Forum - View topicCross-Format Consistency?
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Dessa
 Posts: 4438 |
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This is something that's a pet peeve of mine, and has a number of ways that it pops up. Usually it's more a problem on the English side of things, but there's still things that pop up in the Japanese or other International versions side.
Note: This thread could have just as easily been placed in the manga, novels, or video game forums, and not made any difference. Consistency is something that is badly needed in a work. Sure, things like Space Dandy, where each episode basically has everything reset, don't rely on consistency as much, but, in general, things run off of consistency. You can't have your big tough hero fighting giant spiders in one episode, and then afraid of a tiny spec of a spider in the next. Consistency allows the audience to get confident in what they know about the story and the characters, and to trust that this will continue to be true. (Note that things like plot twists often betray this trust, but as long as you can look back after the plot twist and realize that it's not contradicting things from earlier, it's still got consistency). But this isn't about the internal consistency that a work needs. This is about external consistency, when a work spans multiple formats. The biggest offenders to cross-format consistency are, unfortunately, the most common form of cross-format works: adaptations. Whether it be a light novel, manga, anime, video game, or what, adapted into any other format, there are going to be things that get changed. Some for the better, some for the worse. It's been proven, in recent years, that a perfect 1-to-1 adaptation doesn't work for most things. Probably the biggest example of this is Sailor Moon Crystal. Due to pacing working differently between print and screen, what worked in the manga, ends up feeling "off" in the anime, because the pacing is so different, and given that they have been working with a fairly strict 1 chapter = 1 episode, "talky" chapters seem to drag in episode format, whereas action chapters fly by. That being said, there's still something for having consistency, and avoiding direct conflicts. And there's always the argument of what is "canon" to a series (for me, the original is always canon, and adaptations are canon as long as they don't contradict the original). But what if, taking my definition of canon, there's something that's not in the original, or only mentioned in passing, and multiple adaptations have multiple answers for it? For example, Log Horizon. The light novels don't go into who the first person to die after the Apocalypse was, just that someone died, was revived at the Cathedral, and that's how they knew that death wasn't permanent (or an escape). In the anime, it's shown to be a random person who was the first to be revived. In the West Wind Brigade side-manga, though, it's shown to specifically be one of the WWB members (and before you say that it's a random guild member, WWB is almost 100% female, and we know the only male members. It was a guy in the anime). These kinds of things, even as small as they might be, bug me. The secondmost offender, to cross-format consistency, has to do with foreign-language versions. And it breaks down to 3 smaller parts: casts, translations, and lost-in-translations. 1) Casts This is something that comes up a lot, both when there's a new adaptation of something, or when a license changes hands. And it's not just on the foreign language side, either. Sailor Moon Crystal and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood both recast some or nearly all of the cast, even in the Japanese version. And granted, there's a lot more changes than just voices, but VIZ's dub of the original Sailor Moon has a completely different cast. And then you have the cases where there's an anime based on a game, and the casts are completely different. With Xenosaga the Animation, for example, Richard Epcar (Ziggy in the games) told me that he'd spoken to Chris Ayres (ADR Director for the anime), and that Chris had told him that he hadn't even been aware of the games and their cast, or that he would have hired them back for the anime. 2) Translations This comes into play most commonly when the different formats of a work are licensed by different companies, and they translate things differently. Inconsistencies in name translations are very common, especially if the name either a) has an uncommon transliteration (Krys instead of Chris or Crys, for Pokemon Special), or b) has multiple valid transliterations (stuff like Erik/Eric). But worse than that, are names/terms that are actually translated. In Log Horizon, there's plenty. Is it the Apocalypse or the Catastrophe? Crescent Moon Alliance or Crescent Moon League? Round Table Conference or Round Table Alliance? Villain in Glasses or Machiavelli in Glasses? When multiple versions of a title come out at/near the same time, companies do seem to be getting better at making sure their translations are consistent. But often, especially with anime adaptations of things that are already available, the translations can be vastly different, and which is the more accurate? The one that came out first and you're more familiar with, or the one that came out second and is newer? With many fans not knowing any/enough Japanese, or having access to the original, they often have no way of knowing. For example, I have no clue if "He who seizes glory" (game) or "he who grasps at glory" (anime) is the better translation of the meaning of Vandesdelca's name in Tales of the Abyss (I hope it's the game, though. "Grasps at" just sounds dumb). 3) "Lost-in-Translations" As it is with just about any translation from any language into another, things are going to get lost in translation. A common one, when translating from Japanese (and quite a few other languages) into English, is that English does not have gender-neutral individual pronouns, for when a character's gender is unknown. This often leads to cases of "he" being used as a placeholder, and the character turns out to be female. In some cases, when the character has an ambiguous appearance (such as non-human characters), or the gender is unimportant to the overall story, this will actually lead to a gender swap, so as to keep consistent with the earlier translation. But it's not just with genders. Jokes and other word-puns are also often translated differently across different formats (like with names, it's often because it's a different company). I can't think of any off the top of my head, but an example of one that was changed because it didn't translate correctly is in an early Pokemon episode, when Satoshi/Ash and Kasumi/Misty see a Caterpie. Kasumi/Misty, afraid of bugs, screams, and then Satoshi/Ash pops up in a cow suit. In the Japanese version, Kasumi screams "Mushi Mushi Mushi!" (Bug bug bug), to which Satoshi replies "Ushi?" (cow) in the cow suit. In the dub, when Misty screams, Ash replies that it's just a "Cow-terpie" in the cow suit. I personally can't think of any way to translate the original to retain the word pun, but, if this scene were to be translated multiple times by multiple groups, I can see where different alternate jokes could be made. Again, these inconsistencies are pet peeves of mine (mainly the contradicting info and names/terms being translated differently), and I wanted to get this off my chest. What about others? Do these bother you, or do you just shrug them off? Are there other cross-format inconsistencies that bother you? Or do you have more examples (especially more egregious ones than mine!) to show how this is a problem? |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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The translation inconsistencies absolutely get at me; as an example, in the Madoka anime, AoA gives us lines about witches putting up labrynths, but in the mangas, Yen Press swaps them out for ones about putting up wards. I honeslty wish they'd just give it up and fix it, but they're dead set on using it on each and every new series they translate.
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