im thinking anime and manga here for this one. and have to say things that dont translate well.

but think this. shana, the anime, had shut up said 3 times rapid fire, and in english that realy sounds horrible, but in japanese it sounds allot better. but if i read it it also sounds alot better than when said.

or lets go negima baka rangers. yea, we know baka is idiot, but baka rangers or idiot rangers, which one would you rather have? in negima !? they went dummy force, not bad, not great, and conveys the meaning.

personally, i dont want to see crap like the "just as planed" crap happen, where people left plan untranslated and gave use a small japanese lesson, or some of the more horrendous translators, not translating sentences and calling the people watching it retarded for not knowing what it means.

basicly i think there are tiers of manga and anime, there is the my first anime /manga tier, there is the more advanced tier. the my first anime is like naruto, bleach, onepiece, and other "faimaly" orientated anime that get MASS appeal.

these ones need to have words translated and explained like nakama, and other similar words, things most of us take for granted that we know.

and other seriese, that arent a my first anime, donet need them translated, or even brought up as this is something you dont know.

Stuff that doesn't translate well only.
I really hate it when some scanlator stay to much japanese word in the scanlation and make the manga hard to read.

Full Japanese is fine for me.

But assuming I was illiterate but have limited familiarity with the culture through other media, then everything until the harder stuff that gets lost in translation is preferred. Footnotes can go at the end of a release for the uninformed.

If you want a great example of a balanced but accurate translation job, look no further than Del Rey's professional work on Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. I work professionally in video game localization, and my role model is this particular series, as far as dialogue goes.

Scanlation group Evil Genius has also done an excellent job working on Berserk. Their chapters are worth a read. In terms of localization, they would actually be better than Del Rey if they went commercial, IMO.

Complete localization for me, including sound efects and everything. I don't even mind if they change the names or flip it to be read from left to right.

I am surprised to see not many people voted for "None". I hate when I see bunch of japanese words in manga that was supposed to be translated to english or some other language. Honorfics too, there is an equivalent for almost every honorific in every language, yet so many companies or scanlation groups just leave them there. I think Viz and Dark Horse are doing good job with localizing and changing sound efects, while Del Rey for example, likes to leave honofirics and other japanese words in manga and than explain them in translation notes at the end. Don't get me wrong, I like Del Rey, they had some great titles, but stuff they do sometimes just annoys me. Some people think there are words that could be hard to translate. Well, a good translator will find a way to translate it, even if he had to change some stuff or lose a thing or two in a process.

If I wanted to learn japanese, I would take classes for that.

The only one that really gets to me is name changes. I don't like when people just leave random words untranslated. I mean yeah I picked upa handful of short phrases from that sort of thing, but that's not what I'm reading for. Things like food, cultural stuff and names need to be left alone though.

Quote from Lord Jure

I am surprised to see not many people voted for "None". I hate when I see bunch of japanese words in manga that was supposed to be translated to english or some other language. Honorfics too, there is an equivalent for almost every honorific in every language, yet so many companies or scanlation groups just leave them there. I think Viz and Dark Horse are doing good job with localizing and changing sound efects, while Del Rey for example, likes to leave honofirics and other japanese words in manga and than explain them in translation notes at the end. Don't get me wrong, I like Del Rey, they had some great titles, but stuff they do sometimes just annoys me. Some people think there are words that could be hard to translate. Well, a good translator will find a way to translate it, even if he had to change some stuff or lose a thing or two in a process.

If I wanted to learn japanese, I would take classes for that.

Despite what I said, I have to agree with you on the honorifics and stuff. I have it when translators leave Japanese in that they easily could have translated. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is the only Del Rey series I've ever read, and it's generally a great job all around. But of course, the quality can vary with the actual translator.

In one volume of TRC, for example, a character ratttles off several long (and misworded) Japanese tongue twisters. Obviously that has no way of going into English directly, so you have to come up with an English alternative (easy enough) and explain it in footnotes if you're feeling charitable. Puns and tongue twisters are fine, but when it comes to cultural references that are specific to Japan, it doesn't make sense to change a lot of things unless you happen to be working for a company in the 1980s and assume that your audience is a bunch of uncultured idiots. Which many of us, I hope, are not. /rant

tl;dr, A good translator will find a way to translate the text in a way that works in the target language, while retaining as much accuracy as possible. This is the job of the translator. Del Rey can get away with this in manga because it's just text and you can add notes in the end. With anime and video games and the like, the focus is going to be much more on localization to a specific target audience, rather than pure accuracy. This is the job of the editor.

One final note is that many of these people saying that they want words left in are just typical Japanophiles that think just because it's Japanese, it's better (and this is the type of translation I think you take issue with). They should go learn Japanese before they think they're qualified to comment on that, because every time I see "biribiri" left untranslated when my friend watches subbed Index, I want to kick a weeaboo in the face.

Honorifics, names, places, etc etc should be left in the original Japanese. It always bugs me when I read a scan and they leave words like baka and hentai. I know what they mean, but why leave them in? It's stupid, and one of the main reasons I hate scans. Also, sound effects should be always be translated. Properly. Yen Press likes to translate the sound effects into romanji, then English in brackets. If the sound effect is repeated often then they only translate it once. So annoying. We don't need to know what the Japanese equivalent for "smack" is.

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I just lol'd at the results of this poll.

The whole thing needs to be translated properly in my opinion. That's why it's called "translated". I am not reading manga to learn japanese after all. I hate when scanlation groups insist on leaving words like baka, itadakimasu, konichiwa, hentai, [insert random name of a place here] and at the bottom of the page it says "bla bla actally means "green forest" etc etc.
Then just translate the damn thing to green forest oh my god it makes my blood boil, literally.

Well, I don't mind the biribiri, because say... "Kzkcht!" would be hard to have as a name. I mean japanese sound effects tend to be more... pronounceable. Since katakana makes them include things like vowels.

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This poll's over

A just ruler amongst tyrants