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This Week in Anime - What is the Anime Localization Controversy?

Does "criticism" include harassment and sending death threats or harassing the original mangaka over it? Is that how "adults" act?

OmniZeroAlpha wrote:

Here's the thing about being "adults". If you make a product for public consumption and you receive legitimate criticism regarding your product you can do two things: 1) be an adult, take the criticism to heart and make a better product OR 2) act like a child, ignore the feedback, and stupidly insist you didn't make a crappy product. Who makes the final call on whether a product is good or bad? The consumer.

Does "criticism" include harassment and sending death threats or harassing the original mangaka over it? Is that how "adults" act?

You should track down and listen to the English dub of Bodacious Space Pirates, then. It was made in 2012, a time when Sentai Filmworks was experimenting with using honorifics in English dubs. Why that experiment didn't last long is plain as you listen to that dub. While I generally like the dub otherwise (warts and all) and have listened to it many times, retaining the honorifics is awkward as hell. They're not structurally part of the English language, so trying to insert them in sounds forced. In cases where the distinction matters, there are other ways to convey the differences in familiarity that, while maybe imperfect replacements, still get the gist of the meaning across.

As for the rest of the debate, I'll just watch from the sidelines and think about how translation firestorms have popped up periodically over the years and will probably never go away; I still recall people raging over "Ahiru" being translated as "Duck" for Princess Tutu's official subs and dubs. (Actually, that case is a great example of why context matters in translation decisions.)

As one of the people involved in Princess Tutu's fansubbing, let me reaffirm that ADV's naming is 100% in line with the original production staff's intentions, and I would appreciate it if people could refrain from knee-jerk accusations against anime companies for things that are 1) done absolutely correctly, and 2) entirely beyond their control.
I have very high praise and trust in the person who translated Princess Tutu for ADV, and I will not tolerate any baseless insults against her work.

For years now, these localization companies have often employed rogue translators/localizers who have done things like add English memes with no context, add unnecessary slang, insert political language, censor the source material, skip translations, or straight up mistranslate the source material.

And if we want to throw salt on the wound, the "anti-Shonen Jump Weekly" crowd at the time harassed translators who had nothing to do with those wild decisions (harassing anyone is bad enough, but to go after the wrong person just made it worse, and it led me to feel like I was contributing to the chaos by helping with translations of the Japanese script online, so I pulled out and focused on unlocalized Madoka Magica spin-offs again).

Setting aside the fact that Funi removed the GamerGate reference from the home-video version of the Prison School dub, it's worth noting that "The Left" has also taken some issues with the Dragon Maid dub, yet you don't see left-wing outrage merchants still flogging that deadhorse 7 years later, and you don't see left-wingers calling for the industry to be burned to the ground by piracy, or for all the translators (or "localizers," which = "translator who makes localization decisions I disagree with") to be replaced by AI. It's just a bunch of disingenuous cherrypicking to smear official translations, and gain likes and subscribes from an audience that doesn't want to pay for anime and wants to see their grievance-based worldview validated.

With all honestly and trying to bring something new to the table, unlike these "localization haters" of sorts, I do have the displeasure to explain what it actually means to live with the so called "100% faithfully translated anime" this people want.

For the last couple of years, translations for anime in my country, both in subs and dubs, are distributed into two categories:
1-The ones that go to animes targeted directly to their audiences, so to speak, like for places like Crunchyroll or Netflix originals.
2-The ones that will get a DVD-Blu Ray release, maybe available on streaming platforms if you're lucky enough. And if you pray enough, you'll even get a very very limited broadcast on cable tv for a very short while.

The first category will always have the type of translation and localization present in any other media that has been translated and localised to our language, what the ‘localization haters’ tend to dislike, so to speak. An adaptation of dialogues from it’s original language to another where the words may change but the intention and message of the original will be kept. BUT THEN there's the second category which could be coldly described as "the job's done, that's enough" translations which, to put it simply, only translates the dialogues while leaving anything that would need a localization unlocalized, in a very simmilar way a lot of fan-translations tend to work, and would probably still do. Examples of this could go from calling the Warlords and Emperrors of the Sea from One Piece straight up "the shichibukais and the yonkous", or calling Naruto's clone technique, or jutsu, into quite literally "the kage bunshin no jutsu". And in case I didn't make it clear before, this is for both subs AND dubs, and it's labeled as "100% accurate translations".
Also, i forgot to mention this second category is mainly comprised by extremely popular and more mainstream animes like My Hero Academia or even Demon Slayer, while some others like Spy x Family may end up on Crunchyroll or not even picked up, like the Precure franchise outside Otona Precure.

So to go back to the topic of this column, every time i have to witness this so called debate and see weebs whose entire knowledge on the japanese language is based on the same couple of words repeated over and over in all anime, no matter the genre, with google translate or any other similar webpage operating on machine and literal translations opened in another tabs of their browsers, while acting on social media like they have the N1 level of japanese language proficiency exclaiming they want "100% actually faithful (literal) translations", I START SWEATING.

Are you Brazilian by any chance? Because if yes, I would say that I love the translations we have in Brazil. They're faithful to the original text and many times they chose to leave the original phrases because they sound cooler, this is used mostly with attack names and it's always followed by notes, it's something cool because it conveys the meaning of the text while at the same time keeping the original mood and feeling. In Brazil we even have the tradition of keeping honorifics, and this is great because instead of trying to measly or badly adapting the names, the translator keep the original meaning while allowing the audience to learn a bit about the context of the work they're interacting with

OmniZeroAlpha wrote:

Here's the thing about being "adults". If you make a product for public consumption and you receive legitimate criticism regarding your product you can do two things: 1) be an adult, take the criticism to heart and make a better product OR 2) act like a child, ignore the feedback, and stupidly insist you didn't make a crappy product. Who makes the final call on whether a product is good or bad? The consumer.

Does "criticism" include harassment and sending death threats or harassing the original mangaka over it? Is that how "adults" act?

I don't recall who it was the asked awhile ago, but regarding the musing of if something like Ghost Stories could be made today without backlash: the answer appears to be no going off the Lovely Complex dub situation that dropped today. It might have been something you could get away with in the Steven Foster-era of dubs, but in the age where even a single line can get an entire translation of a series put under scrutiny it seems very unlikely an entire dub with such disdain for a series and creator themself would be tolerated by modern anime audiences who are more aware of the whole situation so nothing like a "Ghost Stories failed in Japan" can ever happen again or spread very far without fact checks happening.