Aside from the recurent problem of garbage translations, localizers bragged about deliberately mistranslating Japanese media to feed the audience their narrow-minded politically-correct garbage.
So fuck-off, amateurs and AI translations cannot be worse, go learn a trade because subbing and dubbing jobs will be done by AI.
And now their "ethics teams" work directly with the Japanese developers to ruin the JP versions too, so nobody gets a good version. It's usually that the English version is even worse.
DeepL at one point allowed user correction, doesn't seem like they have it now. But the longer the service has existed and been "corrected", it's gotten both better and worse with reading Japanese. It can handle half-width kana, but if you don't give it a period at the end of the sentence it could distort the whole response it gives.
I miss the days of fan subs, where they would go out of their way to explain the cultural stuff that didn't really have a one-to-one translation. It was interesting and helped cultivate an appreciation for the Japanese and all the quirks unique to them and their culture.
Or the really early wild west days of going on to some Geocities website and ordering a ton of VHS tapes of some show that had no chance of seeing a Western release.
I refuse to watch dubs on principle. Whatever principle you can have watching anime. The astroturfed comments that keep popping up with "This one dub is just as good as the original" are basically always from the dubbing industry themselves. I refuse to believe that dubs garner real fans. They belong in the same pit that people pretending Succession is amazing, people pretending the Boys is biting political commentary, and people pretending (name the latest piece of shit on steam) is a good game do.
It's frustrating because sometimes there is nuance to language that doesn't have a direct 1:1 translation, or to convey the same meaning you need to change it or else the audience isn't going to understand.
But modern localists use this as springboard to justify their adlibs and fanfiction they are inserting into what is otherwise perfectly fine dialogue, so fuck.
One might argue that it's necessary to have a human appointed for translation and localization, but they have burned through all good will and gone mask off on how SPITEFUL they are about the projects handed to them.
They are extremely salty their SJW translator elitist grift is being taken behind the shed and shot. They had control over media to rub their ideology in the face of people who had previously left other media ruined by SJWs.
Sucks for the few professionals who were dedicated to making acurate translations. The blame rests on SJWs poisoning their profession.
Which is now springboarding us into the "extreme vs extreme" domain. Where someone adding a slight amount of wordplay or adjusted to common English phrasing that effects nothing is suddenly "pozzed, garbage shitgame" and put on the same level as someone going full woke on the translation.
Everyone is allowed their own opinion on the topic, but sometimes it just completely ruins the ability to even talk about a thing because "YEAH BUT THEY CHANGED KUSO TO 'DANGIT' SO ITS WOKE" is the only thing anyone talks about.
Which then ruins any ability to actually show outrage when something is egregious, because, just like the wokies themselves, it conditions people to tune you out because you are always screaming.
Like most online arguments, the main problem is stupid shithead communists who pretend not to understand things and try to win by simply agitating us until we cede the discussion to them just to get away from them.
Everyone is allowed their own opinion on the topic, but sometimes it just completely ruins the ability to even talk about a thing because "YEAH BUT THEY CHANGED KUSO TO 'DANGIT' SO ITS WOKE" is the only thing anyone talks about.
This is why I stopped having this discussion. People would unironically claim that there are no untranslatable nuances and everything is perfectly 1:1, as if the two languages are simple substitution ciphers for one another.
They don't know the tiniest bit about Japanese yet are experts in how translation ought to be. And if you confront them about this, they just get mad and accuse you of being woke, the same way leftists respond to any heterodoxy with "you're just a white supremacist transphobe".
If you can't balance extremity and moderation when its more effective for either, especially when talking with people who agree with you to begin with and thereby don't need to be shouted at to begin with, then you are both a liability and a retard.
This isn't about optics or being an "adult." Its about not alienating yourself in a mad purity spiral to be the most seething about every little nitpicks possible so you can get your upvotes and retweets. And maybe not stressing yourself into the grave over a battlefield with no gain to be had.
If a word has no direct translation then you don't translate it and have a * after it with extra subtitles that explain it on screen.
If we're dealing with dubs then you also don't translate the word, have the VA spell it out and then have glossary of terms at the end.
As we polish tend to say: "nie tlumaczy sie nazw własnych".
"But Dzonatan!" You might say. "That will introduce an unknown concept to the audiance that doesn't make sense to them". Yes motherfucker, that's the point. You're getting cultured.
