I Am Completely Serious

Heya. I stumbled across this while looking up some stuff about manga translation. This is such a great summary of what's wrong with the current pro translation industry! I keep thinking I should get back into reading manga in English (when I last did that regularly, Crying Freeman was what was on the shelves), but recent translations just can't hold my interest. I'd rather half understand good prose because my Japanese sucks than half understand dreadful prose because someone else's English sucks.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention one thing with regards to the original Japanese: It's customary to write most animal and plant names in katakana, not just this one. Whether people know the kanji will depend on 1. how common the word is and 2. how big of a nerd they are. You can't really tell just from the fact that it's usually written in katakana.

I wish more people who liked bad translations and more fans of foreign stuff in general would try their hand at translation some time. Even doing half a page of half-assed scanlation would teach most people more about the ridiculous idea of a single "correct" translation than a year of being ranted at by me. Personally, I'd gladly trade a little fidelity to the source for a lot of readability in English.