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If I said that there was a children's manga about happy little monsters befriending each other, and one chapter introduces an "American" monster who immediately whips out a handgun and "shoots [his opponent] in broad daylight" -- because "we take amasked assailants seriously in the U.S.A." -- you would think I was just doing a bit, right? At most, maybe describing some old "edgy" adult cartoon's half-baked Pokémon parody skit?

But I'm afraid Yo-Kai Watch, and Apelican, are all too real.

"We take amasked assailants seriously in the U.S.A. 𝅘𝅥𝅮 I had every right to shoot him!"

© 2012 KONISHI Noriyuki / Shogakukan & Viz Media. All rights reserved.

(At least the presence of a "super Americanizing yo-kai" explains why the ostensibly Japanese characters all have names like Nate and Katie!)

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Root causes of 99% of professional translation mistakes:

  • not enough time
  • low pay
  • on projects with multiple translators working in parallel: too little editing (usually related to "low pay") and no series bible
  • arcane legal or technical requirements -- e.g. can't use certain common words for trademark reasons, can't use words ending in "s" because the engine will break
  • unable to predict the future and thus chose wrong (wrong romanization, wrong gender, etc.)

(And in some cases: people will complain if they do translate it correctly, especially if the result could be construed as "woke" in any manner.)

Root cause of 99% of fan translator mistakes:

  • plain ol' incompetence

Sure, scanlators get bit by "not clairvoyant" too! But that's a rounding error compared to the number who post machine-translation word salads. (I know some heavily sampling-biased people insist that scanlators as a category are good at their jobs, or that MTLs aren't always bad. So this is a direct quote: "Love observation variety dangan crimson salmon brigade." If you can figure out what that was supposed to mean, please tell me. And I have so many more examples that I can barely enumerate them all. Might save them for another post.)

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@ the Kaito Kid: Buddy, "I disguise myself as women for my heists because it attracts less suspicion/shows greater skill" is just the same melody as "I always play as female game characters because I like their designs better" in a different key. 10 years from now, you'll be slapping yourself in shock that you ever believed this.

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And Julie Su, acting labor secretary [...]

Hold on, the U.S. government's acting labor secretary at press time is named Julie Su?!

That fact sandblasted the rest of the original paragraph out of my mind, and I'm physically unable to get any information from it or any articles about her, because she somehow has the same name as Knuckles the Echidna's cyborg girlfriend.

I mean, what are the chances? Are there people at the White House named Sally Acorn and such too?

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I'm guessing it's just because the manga is for very young children and they couldn't expect readers to understand the values of different currencies, or perhaps of any currency at all (and putting in translators' notes was a non-starter). But I still enjoy the way the Yo-Kai Watch manga refers to all currency as simply "coins". "That'll be one coin." It's actually fairly clever!

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The standard scenes and images that pop up in too many manga to count -- "bumping into a beautiful girl and she turns out to be a new transfer student", checking someone's temperature with the forehead, umbrella-sharing, kabëdon -- are culture-specific. If you put one into an American teen drama without a lot of setup to make it clear that this is supposed to be charming, and why, everyone would be really confused. Hell, try to explain a bunny girl and why that outfit is "sexy". (The tight outfit, sure, but why a rabbit?)

These tropes are seen as cool and romantic because we've already built up a response to them over time. And some of them were created and popularized during our lifetimes: when I was born, the "running out of the house with toast" one didn't even exist. They're new things that can be invented, not a pre-existing, dwindling resource of "moë" that we have to mine for.

So my theory is that we need to accelerate production of brand-new moë scenarios for, e.g., tall girls. Right now, many people still think "I'm not attracted to people who are like [x]. I only like [y].", but they're being deceived by the lack of pre-existing moë into thinking that [y] is inherently better than [x].

The hentai producers are hard at work on tomboys (good job, guys), but there is still work to be done for other traits, genders, and so forth.

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Hinagiku:
OMG, why do I like this [unattainable, nonthreatening] boy, especially when he is a FEMININE CROSSDRESSER sometimes?!

Me:
Hinagiku. Hinagiku. Pls. Hina. giku. There is an explanation. It's very obvious. You are just too much of a dumbass to see it.

(Been reading a lot of new manga on Viz lately! Well, I originally picked up the first few volumes of Hayate when I was close to Nagi's age [💦️] and now I can finally finish it.)

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One day, Nisioisin will stand trial for everything he's done. The toothbrushing scene, Mayoi, the dialogue in Kizumonogatari, causing a translator to resign. When names come up, they'll talk about Shinobu and every damn character in Cipher Academy -- especially Soboro Oboro and Kubinashi Shitai -- and then someone will say "Beyond Birthday" and everyone will flip out so much that they'll have to declare a mistrial.

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UUUltraC Shitpost Log: Shoutarou

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A small collection of random stuff I said while playing the first route of UUUltraC, mildly cleaned up for readability. There's probably not much of value here, but if I got worried about that kind of thing, I wouldn't have a blog.

Contains some mild spoilers -- although I tried to avoid putting in anything too explicit -- and NSFW text (I did not try to avoid putting in anything too explicit).

"Kaijū" is spelled without an extended vowel because:

  1. I'm lazy, and
  2. I was talking to Doctus, who is married to someone called Kaijyuu, and talking about kaijuu would therefore be confusing.

Continue reading "UUUltraC Shitpost Log: Shoutarou"

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I sit in a room whose wallpaper bears an "I Hate Brand" print. On the back wall hangs an enormous banner emblazoned with "I Hate Brand", and below it, a dartboard with a picture of the Brand logo. There are darts and knives stuck in the board. I am wearing a smoking jacket covered with "I Hate Brand" and the Brand logo with a red line through it. I'm admiring a camera feed of my pet bear devouring various fish that have been genetically modified to express the Brand logo on their scales. Suddenly, my PC plays a notification that's a text-to-speech program saying "I Hate Brand". My desktop background is a continuously updating graph of Brand's financial losses. I open my browser and tab past the "Cabal to Destroy Brand" IRC channel to see someone has made a post:

"Why are you complaining about Other Brand? You're fine with Brand."

I crush my "I Hate Brand" glass in my hand (it's O.K.; I have another 143 just like it), take a seat in my "I Hate Brand" chair, and begin to type.