what may be the single worst example of it, and have no interest in investigating this when it's brought to your attention?

I think this comment reflects a bunch of differences in our perspectives that I don't really feel inclined to spend a lot of time unpacking.

Suffice it to say that in my opinion, context always matters (which also means I'm hesitant to read anything nefarious into a single tweet snipped from a conversation), and I reject the idea that a "change" and a "mistranslation" are categorically different things, rather than points on a continuum. And if you're implying that anyone who has knowledge relevant to this subject must automatically be outraged enough to "investigate", then I disagree with that too.

Nitpick: きょどる is in JMdict (and has been since 2014), so it will show up on all the usual dictionary sites.

Ah, so it is! I must have made a typo, then.

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