German localizers are less retarded than English ones
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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The german translation is still garbage, though.
Yeah, it's super cool and doesn't afraid of nothing, like the super scary no-no word "slave", but for fucks sake, everything BUT the word slave is wrong.
Translation isn't supposed to be about changing shit. It's supposed to be about taking data in language format A and converting it to language format B with minimal loss of data (ideally zero, but that's not always possible).
This is 75-25 noise to signal ratio.
And before any chucklefuck gets the "hurr durr what about things that have no direct translation" like the oft-quoted "the moon is beautiful tonight" thing, fuck off. Add a TL note or something; sometimes your conversion has a plugin dependency, tell the users to install the fucking plugin and load the library.
God fucking forbid people should learn something new or be exposed to a foreign culture. Fuck.
Counterpoint: Liberally translating titles is usually a marketing strategy. Demon Slave probably sounds cooler to the average German than the direct translation.
You could say the same about the Japanese though. 9/10 when they use Christian symbolism, it ends up being cringy as fuck because even after so many decades of cultural exposure, they still have a very superficial understanding of Christianity.
That too, but it's also a space management/text formatting issue.
The original title is 4 words. Two of them only take up 4 characters, making it 9 in total + 5 for the gratuitous addition of "slave" in Latin letters. That is a lot shorter than the 7 words written with 34 letters it takes for the accurate English translation (German would probably be something along the lines of "Sklave der Elitetruppe der magischen Hauptstadt" which is 6 words and 47 letters).
You would have to make the nice lady quite a bit smaller to fit all of that on the cover and still have it be eye catching.
Now someone below mentioned that the titular slave isn't demonic, so they should probably have found a more fitting word. I can't offer a good alternative, without knowing the manga though.
People who think like this are the same people who think translating every instance of "-san" to Mr./Ms. is acceptable, as if high school students go around addressing their fellow students in the exact same manner as their teachers.
At this point I really just want the translators to list the honorific verbatim and stop trying to localize it. Anyone with half a brain will figure it out and those who can't aren't worth accommodating to begin with.
All of us who watched the original Higurashi figured out what the fuck "-chama" was from basic context clues and that should be the barest expectation of anyone watching foreign media.
Heck I remember when Persona 3 was still this sleeper cult classic in the making and the fact that the English dub kept all the honorifics in was considered a huge plus in its favor.
Well what do you and the other grade 10s call each other then? :)
Honestly, it was some variation of faggot, gayboy, and other loving terms of endearment boys that age use.