Forum - View topicAnswerman - Is There Anything To Miss About Old School Subtitles?
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KabaKabaFruit
 Posts: 1872 Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba |
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Ah, the classic "I'm an anime fan and don't want to see my animes ruined with bad dubbing and bad translations but leave the same bad dubbing and bad translations from the past releases because nostalgia" excuse. Buddy, you either want a professional localization or you don't. Symphony of the Night may have been a hilarious shod job in terms of localization of dialogue but at the end, it was a mistake on the part of the localization team who couldn't be bothered to handle it professionally. To say that the original shouldn't be re-released with corrections because it would take away from the original release is nonsense. The original release is still there for you to play and Konami corrected their blunder with the re-release. Period. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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And this is to say nothing of Page Down becoming merely 'Down', causing an immediate functional conflict with a nearby arrow key. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5936 |
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I will never understand the inane criticism of the fixes to Symphony of The Night's script's and voice acting not only because the original script was widely mocked hence why it was changed but it still exists on the PSN rerelease of the game. The narm charm crowd can have their silly script and iffy voice acting while everyone else (with a Vita or PSP) can enjoy something that doesn't harken back to the cheesiness that marred Japanese video games translated into english in the 80's and 90's. God forbid if Capcom were to actually remake Megaman 8 or X4 I'd expect people to take issue with any fixes to the voice acting or script there eventhough virtually no one uses narm charm to defend either game's aforementioned aspects. |
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Gurren Rodan
 Posts: 263 |
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Discotek did a brand-new subtitle translation for their release of the film, along with "restoring" the 1980 subtitles. I haven't watched the latter yet*, but my guess is Discotek's intent was preservation/reference. *I mean, technically I probably have, since I saw the film on DVD previously, but I don't recall specifics of the subtitles - apart from the counterfeit bills referred to as "goat bills" (Discotek's new translation uses "goth"). |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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The only way that could be better is if that also popped up in some translation of Attack on Titan.
Reminds me of how my high school's anime club screened Kite. The club leader INSISTED the name was pronounced "KEE-teh," and even spoke during the screening, "At first you think it says "kite," but then you realize it's actually "KEE-teh."" Though I don't think that was an issue over any sort of translation, it did demonstrate during that time you had a lot of know-nothing-know-it-alls among anime fans.
Something I've observed, looking at some translators at work, is that there are many, many translators out there who know one language really well while not knowing the other language that well at all. I see this in person as someone who grew up speaking a language other than English but being in the United States, and I'd see it reading behind-the-scenes details on other things because I'm just curious in general. (An example is Nintendo's translators before the Treehouse translators like Bill Trinen and Teresa Lilygren came along: They generally used translators who were fluent in Japanese but had passing knowledge of English, and they would receive scripts full of bizarre uses of words and sometimes complete nonsense, which the Treehouse people of its day would try their best to untangle.)
Now I'm curious as to how they react upon finding out.
Why does that keyboard have two Scroll Rock keys? And two Print Screen keys and two Pause keys, for that matter? |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Sounds like the old one got it right: The Japanese script does refer to the Count-erfeit money as "Goat bills", since the Goat is the Cagliostro family's crest symbol. The one that's on both rings everyone's after, and the one that's just over the clock. (..."Goth"??  )
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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I sure as hell don’t miss the days when such terrible translations were commonplace. It’s bad enough that there’s still some pretty terrible quality translation from time to time in scanlations; bad enough to outright put me off reading a series sometimes.
That’s more a questionable decision on how to handle a character’s name; the translation as a whole otherwise seems pretty decent. What’s being talked about is more things like consistently horrible and nonsensical use of English, generally inaccurate translation, etc. That is thankfully rare, but you do still get some that are a bit off. The Crunchyroll subs of Gabriel Dropout shoehorned some pretty stupid phrases in, for example. Whoever did the subtitles for the first season of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure really didn’t have enough of a grasp of British English to be using it that liberally, for another.
This reminds me of one of my pet peeves; no one I speak to seems to be able to pronounce Patlabour correctly. It is not patla-bore, dammit, can you not hear them in the show saying “labour”? |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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I sure as hell don’t miss the days when such terrible translations were commonplace. It’s bad enough that there’s still some pretty terrible quality translation from time to time in scanlations; bad enough to outright put me off reading a series sometimes.
That’s more a questionable decision on how to handle a character’s name; the translation as a whole otherwise seems pretty decent. What’s being talked about is more things like consistently horrible and nonsensical use of English, generally inaccurate translation, etc. That is thankfully rare, but you do still get some that are a bit off. The Crunchyroll subs of Gabriel Dropout shoehorned some pretty stupid phrases in, for example. Whoever did the subtitles for the first season of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure really didn’t have enough of a grasp of British English to be using it that liberally, for another.
This reminds me of one of my pet peeves; no one I speak to seems to be able to pronounce Patlabour correctly. It is not patla-bore, dammit, can you not hear them in the show saying “labour”? |
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Fluwm
 Posts: 891 |
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I think that depends a lot on what you're translating. The most difficult (and rewarding) translation work I've done was German literature, into English, and... there was a *lot* to juggle. I had to catch all of the "sophisticated" rhetorical techniques and try to find appropriate ways to convey them in English; I had to struggle to preserve the rhythm of the prose (something a lot of translators ignore, which is one of my big pet peeves); at one point I had to hunt down some elderly Germans because the author was using really anachronistic language that had long-since fallen out of common usage, and I needed to know as much about the context of the German terminology used in order to determine an analogous English term. With Japanese-->English specifically, I think the most common debate I've seen has to do with the random usage of English words. It's really hard to convey that in English, because most English-speaking cultures don't so readily incorporate foreign words into everyday conversation. Yen Press' translators, for example, chose to make Yotsuba (in the manga of the same name) randomly break out the Spanish, which is kinda-sorta-analagous, but absolutely does not fit within the context of the work and absolutely does not have the same cultural resonance w/ an English-speaking audience. Lots of arguments here, I think, simply because there is *no* good, optimal answer. Generally speaking most competent translators and editors understand that a literal translation often impossible and almost always inadvisable, but the line separating too little vs. too much liberty is constantly shifting.
