(no subject)
Jun. 26th, 2005 02:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tephraSometimes the English broadcasts of anime annoy the hell out of me. And I'm not talking about poor casting or translations, or even "editing for content" (though I have rants for all of those topics). No, I'm talking about something that fansubbers usually do that apparently the "professionals" never think of doing, translating the written Japanese in scenes.
Now I'm not saying that everything in text in an anime needs to be changed to English, I rather enjoy matter-of-fact appearances of Japanese text (newspapers, books, posters, etc) but there are times when it is obvious that the viewer is supposed to pick something significant out of the text in a scene. I think zooming in on some text and displaying it for several seconds is a fairly good indicator that Something Important is there.
If a character writes down something that she conceals from another character but we get a nice clear shot that lasts long enough for us to read the text (if we can read Japanese) then it's probably significant to the story and it should be translated. Likewise, when a character is reading something and the camera zooms in and stops on the text it obviously means we should read it and therefore it should be translated. I might forgive missing some of the instances within an episode, but they don't even bother with the episode titles or location notes in some of the stuff they broadcast. I don't think there's anything more frustrating than knowing that there's something important to a story that you're missing because someone did a sloppy job in translation.
If they can turn cigarettes into stick pens (Yu Yu Hakusho) and lollipops (One Piece), and minimize or remove blood (Yu Yu Hakusho again) then they can certainly translate a few frames of text (Paranoia Agent, .hack//Legend of the Twilight Bracelet).
If I were in the market for .hack or Paranoia Agent on DVD I would be very leery of buying them, based entirely on the broadcast version. I'd have to rent them just to see if they bothered to translate the text in the DVDs. The bitter and cynical part of me says they probably didn't bother. It's "just cartoons" so the text can't actually mean anything after all.
Now I'm not saying that everything in text in an anime needs to be changed to English, I rather enjoy matter-of-fact appearances of Japanese text (newspapers, books, posters, etc) but there are times when it is obvious that the viewer is supposed to pick something significant out of the text in a scene. I think zooming in on some text and displaying it for several seconds is a fairly good indicator that Something Important is there.
If a character writes down something that she conceals from another character but we get a nice clear shot that lasts long enough for us to read the text (if we can read Japanese) then it's probably significant to the story and it should be translated. Likewise, when a character is reading something and the camera zooms in and stops on the text it obviously means we should read it and therefore it should be translated. I might forgive missing some of the instances within an episode, but they don't even bother with the episode titles or location notes in some of the stuff they broadcast. I don't think there's anything more frustrating than knowing that there's something important to a story that you're missing because someone did a sloppy job in translation.
If they can turn cigarettes into stick pens (Yu Yu Hakusho) and lollipops (One Piece), and minimize or remove blood (Yu Yu Hakusho again) then they can certainly translate a few frames of text (Paranoia Agent, .hack//Legend of the Twilight Bracelet).
If I were in the market for .hack or Paranoia Agent on DVD I would be very leery of buying them, based entirely on the broadcast version. I'd have to rent them just to see if they bothered to translate the text in the DVDs. The bitter and cynical part of me says they probably didn't bother. It's "just cartoons" so the text can't actually mean anything after all.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-27 06:10 am (UTC)Yep thats one of my pet peeves with professional translators.