how accurate do you think translating manga is, when its done by mostly non-official groups?

well i say nothings always 100% accurate, even if its from an official branded company hiring proffessional translators. well, i mean its pretty understandable, considering the fact you have to be accustomed to both languages. i mean pretty much very small precentage of people are bilangual perfectly, and trilangual i say forget about it.

seeing popular mangas like naruto, bleach, or one piece being translated by different groups, and i noticed most of them always have between 5-10 statements that are almost completely different, in respect to context structures, grammer, vocabulary, and translation. i mean it is a big deal to me sometimes, considering i do get a different feeling in certain scenes even if the main point is not changed.

so my question is, is people aware of that? or do some people like changing around lines to make it sound better or perhaps explain it in their own context for the attempt to allow the readers to understand it better.

though i have to admit, i do quite get annoyed when people add in unnessacery profanities, just for lazy reasons being to make the statements give off a stronger feeling. like for example "im going to fucking kill that mother fucking ruler of the land to fucking save my fucking land, you sons of bitches", LOL, funny thing is, people actually do that alot...

The unofficial translators are 99% more accurate, 80% of the time, compared to the official translators.

Having read official and unofficial, you can tell how much the 'official' translations tend to curb humor to try and make it understandable to an american audience who might not read manga frequently or be knowledgeable of japanese culture. Also, official groups absolutely LOVE to make manga PG. It's not -quite- as bad as Anime, but... It's bad.

It's not necessarily because the official translators can't be accurate.. It's more because they choose not to. I speak from an American point of view at least. It could be different in France, Korea, etc.. And also depends on what company it is that's purchasing the license, and how they tend to address their targeted audience. However I'd definitely say that a lot of scanlators out there are the equals of, or better than those who do it as a job. Hell, they might even spend more time doing it ^.^.

well, im aware of that fact, just that i was discussing in respect to the accuracy in context to non-official translators, though i did mention official people are accurate in successful understanding of translating

Overall, I think it's pretty darn good. Of course there will be mistakes here & there; no matter how diligent people are, it happens. There are often no exact direct equivalents between languages, so there will be differences in interpretation & word choice - that doesn't necessarily make one group's version more or less accurate, though.

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

Yeah, you can't help with differences in word choice and stuff like that, but some American licensers absolutely butcher manga series. For example, the official Ikkitousen (or Battle Vixens) had unnecessary dialogue to make it dirty. My brother found references of ER and Star Trek (?). To tell you the truth, I couldn't read one volume of the offical releases. Then there's the puns in Tsubasa RC from volume 2. I would rather have the editors have the puns in roomaji and a note at the end instead of them writing, "A tudor who tooted a fruit tried to tutor two doodoos to toot."

...Sorry, I have a lot of...passion...when it comes to translating and adapting manga. I wish I was fluent in Japanese so I could read raws instead. Oh, and I also wish I could yell at (and maybe hit) whoever butchered my favorite series like One Piece.

Official translating = 70~80% accurate, I'd say less since they always try to fit it in context with their own standards and expectation rather than keeping it to the manga. These manga aren't meant to win any literary awards but that's what some publishers are doing.

Fan translation = 99% accuracy, manga is manga, the true spirit of it is what can be understood by all. Some groups tend to translate it as well as making it make sense without complicating the crap out of it.

Though you might see different versions of translated works out there but that's also because a lot of them can be interpreted in those ways. Not all of them have one direct to english meaning or phrasing.

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Hey Read Battle Vixens from TokyoPop

And then Read Vol 2 of Ikkitousen from Hawks

They are the same manga

but the Hawks Translations is way better

of course that Tokyopop version have some shitass that Adapts the text ( same as corrupt the manga to the core)

if hawks realese i'll prefer download from them

so for me Scanlations is like 99.99% Accurrate

I am currently learning Japanese (in my 3rd-year of learning) and the "official translations" are largely accurate, but they do change cultural references to American ones and I have seen little changes to stories, through translation, to add more suspense. As a reader myself, I don't like how a lot of the manga now is being translated into "teen American English". As the the fansubbed versions, those tend to be more authentic, but there are mistakes and misinterpretations from time to time. As another person previously commented, there are some words and phrases that are not directly translatable into English. Also, there are lots of subtleties in the Japanese languages that can be interpreted may ways depending on the person doing the interpretation. What they come up with will have a lot to do with how they feel about the story and the character for who they are translating the dialog. What is most annoying for me is not knowing which "I" a person is using since there is only one "I" in English, but many in Japanese.

For those of you out there that have the time, energy, money, and interest, I highly recommend actually learning Japanese so you can read the raws. For me it took about 2.5-years before I knew enough to actually get through a manga, but I really think for me it was worth it. Plus, the raw manga cost 50 - 60% less than the translated manga and you can keep up with your favorite series as they come out through the magazines which are amazingly cheap (3 - $7US for something that looks like a phonebook!!!) plus a lttle bit of postage if you know where to buy them.

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http://omaris-sister.blogspot.com/

as long as it isnt from tokyo pop its usually alright. Would prefer group scans but sometimes you just need to stomach the company releases. its a crime what TP did to Getbackers.

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"Let's put a smile on that face."

I think, it's best to not think too much about it. Then you would feel you need to get the "accurate" translation, which, I believe, is probably harder to find.

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Click the Pokemon.

I don't know about that, 'cause plenty of times the raw is a translation (I can be the only one that's seen lots of groups use Chinese raws.) so it's a translation of a translation, which always creates a measure of uncertainty. Plus debating accuracy is hard 'cause it gets into a question of feel vs. verbatim translation. I've seen some really lousy verbatim translations, 'cause often the diction/tone/style seems a little stiff/formal/off for the character in question.
For example, I find that Naruto and 'co sound more like 12 year olds in official releases than in fan translations 'cause my frame of reference is an American 12 year old, and word for word translations can't capture that 'cause a Japanese 12 year old and an American one are going to sound completely different.


