/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>44478179
I unironically and firmly believe the fault for the Whedonization of the text must lie with the editor, not the translator, because there is no way even a semicompetent translator who actually speaks Japanese and passed some kind of TL test that would be part of any job application would fail to recognize the importance of word choice and stylistic flair.
I posted this in another thread but a QA failure in a volume of Strike the Blood gives us a rare sneak peak into the editing process at Yen Press, you can see both the edited and the unedited forms of a certain passage in the script and the way the editing tries to inject more "personality" into the character voicing.
Which isn't an inherently bad thing, because personality in voicing is less formalised and harder to get right in English than in Japanese, but it's a recipe for disaster if your editor neither knows any Japanese nor actually talks to your translator, which is the norm in for yen and shitseas.

I do want to take a moment to point out that a lot of tone and voice issues can often be put down to the fact that at 7SE and YP, the editors neither need to know a single word of Japanese nor need to ask the translator if any rewording or cuts they are doing is creating translation errors.
Thanks to a massive failure of quality control on Yen's part leaving both the edited and unedited forms of one particular passage in a volume of Strike the Blood, you can actually have a brief insight into the editing process and how much an editor can monkey with the text without any Japanese knowledge at all guiding them.