I'm italian, and I'm obsessed with this shit. I don't know much about Japanese, but I know enough English and Italian to compare original US stuff with the localized version, and there's so much you can get wrong. Localizing is hard because every language is unique, and that's why you need to be extremely careful or you end up changing the meaning of stuff. It is ridiculous to claim you can't have a faithful translation because the languages are different because ultimately every language can be used to express every concept, with very small exception, but you can always get really close anyway.
In Italy they do this while working around not screwing up the actors' lipsync. You can do it with text.
They’re acting like the argument is about the nuance of translating one particular word for another and not entirely missing scenes, bullshit made up whole cloth, and leftist preaching out of nowhere.
They're just using the standard leftist tactic of pretending not to understand what you mean when you say something simple, it's exactly the same as when they get really smug and sneery when we say "we don't want politics in our games" and the only counter argument that works is to call them slurs until they fuck off.
This is one of those cases where they take something that's true (translation isn't a one to one thing between words) and grossly inflate the importance of it to push a lie (you can do whatever the fuck you want since there's not always an objectively correct translation). We'd prefer a human translator that makes a good faith effort to be accurate, but since can't have that we'll take a computer that gets it mostly right over some liar out to push their political agenda.
We didn't hate Ted Woolsey because he had technical constraints, he was actually clever and funny, the story was still coherent, and it wasn't obviously written by somebody who hates us and wants us to suffer. It's really simple.
I know Spanish so I can understand something not being able to fully convey a thought sometimes or losing something in translation but wasn’t the issue here activists injecting political stuff where none existed in the Japanese version?
This is so tiresome, they take the fact that there is some level of subjectivity in a field and then claim that that means there's no objective standard or that it's pointless to try.
Like with art. We might disagree on what the most beautiful sculpture is, a different Bernini might speak more to you than it does to me, but that doesn't make a banana on a wall good art just because we can't agree or judge which masterpiece is 'best'
This is them doing it again in a different field. Just because all translation and interpreting comes with some loss, or hard choices, or that there are tradeoffs between meaning, beauty, flow and in the case of dubs, time and lip-pattern restrictions, doesn't mean that there isn't a standard to strive towards, or that inserting your own politics is somehow ok.
And many of them know this. But they lie to you about it. The others lie to themselves about it.
What a flaccid attempt to render himself an unassailable authority with his unselectable text:
読むか？それとも犬のように滅びるか？
GoogTrans prolly does alright with it, but the gist of his humor appears to be "Can you read this? Or will you [be destroyed/go extinct] like a dog?"
Thing is, he's missing the potential tense on the verb 'read', so it's more like "Do you read this? Or..." Also, he missed a really natural spot for 負け犬 instead of just 'dog' given the point he was trying to make.
I give it a C- at best. Fake and gay. Carry on everyone. Even if you can't speak a word of Japanese, you are more welcome and needed in the fandom than this faggot.
This is just objectively false. Are the instances where interpretation is needed? Sure, but in the vast majority of translation, and even more in the specific examples that receive 99.9% of criticism, interpretation isn't something that comes in to play. It's the fact that these worthless turds explicitly, knowingly, and often gleefully alter the translation to push their agenda.
This is a repeat of Gamergate. One group levies legitimate criticism while the defending group focuses on a topic virtually nobody is talking about. It's cliche Motte and Bailey tactics.
Languages are weird. Dialects alone are annoying. There are 3-4 ways to say High Five in Spanish, and a person will only know one of them. I genuinely thought one of them was Portuguese.
There are jokes in England entirely based on the accent. What did the smart skouse get on his report card? Eyyy eyyyy
That level of nuance will be lost. It's not the language, it's the culture. The only way to learn is spend time with the people.
However, if the story is told right, you don't need the translation. Zhang Yimou can make a film so well that the visuals and acting explain what is being said. I have seen anime that did the same.
The people trying to control the narrative have proven they don't care about either.
Aside from the recurent problem of garbage translations, localizers bragged about deliberately mistranslating Japanese media to feed the audience their narrow-minded politically-correct garbage.
So fuck-off, amateurs and AI translations cannot be worse, go learn a trade because subbing and dubbing jobs will be done by AI.
And now their "ethics teams" work directly with the Japanese developers to ruin the JP versions too, so nobody gets a good version. It's usually that the English version is even worse.
