a list of issues u have w/ the official translation would be epic yes. tyt if u want tho ik ur busy
So. Oof. This ended up being kind of long mostly bc I felt the need to explain. The tl;dr is a lot of choices ended up being bad within a larger thematic/narrative context, but weren’t incorrect translations Per Se. Most of these are heavily context dependent, but I can’t explain them fully without spoilers. For that reason... if you want to know more, please message me about any of these after having finished. I’ll be happy to explain.
Vaguely in order of appearance. Keep in mind I cannot fully explain some because spoilers but here’s the rundown:
- Tomo Kimura’s prose is just kind of weak tbh but awkward phrasing doesn’t equal a bad translation and it’s not gratuitous it’s mostly I just have writer vision on always
- At the start of the story one of the antagonists, Zwei, is referred to with male pronouns because she uses the usually male first person pronoun 僕. This got corrected in the rerelease and normally I wouldn’t care EXCEPT later on when it is made explicitly clear that Zwei is in fact a woman the translation notes insinuate she was intended as a trans man. She was not. The nuances of this are pretty important to understand and why she uses the first person pronoun 僕 is a major part of understanding her character but... it’s just... not mentioned in the official translation. Basically it’s a case of the official TL declaring a female character to be male because she is somewhat GNC and I think it’s a pretty poor thing to do with this character in particular.
- One of the main characters just straight up gets referred to by a homophobic slur when the original text said something along the lines of “timid.” I’d be willing to let this slide given that the word itself is... used casually pretty often? It always has homophobic connotations but it’s not always used to refer to gay people and ig you could argue isn’t always used negatively. Except the character it’s used for is. Really obviously supposed to be gay. Technically it’s not explicit, in the sense that well his complete disinterest in women throughout his life is a running gag and most of his character is built around his intense devotion for another male character and it really is some of the most overt gay coding I’ve ever seen such that it’s basically impossible to miss but. Yeah they called him a homophobic slur in the official TL. And then when it turns out the character was actually supposed to be gay they just left it in.
- Echo does not use first person pronouns in the original text for nearly her entire arc, and this is meant to be symbolic. However, in English, she switches between referring to herself in the third person and using first person pronouns. I can’t really elaborate on this without spoilers.
- A character who in fact did not lie directly to the protagonists in the original text is made out to have lied in English, by virtue of pronouns that were omitted in the original being inserted into the English translation in a way that made the not-technically-false statement an outright lie. For example-- and this is not a direct quote, deliberately, for spoilers-- a sentence that does not include pronouns for the subject such as “and you were attacked” being... definitely true and what happened, versus “and he attacked you,” which is a lie. The latter translation isn’t technically incorrect, except for how it misrepresents the author’s intent.
I’m expanding way too much on this but this bothers me primarily because of how it affects the characterization of A. the speaker character and B. another character who accuses them of having lied to him. The latter character has much of his arc built around his refusal to accept realities which conflict with his preestablished worldviews, to the point of acting in direct opposition to stated, known realities because they go against his assumptions. His insistence upon having been lied to was a part of this, and I think having actually been lied to weakens this point.
- A few other instances that are sort of similar which make it seem like the story was retconned/narration lied to you in English but were ambiguous statements in Japanese. I can’t tell you which they were specifically but you’d probably only notice if you reread, in which case I feel like most of them would be obvious. In addition, some other statements which have definite intended subjects but which leave out pronouns for symbolic reasons (i.e. within textual context referring to one character, but within a thematic context referring to another)
- An instance alluding to same sex attraction by one of the characters during his introduction gets made more ambiguous. In the fan translation this line was rendered as (paraphrasing) “wow, didn’t know you swung that way.” In the official translation, it gets rendered as (again, paraphrasing) “wow, didn’t know you were that interested in him.” This is in relation to another gay coded character. PH has a few of those. L
That’s what immediately comes to mind and what I’m 100% sure about. The rest is mostly... I can’t tell if the original text was like that or if the translation put it in, because it seems kind of weird knowing how Japanese works, but it could’ve been like that already, so who knows. Again please message me after having read it if you’re still curious about any of these points... I will explain. Ok thank you <3