I didn't mean to say that a new, competent translator is a bad idea, but rather that *recommending* a new translator can be a bad idea. Often the incompetent translators (at least in my experience) were nepotism hires. And, often, they work with the employers on the other side of the planet, meaning that between the two of us the big bosses are going to be more inclined to give the person they see face-to-face every day the benefit of the doubt over some facely foreigner who only exists (at most) as a face on a screen.
I mean, it'd be great if that were the case... but it's not. Yes, there are more translators now than ever before, but that also means it's easier for bad translators to find work, and there's no shortage of people willing to exaggerate their fluency in order to get a job.
Yeah, this is almost always going to be the case. Ideally, you want each project to have two translators working in tandem: one a native speaker of the first language, the other a native speaker of the second language. And, of course, you *always* want an editor (in addition to the translator(s)) to go over the translated text. Translation isn't just about language, it's also about culture and context--of both the culture who produced the media in question as well as the culture the media is being translated for. Take, for example, a generic Japanese light novel about a Dragon Quest-style setting. To translate that into English properly, the translator(s) doesn't simply need to be fluent in both English and Japanese... but also very familiar with the video game sub-cultures, nomenclature and tropes in both Japan and the English-speaking world. |
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Northlander
 Posts: 901 |
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From Yurucamp:
Two questions: 1. What is a POLER bear? 2. Should we be worried? |
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Crext
 Posts: 211 |
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I remember FF7's two funny translations.
Aeris sees a guy in the slums: "This man are sick" I guess he was a rock star or something. Then it was one I burned myself on bad. During the arena fights in the golden saucer, after you win a fight you sometimes get options between "Do you want to continue?" where the first option is "off course", so you pick the second option of course as you don't actually want to quit. Beep, the second option was the one to truly get you off course so to speak as you get thrown into plague town for quitting. Then we have this case of high degree of incompetence: 
Cmon, just give it to her Cloud 
Thank God there's been no fish in the water, phew: 
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Cutiebunny
 Posts: 1748 |
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Thank you for this update. I bought several Engrish shirts while in Japan years ago and plan on doing so again when I head back in October. The thought of not being able to do so because the Engrish has improved was sad to me. So, good to hear that I can find some great specimens and continue to tick off people who consider that (and likely everything else) offensive in California. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Oh, so it IS pronounced "PAT-lay-ber"? I had been pronouncing it like that and got mocked and ridiculed by the more hardcore anime fans in high school for my so-called ignorance by not calling it "PAT-la-BORE."
That actually got me thinking: Something else that helps with translations and localization nowadays compared to how things used to be is that they can get in contact with creators, authors, writers, directors, and such and ask them questions if they're unsure about something. This can allow them to pick up references that may have been too subtle or obscure to catch without them or more meanings in a pun than just the two obvious ones, among other things. Translating something like Gravity Falls into any other language must be a nightmare without this sort of communication, for example, because the show invites viewers to look for tiny details that could be clues to something later on, and some of those come up in the dialogue. There is a monthly segment in the Unofficial One Piece Podcast that goes over references in One Piece most people might have missed. A lot of it consists of particular words and phrases that came up much earlier in the manga that return and are shown to have significance which readers (and translators, in turn) will likely miss because they've forgotten about it or didn't pay it much mind when it first came up.
Of course, there's one big problem about that that will prevent it from becoming the norm: It costs a lot more money than having just a single translator.
Well, I can answer the first one. Looking it up in my dictionary, a poler is an Australian/New Zealand term for an animal at the back of a team of such animals pulling a large vehicle. Hence, if you're in Oceania and you're riding a vehicle pulled by a team of bears, the ones in the back are the poler bears. Whether that should be worrisome or not is up to you. |
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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This was addressed when the Discotek set came out. I can't remember if it was talked about in the ANNCast, the commentary on the Blu-ray, or both, but it went thusly: The original English script made a mistake when it translated/ dubbed the bills as "Goat", a mistake that was easy to make because of the movie's imagery. The Japanese pronounce the 'o' sound in English words not as the "aw" sound we sometimes know but the "ow" sound, as in Rowboat. Chowper is a One Piece character for Toei; It takes them a minute to figure out who Chawper is. ( I wish I could remember which DVD has that anecdote). Not that you can blame anyone: Robot is a fun little word that conjures up memories of that famous I Love Lucy sketch. When the new translation for Cagliostro was done, the team looked at the Japanese writing and it was closer to the meaning of Goth ( as in Gothic, not teens all in black) than Goat. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Yup. People who kind of understand how Japanese words get romanised are assuming that the title must of course be romanised Japanese and pronounce it accordingly, while failing to think about the fact that the title is actually a portmanteau of two English words, or listening to how it's pronounced in the show. Anyone who has more than that token familiarity with the Japanese language - ie enough to be able to read katakana - can see that it's パトレイバー and therefore pat-lay-ber, not パトラボウル (or パトラボール) which would be pat-la-bore. In short, those hardcore fans aren't nearly as hardcore as they think they are. |
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