Forum - View topicNEWS: Seven Seas Addresses Mushoku Tensei, Classroom of the Elite Light Novel Localization Changes
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Covnam
 Posts: 3654 |
|
|||||
Hasn't that been attributed to the images in the books and not the written content? And usually because those images were available in the previews (I think I've heard that some books have had any potentially contentious images put to the back of the book because of this) so people would see and report them. I imagine that when it comes to the written content, there's plenty of text describing worse things available. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
OtherSideofSky
|
|
|||||
|
Looking at the Reddit post with the CotE comparisons, that seems like the bigger issue here (and also much less explicable). The content of the cut sections doesn't seem to differ significantly from the sections around them that weren't cut, which makes it seem unlikely that they were cut for that reason. It makes me suspect an editor or translator either going overboard or cutting corners, or a major quality-control issue. In some ways that's more worrying than cuts for content, because it could affect any title and be more difficult to address.
|
||||||
Tanteikingdomkey
 Posts: 2346 |
|
|||||
SO has the translation for classroom of the elite always been suspect or did this volume suddenly get a new editor/translator who made the translation into a $(@! show |
||||||
|
||||||
TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5836 Location: Virginia, United States |
|
|||||
I understand what you are saying, and you are probably right, but if you are going to censor, it needs to be listed as such. Hiding and lying about it shows no respect to your core consumers, and I believe it to be far more damaging I do a lot of pre-ordering of manga and light novels on Amazon for my Kindle, but if I have to worry about a particular company secretly censoring their licensed books, you are going to lose preorders. If I have to wait for the reviews to find out about censoring, your books may be forgotten in time, or I could have decided to use other means. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Thespacemaster
Posts: 1109 |
|
|||||
|
The real issue is not so much the censoring, it is pretty much the fact they initially censored things without actually telling their customers that they did, this is pretty much fraud, people pay you to get the content they were promised and for you to sell a product like it is the original without so much of a warning label that this content has been censored or certain things edited is clearly false advertisement.
I really hate this era where so much works have to be edited or censored simply cause they clash with modern values, alright fine it may not suit to your taste, so why not release a censored and uncensored version? or at the very least warn customers what you did and give a valid explanation, that did not happen and they are only doing it now cause of th backlash as i can guarantee if people did not find out and complain they would still have done this and that is bad sign of any business to do as it shows they are willing to undermine customers. I just wish people do not go overboard with the censoring or try to erase certain things from past media as by burying and censoring history your just inviting misinformation for future generations and instead of helping them understand how times were like and how times have changed now, your sheltering them and might even invite further problems later. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2231 Location: San Antonio, USA |
|
|||||
We do not cut or rewrite the content of any of the books we license, beyond what is beneficial to smooth translation (e.g. we might swap some sentences around or cut some redundant sentences), and if we discover that an editor or translator has been going significantly beyond that to censor or significantly soften or cut content they would be immediately removed from the project. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Cloudywind
Posts: 55 |
|
|||||
What if redundant sentences and other unpleasant prose features such as word repetition and run-on sentences are part of the writer's (possibly inexperienced and amateur) writing style which, while not making for a smooth read, are still part of what would have been the experience of the text for a native reader, thus having the potential to have a case made for their translation in such a text to maintain similar features for a similar reading experience in the target language insofar as any "similarities" or equivalences or analogues between two very different languages and cultural contexts may be found? I don't know anything about translation and I'm not a literalist translation fanatic, this was just an idle thought and I wondered about your perspective on it as a long-time translator yourself. Last edited by Cloudywind on Thu Feb 18, 2021 6:57 am; edited 1 time in total |
||||||
|
||||||
|
samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2231 Location: San Antonio, USA |
|
|||||
It's actually less work to just leave all that the way it was written originally. Some editors and translators might go the extra mile to improve the writing in english, but it's not really our job as localizers to take that too far, and most of the time we wouldn't do much to improve those things. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Cloudywind
Posts: 55 |
|
|||||
Thanks for the reply, so normally translation just follows the path of least resistance and text cleanups such as you described are really more of an exception than a rule, or at least infrequent enough that there isn't really a hard and fast editorial rule on them just "did the editor feel that this sentence is unnecessarily unpleasant or unclear in English where it wouldn't have been in Japanese"? |
||||||
|
||||||
|
TarsTarkas
Posts: 5836 Location: Virginia, United States |
|
|||||
Thanks for your assurances. |
||||||
|
||||||
Kadmos1
 Posts: 13558 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
|
|||||
Might not be one's job as at translator to go that figurative extra mile but those that are willing to do so certainly are dedicated to their craft. That is, provided that extra mile results with lines or dialogue that can adhere to the spirt of what was originally said while also going in with grammar mechanics of the language that the work was translated into. |
||||||
|
||||||
Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23786 |
|
|||||
It's a business decision. If a company feels they can attract more readers by removing objectionable material than they can by appealing to those who don't want a single comma changed, that's their prerogative. It must be even more tempting with a title like Jobless where there is so much that does have non-controversial appeal. You make a few snips and the story doesn't change. It's not like Redo of Healer where the ick is baked into virtually every scene and utterance. |
||||||
|
||||||
Blanchimont
 Posts: 3453 Location: Finland |
|
|||||
It's a bad business decision. That is, the way they did it, without disclosing there had been edits. If they had disclosed, fair, their right but customers could have avoided bowdlerized versions if they so felt. By not disclosing, they're jeopardizing customer trust and that will affect future releases, thus sales, pre-orders... |
||||||
|
||||||
Scytalle
 SubscriberPosts: 53 |
|
|||||
Not making a judgement one way or another personally, but we simply can't know ourselves whether it was a good business decision or not. We are a very small minority of potential customers here. I bet the vast majority of readers of LNs are just not plugged in like this. If the license holder focus grouped, and ran the numbers, and saw that a certain % of readers were going to drop a series or continue reading due to the way they translated a highly controversial scene, especially in volume 1 of a long running series, it very well may have made a ton of financial sense sense to just do it, and deal with the potential blowback later. They can always apologize later, which is what they are doing now. Is it objectively the most fair way of doing things? Nope, but that's the reality of business. Going out on a limb, I bet more than a few casual LN readers continued with the series where they might not have otherwise. |
||||||
|
||||||
Brook09
 Posts: 81 |
|
|||||
One fact is known to be sure, that a lot of people will probably drop the mushoke tensei translation by seven seas cause of this, and might also pull out from other series that they have licensed suspecting the same issue. Building up trust is hard and a long way, but losing trust is a simple quick process. This definitely made them extremely unlikeable and will people make to compare them with 4kids or put them on the same pedestal. One thing is for sure I ain't buying anythign from them anymore, Mushoku Tensei is a yeah alright for me, what's more aggrevating is how they dealt with Classroom of the Elite and how they're localisation process was on that altering and leaving out multiple passages and internal monologues, not only in volume 7, they did it in vol 5 and 4.5 too. The fan translation is vastly superior to the utter mess they put out in Classroom of the Elite case, which made me so mad that I swore that I will not support seven seas in the near future, I'll rather buy the LN from a japanese digital store like cmoa.jp as that would also help me to learn japanese faster. 
|
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group