They can't be worse, but they could be just as bad, if the AI itself has been suborned with the same agenda.
Looks at Gemini
Or through user input nudging
DeepL at one point allowed user correction, doesn't seem like they have it now. But the longer the service has existed and been "corrected", it's gotten both better and worse with reading Japanese. It can handle half-width kana, but if you don't give it a period at the end of the sentence it could distort the whole response it gives.
I miss the days of fan subs, where they would go out of their way to explain the cultural stuff that didn't really have a one-to-one translation. It was interesting and helped cultivate an appreciation for the Japanese and all the quirks unique to them and their culture.
Or the really early wild west days of going on to some Geocities website and ordering a ton of VHS tapes of some show that had no chance of seeing a Western release.
I refuse to watch dubs on principle. Whatever principle you can have watching anime. The astroturfed comments that keep popping up with "This one dub is just as good as the original" are basically always from the dubbing industry themselves. I refuse to believe that dubs garner real fans. They belong in the same pit that people pretending Succession is amazing, people pretending the Boys is biting political commentary, and people pretending (name the latest piece of shit on steam) is a good game do.
Nice. I actually enjoy hearing the Japanese lines, and read the subtitles with translator notes explaining the inside jokes.
It's frustrating because sometimes there is nuance to language that doesn't have a direct 1:1 translation, or to convey the same meaning you need to change it or else the audience isn't going to understand.
But modern localists use this as springboard to justify their adlibs and fanfiction they are inserting into what is otherwise perfectly fine dialogue, so fuck.
One might argue that it's necessary to have a human appointed for translation and localization, but they have burned through all good will and gone mask off on how SPITEFUL they are about the projects handed to them.
They are extremely salty their SJW translator elitist grift is being taken behind the shed and shot. They had control over media to rub their ideology in the face of people who had previously left other media ruined by SJWs.
Sucks for the few professionals who were dedicated to making acurate translations. The blame rests on SJWs poisoning their profession.
Which is now springboarding us into the "extreme vs extreme" domain. Where someone adding a slight amount of wordplay or adjusted to common English phrasing that effects nothing is suddenly "pozzed, garbage shitgame" and put on the same level as someone going full woke on the translation.
Everyone is allowed their own opinion on the topic, but sometimes it just completely ruins the ability to even talk about a thing because "YEAH BUT THEY CHANGED KUSO TO 'DANGIT' SO ITS WOKE" is the only thing anyone talks about.
Which then ruins any ability to actually show outrage when something is egregious, because, just like the wokies themselves, it conditions people to tune you out because you are always screaming.
Like most online arguments, the main problem is stupid shithead communists who pretend not to understand things and try to win by simply agitating us until we cede the discussion to them just to get away from them.
This is why I stopped having this discussion. People would unironically claim that there are no untranslatable nuances and everything is perfectly 1:1, as if the two languages are simple substitution ciphers for one another.
They don't know the tiniest bit about Japanese yet are experts in how translation ought to be. And if you confront them about this, they just get mad and accuse you of being woke, the same way leftists respond to any heterodoxy with "you're just a white supremacist transphobe".
Honestly the world could do with more extremity. FUCK moderation. Why do calls for centrism and "adults in the room" always swing left?
If you can't balance extremity and moderation when its more effective for either, especially when talking with people who agree with you to begin with and thereby don't need to be shouted at to begin with, then you are both a liability and a retard.
This isn't about optics or being an "adult." Its about not alienating yourself in a mad purity spiral to be the most seething about every little nitpicks possible so you can get your upvotes and retweets. And maybe not stressing yourself into the grave over a battlefield with no gain to be had.
If a word has no direct translation then you don't translate it and have a * after it with extra subtitles that explain it on screen.
If we're dealing with dubs then you also don't translate the word, have the VA spell it out and then have glossary of terms at the end.
As we polish tend to say: "nie tlumaczy sie nazw własnych".
"But Dzonatan!" You might say. "That will introduce an unknown concept to the audiance that doesn't make sense to them". Yes motherfucker, that's the point. You're getting cultured.