I've found that when there's a phrase that seems a bit off in one groups scan, grabbing another groups version (very easy to do for popular shounen) works-I just figure the real meaning is somewhere between the two. Also use the real version for comparison -especially if the publisher is Del Ray or Dark Horse, 'cause those two tend to give lots of translators notes in the back.(Haven't picked up a Viz release in a while, so can't remember if they do.)


The only time I've found it really cringe-worthy was in the official Nana manga, and to be fair the translator did want to show that a punk band and 'co were not speaking in any form of proper Japanese, I just don't think outdated hipster was the way to go. I think it's an issue of trying to translate dialect and slang, which is almost impossible to pull off 'cause slang barely works outside of it's own context-in a foreign language it's completely laughable. Fans do some interesting things with dialect too - in some CCS scans Kero speaks with a Brooklyn accent 'cause that's how the translator chose to show an Osaka dialect, one of the big fansub groups did something strange with Gin's syntax for a similar reason.

First and foremost, "accurate" varies from person to person. One person may think that accurate is when the translation is roughly what is being said, while the next person will think that the translation accurate only when the translation is exactly being said. Is translating from a third language still "accurate" to you? Because translating Japanese -> Chinese/French/Italian/Spanish -> English loses some of the original meaning, regardless of what you may think. Do you still believe the third-hand translation is accurate to the original Japanese? What if the translator has very bad English, and the proofreaders have to do interpretations of nearly every line translated?

The statement that "Scanlations is like 99.99% Accurate" is very ignorant. Very, very ignorant. For one, do you know Japanese? Have you ever bothered checking the original Japanese Raw to what's been translated? If you haven't, don't speak. False assumptions kill kittens, you know?

All of the examples I mentioned above are situations I've experienced.

On a chapter of a series I worked on in November, we used a public translation for a series. The translator missed a bubble, so I asked a translator in my group. He decided to translate the whole page because he was "too lazy to figure which bubble was the exact one" and the whole translation was different. So I asked another translator, and he said that the second translation was correct whereas the first one was totally off. So I eventually got someone to check the script, and one third of the whole script was re-written because it was totally off. Thankfully for me, two shitty quality scans were released before my group's. Nice.

I also translate some series from French to English. I do acknowledge that the trans might be slightly off from the original Japanese, but for the most part, it's accurate. Not 100% accurate, but still accurate for the most part.

I've also had a translator who's English was pitiful. Absolutely pitiful. Everything had to be interpreted. I'm sure that some of the original meaning was lost in it because, like I said, it's a possible interpretation of what he said.

This is why I buy licensed manga. Sure, some companies like TokyoPop add in some non-sense crap in their volumes, but, again, for the most part, it's accurate. The story is told fine. You have to remember, they are paid, professional translators.

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-GGpX

I run Illuminati-Manga. You're welcome.

I agree that no manga translating can be 99% accurate. Cultural differences, idioms etc are very hard to translate without losing some of the meaning. Furthermore, translating also depends on the individual...for sentences that are vague or have some profound terms, different translators will interpret it in their own way.

Chinese raws are commonly available, especially more popular titles or titles by popular mangaka. There are a huge amount of Chinese manga hosting sites, so it's not surprising that groups use Chinese raws since they are easily available (and Chinese version is published more quickly than other languages). I'm a Chinese translator who can read a wee bit of hiragana and kanji, sometimes when I get to see the Japanese version of the manga, I'll be surprised at how the sentence structure changed in the Chinese version (even though I feel that they could've kept it the same way if they wanted, but the sentence sounds nicer when it's changed). And most likely the Chinese translator will just translate follow the Chinese version...also, terms in Japanese such as -kun, -san, -sama etc don't really have a Chinese or English equivalent.

Official translations may be tweaked to suit to their audience...I'm all for keeping as close to the original as possible, but perhaps it'll be too much trouble for the translators to keep explaining all the Japanese terms, so the companies just use what they think is suitable. Once I read a Chinese version of the manga and an official English translation, and the meaning of the bubbles sometimes differed greatly, but I could understand the official translation better than the Chinese version.

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Lenalee Galore (by bs_mlsm)

I have to say that it depends on the group. I sometimes check the translations in the scans vs. the raws, just out of curiosity. I've seen groups with almost-perfect translations, (surprisingly, there are a lot of groups who do XD), but I've also seen groups where translations are only 50-70% correct. It's scary to see manga being released with an accuracy that low. You just have to be wary of which group you're reading from. From my experience, if it seems like a respectable enough group, the translations turn out pretty well.

Of course as a J-E translator myself, I make sure everything is as accurate as can be. When confronted with something that can't be directly translated into English, I go for the "feel" rather than the "literal" translation. (some groups I've been in do the opposite) We don't get paid to do this, but I think it's still a responsibility of ours to deliver the most accurate translation possible, and I hate seeing groups releasing chapters with obvious translation errors >___<

Last edited by Wild Star at 12:29 am, Dec 31 2007

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“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.”

I hear where you're coming from, but one look at TP's version of Ikkitousen can make anyone's reslove crumble. I can't read a single word of anything japanese but even I could tell it was butchered.

Also just an aside; how long did it take Del Rey to fix "Southern Master" after everyone in the scan reading community told them it was wrong. I always thought that was hilarious that a bunch of know-nothing's told them it was wrong and they actually fixed it in later volumes. =D


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Sarcasm just doesn't work over the internet.