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Manga Answerman - What Makes A Great English Translation?

That said I agree with Hiroki not Takuya that having Osaka speak with a southern or Texan sort of accent was a great choice.

What is the context behind "first-string," "second-string," and so forth?

Only 9 people can play baseball at a time, but baseball teams typically have more than 9 people. The team can loosely be divided into tiers based on skill, or other factors, and also divided into sub-teams for practice games.

EG say a team has 18 people on it; the 9 best players would be 1st string--the ones who would regularly play in real games. The other 9 would be 2nd string, and would play less often and less frequently in real games.

Using numbers to differentiate tiers is simple, succinct, and direct; using nouns unique to a very specific subculture is none of those things.

r 3) omitting the reference to brother / sister and replacing it with just the character's first name or nickname. I tend to think option 3 is more natural in English, since I personally *never* refer to my siblings as “bro” or “sis” in conversation, but instead call them by their first names. But maybe that's just me?

Why is this artlce popped up on Febuary 1, this article 3 month old already.

Aca Vuksa wrote:

Why is this artlce popped up on Febuary 1, this article 3 month old already.

Manga Answerman is on hiatus this week, we usually run a repeat in those instances.

On a final personal note, I'm not a fan of works that completely mess with the Japanese translation to the point it becomes unrecognizable. For instance, both Fire Emblem Awakening and Fire Emblem Fates had a separate translator and writer and while I don't know what page the translator was on, the writer had a specific agenda (possibly directed by management) to try and re-write multiple characters to seem more interesting to a Western audience. In some cases, this was to avoid common issues with Japanese works being tranlsated (Japanese women tend to be more humble, which is hard to translate into English without making them seem subservient or weaker as characters), while in others, it was to make the work more friendly to a more sensitive audience (I don't approve of censorship, but I also don't approve of inconsequential date rape, accidentally implied or not). The fan reception was split, so a lot of people uncaring of the Japanese intent were actually very happy with the work, but it ended up causing a lot of inconsistencies with characters and unintentionally made a lot of people hate well-written characters whose newly-found attitudes in English were a bit... annoying? Obtrusive? Unattractive? The revelation to the public that the work was hardly dedicated to the author's intent made a lot of fans angry, to the point that death threats were thrown around and staff were [hastily and, as we eventually learned, wrongly] accused of doing things for some sort of political agenda. The trade-off, in my opinion, was pretty severe. I think a more dedicated script would have been far less risky to use and, having played both games in both languages, I highly doubt it would have alienated as many people as the current result did.

Fire Emblem is aimed at those who consume a lot of Japanese media, though I have to wonder how intentional that was, considering Awakening sold a lot more than its franchise's predecessors did and I also wonder if Nintendo wanted to strike that mainstream chord they do with their other franchises.