General & Others Viz vs scans
- Thread starter PrimordialGod95
- Start date
Viz is overall more accurate but they still make some occasional strange/questionable choices on how to translate certain colloquialisms, dialogue, titles, names, etc. Back before Stephen Paul got hired as the official translator, he ran a blog where he would translate the manga in script format that people would use for "more accurate" translations compared to the officials/scans, and he is or at least was a fan who cared about doing a good job. Things like translating "武神" as "Godhead" instead of "War God" are just incorrect both in Japanese and English, but I think the error in this case is in Paul's understanding of English, not Japanese. He's trying to get across the Japanese pun of Bushin in the kanji meaning "War God" but also sounding like the word for "minister of military affairs" but his mistake is that "Godhead" means "literally the source of all divinity in the universe" and not "a god who is the head of a department"
TCB is better than OPScans at least. But TCB does more than just make questionable translation choices, they will often just not translate something at all and replace it with something they wrote themselves, like with Buggy getting "Can't Go On The Island Disease" and making it sound like a lie/joke instead of Buggy legitimately getting extremely sick.
Or translate something completely wrong on a grammatical level because they don't actually understand Japanese, like when Sentomaru betrayed the marines and they locked him out of communications by looping den den mushi signals so he could no longer speak to anyone or get updates and TCB translated it as "The navy's still trying to reach me! They don't realize I'm already a rebel!" even though the scene was specifically about the Marines knowing he was a rebel and locking him out of comms because of it.
Or even smaller misunderstandings of text that cause issues like in the beginning of Elbaf when TCB translated a line where after they beat up the giant cat luffy asked "Do you think he'll be ok?" and TCB translated it as "I wonder how this guy will taste." (This line seems to have gotten completely ignored by Viz. I might also be translating it wrong because I don't know Japanese either. He might have been asking Zoro if he wanted to eat it but then saying he was full himself.) They also remove jokes from the original like Bepo's running gag of saying "aye aye captain" all the time even when he disagrees with Law because they think it's too confusing.
They also fuck up names just as much as Viz does like with the reveal of "Clou D. Clover" which is spelled and pronounced the same as "Cloud" in japanese. "クラウド" or ku-ra-u-do. Clover's name is "クラウ D." TCB pulled some nonsense out of their asses about Irish mythology and tried to rename him "Claíomh" of all things, which is not prononced "kurau", it's pronounced "Clive" or "Cleave" which would be represented as クライヴ/ku-ra-i-vu or クリーヴ/ku-rii-vu
TCB is better than OPScans at least. But TCB does more than just make questionable translation choices, they will often just not translate something at all and replace it with something they wrote themselves, like with Buggy getting "Can't Go On The Island Disease" and making it sound like a lie/joke instead of Buggy legitimately getting extremely sick.
Or translate something completely wrong on a grammatical level because they don't actually understand Japanese, like when Sentomaru betrayed the marines and they locked him out of communications by looping den den mushi signals so he could no longer speak to anyone or get updates and TCB translated it as "The navy's still trying to reach me! They don't realize I'm already a rebel!" even though the scene was specifically about the Marines knowing he was a rebel and locking him out of comms because of it.
Or even smaller misunderstandings of text that cause issues like in the beginning of Elbaf when TCB translated a line where after they beat up the giant cat luffy asked "Do you think he'll be ok?" and TCB translated it as "I wonder how this guy will taste." (This line seems to have gotten completely ignored by Viz. I might also be translating it wrong because I don't know Japanese either. He might have been asking Zoro if he wanted to eat it but then saying he was full himself.) They also remove jokes from the original like Bepo's running gag of saying "aye aye captain" all the time even when he disagrees with Law because they think it's too confusing.
They also fuck up names just as much as Viz does like with the reveal of "Clou D. Clover" which is spelled and pronounced the same as "Cloud" in japanese. "クラウド" or ku-ra-u-do. Clover's name is "クラウ D." TCB pulled some nonsense out of their asses about Irish mythology and tried to rename him "Claíomh" of all things, which is not prononced "kurau", it's pronounced "Clive" or "Cleave" which would be represented as クライヴ/ku-ra-i-vu or クリーヴ/ku-rii-vu
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Viz have always taken creative liberties.
imo that's kind of to be expected from the type of Western weeaboos that would flock to translating Japanese for a living. Japanese is a contextual language that can be interpreted many ways in English.
The Japanese do have common phrases however that usually mean something specific because they're used in that specific context. A lot of that gets lost in translations due to cultural differences.
imo that's kind of to be expected from the type of Western weeaboos that would flock to translating Japanese for a living. Japanese is a contextual language that can be interpreted many ways in English.
The Japanese do have common phrases however that usually mean something specific because they're used in that specific context. A lot of that gets lost in translations due to cultural differences.
