so I saw some people claim the "only one man" is a mistranslation and that eruris spread it on purpose as misinformation because the original panel says something like "isn't there someone i can bring back" and I'm just wondering why only one man is suppose to be a mistranslation when it basically means the same, idk who translated it as "only one man", but imo it fits since levi is only thinking about erwin anyways right? but yeah I'd be curious if you know who originally translated it as only one man and why because we all know the official translations aren't always 100% accurate and not just in AOT
Tumblr now adds dates to the asks in my inbox so I can feel even more guilty about how long it takes me to answer them 😭 This one has been languishing since July and I’ve been meaning to answer it ever since. I’m so sorry it’s taken me so long Anon.
Anyway, I do actually remember seeing some drama about this on twitter back in the summer. The whole thing made me laugh because the screen cap that was being touted around as proof of Eruris duplicity is actually one of mine.
I capped this from one of the spoilers that came out in April 2016. I am not responsible for the translation though. I don’t know who actually translated this because I can't find the original and there were multiple accounts releasing spoilers and translations at the time plus at least two groups, if not more, doing full scanlations. It wasn’t uncommon for multiple and often quite different translations to appear, as more manga panels were leaked and the full raws finally became available. It’s also worth noting that some of the translations were from Chinese and some from the original Japanese. As you can imagine, the translation of certain panels often became very contentious, particularly when only fragments of the chapter were available. If you look back at the archive of the #snk 81 tag on my tumblr blog you can actually see the spoilers being released along with the various translations. I'm not quite sure when this particular version first appeared but I think @yusenki was one of the first to post a spoiler translation. You can see that they translated this panel as “Anybody…only one person”. There are various versions of this panel that I collected over the course of the week, including this one from a French translation of the chapter.
This isn’t the first time questions about the alleged “mistranslation” of this panel have come up. I spoke to @tsuki-no-ura about this and they pointed me to these two asks (X, X) they’ve already answered on the subject. Here’s the most relevant part.
So although this translation is worded slightly differently, Erwin is right there in every version and the meaning is still clear - Levi can only bring back one person with the serum, and it’s unambiguous who he is thinking of. @tsuki-no-ura has also made some other interesting points about how these panels have been translated, but I’ll leave them to add more if they have time.
Hope that answers your question Anon, and apologies once again for taking so long to reply.