I'm italian, and I'm obsessed with this shit. I don't know much about Japanese, but I know enough English and Italian to compare original US stuff with the localized version, and there's so much you can get wrong. Localizing is hard because every language is unique, and that's why you need to be extremely careful or you end up changing the meaning of stuff. It is ridiculous to claim you can't have a faithful translation because the languages are different because ultimately every language can be used to express every concept, with very small exception, but you can always get really close anyway.
In Italy they do this while working around not screwing up the actors' lipsync. You can do it with text.
They’re acting like the argument is about the nuance of translating one particular word for another and not entirely missing scenes, bullshit made up whole cloth, and leftist preaching out of nowhere.
They're just using the standard leftist tactic of pretending not to understand what you mean when you say something simple, it's exactly the same as when they get really smug and sneery when we say "we don't want politics in our games" and the only counter argument that works is to call them slurs until they fuck off.
This is one of those cases where they take something that's true (translation isn't a one to one thing between words) and grossly inflate the importance of it to push a lie (you can do whatever the fuck you want since there's not always an objectively correct translation). We'd prefer a human translator that makes a good faith effort to be accurate, but since can't have that we'll take a computer that gets it mostly right over some liar out to push their political agenda.
We didn't hate Ted Woolsey because he had technical constraints, he was actually clever and funny, the story was still coherent, and it wasn't obviously written by somebody who hates us and wants us to suffer. It's really simple.
I know Spanish so I can understand something not being able to fully convey a thought sometimes or losing something in translation but wasn’t the issue here activists injecting political stuff where none existed in the Japanese version?
Much like their "translations", they're trying to muddy the water and meaning of the original discussion.
This is the linguistic version of "well %1 of abortions are from rape so whores should be able to use it like birth control"
Gotcha. I’m not as knowledgeable on Anime/Manga as others here so any learning opportunities are appreciated
I will take amateurs passionate about their work over professionals who hate me every day of the week.
This is so tiresome, they take the fact that there is some level of subjectivity in a field and then claim that that means there's no objective standard or that it's pointless to try.
Like with art. We might disagree on what the most beautiful sculpture is, a different Bernini might speak more to you than it does to me, but that doesn't make a banana on a wall good art just because we can't agree or judge which masterpiece is 'best'
This is them doing it again in a different field. Just because all translation and interpreting comes with some loss, or hard choices, or that there are tradeoffs between meaning, beauty, flow and in the case of dubs, time and lip-pattern restrictions, doesn't mean that there isn't a standard to strive towards, or that inserting your own politics is somehow ok.
And many of them know this. But they lie to you about it. The others lie to themselves about it.
What a flaccid attempt to render himself an unassailable authority with his unselectable text:
GoogTrans prolly does alright with it, but the gist of his humor appears to be "Can you read this? Or will you [be destroyed/go extinct] like a dog?"
Thing is, he's missing the potential tense on the verb 'read', so it's more like "Do you read this? Or..." Also, he missed a really natural spot for 負け犬 instead of just 'dog' given the point he was trying to make.
I give it a C- at best. Fake and gay. Carry on everyone. Even if you can't speak a word of Japanese, you are more welcome and needed in the fandom than this faggot.
Insane dogmatists will always eventually fall back to "objective reality doesn't exist"
This is just objectively false. Are the instances where interpretation is needed? Sure, but in the vast majority of translation, and even more in the specific examples that receive 99.9% of criticism, interpretation isn't something that comes in to play. It's the fact that these worthless turds explicitly, knowingly, and often gleefully alter the translation to push their agenda.
This is a repeat of Gamergate. One group levies legitimate criticism while the defending group focuses on a topic virtually nobody is talking about. It's cliche Motte and Bailey tactics.
Languages are weird. Dialects alone are annoying. There are 3-4 ways to say High Five in Spanish, and a person will only know one of them. I genuinely thought one of them was Portuguese.
There are jokes in England entirely based on the accent. What did the smart skouse get on his report card? Eyyy eyyyy
That level of nuance will be lost. It's not the language, it's the culture. The only way to learn is spend time with the people.
However, if the story is told right, you don't need the translation. Zhang Yimou can make a film so well that the visuals and acting explain what is being said. I have seen anime that did the same.
The people trying to control the narrative have proven they don't care about either.
That shotgun barrel is looking mighty tasty right now.
these skinwalkers need to suck-start a 12-gauge
Jesus .jpg posts are cancer.
That's assuming the AI used isnt contaminated with google-tier leftist injections.