/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>17119943
You're not completely incorrect, but you have to remember that outside of actual respectable literature most of the Japanese media consumed outside Japan is consumed by a fairly small demographic who understands that there are concepts that can be translated to English fairly accurately, and some that need some extra explanation to get the intended meaning across. The point should not be to masturbate about how intimately you know Japanese and make what you're "translating" look like it was produced by Hollywood, but to convey the message intended by the original creator as well as possible, taking into account cultural differences where they may exist. The trouble comes when you have companies like Yen Press, who not only translate, but also localize for a general audience rather than the demographic actually interested in the product. Then the core audience is alienated and whether the relatively niche work can appeal to a general audience is a gamble.

Trust me, I translate things from a far less vague and far more obscure non-Indo-European language than Japanese, and even then there are a lot of things that simply cannot be conveyed without either losing the original meaning or explaining what the fuck is going on, despite the fact that the majority of my small audience is likely unaware of them. Comparing "nakama," which has several fairly accurate parallel words in English, to "tsundere" which is both very specific and does not cleanly translate, is asinine. I'm not going to forgive shit like pic related (though I did generally prefer [mahou] over the R1 subs) but it's not 1990 anymore. People are willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of American-ness to better understand the material.