7 ms·

As a manga reader, one of my biggest frustrations is with censorship. 10 years ago, Viz and Tokyopop dominated English published manga, yet they each had very

As a manga reader, one of my biggest frustrations is with censorship. 10 years ago, Viz and Tokyopop dominated English published manga, yet they each had very spotty records with regards to translation quality, editorial decisions and censorship. I didn’t want to read Full Metal Alchemist or Dragon Ball or Initial D knowing that random instances of blood would be erased or religious symbols replaced or weird editorial changes would change the tone. And unlike the edited anime airing on TV, there was no “uncut” version I could buy and even finding lists of changes was difficult. So, I kind of learned to avoid buying North American manga. Only recently have I started buying some releases from publishers like Kodansha and Dark Horse that, from what I can tell, have a better track record. But ultimately that’s the problem - you shouldn’t make a customer guess what they’re getting. I want to collect way more manga than I do, but my confidence in the industry was shaken very early on, and that’s hard to gain back.

HalcyonicStorm 4y ago
I pay Viz and Shonen Jump as a subscriber in their apps. Whats frustrating is that I only get a tiny subset of their catalogue. I can't ready some of their older series. I'm even willing to buy them if given the option but I'm only offered new stuff that I'm not really interested in.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  It is frustrating when you want to do the right thing and pay for a product that you have great demand for, but which nobody is offering to you.
cogman10 4y ago
Translation really is a major problem with Anime/manga. The unfortunate thing is the pirated versions often have better translations and translation notes vs the official release. Why? Because it's mostly just a bunch of nerds trying to share what they love. It seems like the studio translators are very often just trying to churn out a translation as fast as possible. It gets a little better when dubbing is involved (because someone ACTUALLY has to speak the line, which makes bad translations/awkward phrases a lot more apparent)... But, like you said, there's often a lot of editorial choices to make sure things are palatable to the widest portion of the English speaking population.
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  Ironically, I think deepL has made this better for novels. It's shocking how good human-edited deepL transitions can be, and how fast they can be to produce compared to fully human translation. Before anyone brings it up, it doesn't remove the need for a bilingual translator. They still have to do (sometimes significant) editing.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  It might be unfair to generalize, because there are some shoddy fan translations out there, and I’m sure there are some studios / professionals that do great work. But it can be jarring to see fan-translated versions put more care into preserving intent and readability in translations, and even preserve artwork like onomatopoeia while also providing context, only to see what appears to be sloppy disregard in the official release. It feels like an industry where you as the customer never really know what you’re getting, because the standards are all over the place. For all the legit criticisms, anime has at least generally evolved to have a minimum acceptable standard by which most studios operate, with considerable blow back when that doesn’t happen (see early Netflix dubs that they later re-dubbed based on complaints). The same can’t be said for manga, afaik.
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    Manga does pretty well with fanlations since there is less overall text. It's when you get into webnovels / light novels things get hairy and you pretty much have to lower your standard to the proper nouns being consistent and nothing else. But the alternative is to wait 2+ years for yen press to ship (Overlord addict here).
    - falcolas 4y ago
      As a former reader of "The Irregular in Magic High School", official translations are not proof against poor quality. I get it, the original author used lots of arcane and formal Japanese, but good lord it was terrible.
  - klodolph 4y ago
subjectsigma 4y ago
This is becoming even more widespread despite immense negative feedback from fans and it is really concerning. Companies like Crunchyroll carry around a laundry list of translation (as well as other) controversies but for most American anime fans there is no alternative, you either watch on Crunchy or you don't watch at all.
- tarentel 4y ago
  Or you steal it. It's really weird how some of the companies mentioned in this thread are run. I like this stuff, have the money, and I am more than willing to pay, but as others pointed out the quality is usually much worse than the same thing posted online for free. Whether fixing these quality issues would lead to less piracy overall I don't know but they'd have at least one more customer in me. Also, wrt to physical manga, availability is often time an issue. I don't want to read everything on a screen.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  I can think of at least 3 major groups doing anime in the USA: 1. Crunchyroll (aka: merged with Funimation) 2. Netflix 3. Hidive (aka: Sentai Filmworks) Amazon Prime tried to do a thing (and still holds some licenses), but I don't think they have done any recent anime. (Especially with the stupid "double-paywall", requiring both Amazon Prime + an anime-specific subscription to get access... it was doomed from the start by bad business decisions)
  - astrange 4y ago
    Btw, HiDive/Sentai are owned by AMC now. There's also Retrocrush and Discotek.
19870213 4y ago
Don't get me started on the original (the later omnibus is way better) official english publication for Inuyasha... even ignoring flipping the reading direction and not updating references to which hand someone is using (so referring in text to a right hand, but visually a left hand) the amount of translation errors and swapped text bubbles was just maddening.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bananamerica 4y ago
You're in north America, I'm in Brazil. I have HBO Max, and I know for a fact that even on HBO dubs and subtitles are heavily censored. If you don't speak English, you'll think that the harshest word in The Sopranos is "damn".
babypuncher 4y ago
How prevalent is censorship of imported anime/manga today? American media in general has become far less puritanical over the last 15 years. I can't imagine those changes being made to Fullmetal Alchemist today.

HalcyonicStorm 4y ago

I pay Viz and Shonen Jump as a subscriber in their apps. Whats frustrating is that I only get a tiny subset of their catalogue. I can't ready some of their older series. I'm even willing to buy them if given the option but I'm only offered new stuff that I'm not really interested in.

kiawe_fire 4y ago
It is frustrating when you want to do the right thing and pay for a product that you have great demand for, but which nobody is offering to you.

cogman10 4y ago

Translation really is a major problem with Anime/manga. The unfortunate thing is the pirated versions often have better translations and translation notes vs the official release. Why? Because it's mostly just a bunch of nerds trying to share what they love. It seems like the studio translators are very often just trying to churn out a translation as fast as possible. It gets a little better when dubbing is involved (because someone ACTUALLY has to speak the line, which makes bad translations/awkward phrases a lot more apparent)... But, like you said, there's often a lot of editorial choices to make sure things are palatable to the widest portion of the English speaking population.

Blackthorn 4y ago
Ironically, I think deepL has made this better for novels. It's shocking how good human-edited deepL transitions can be, and how fast they can be to produce compared to fully human translation. Before anyone brings it up, it doesn't remove the need for a bilingual translator. They still have to do (sometimes significant) editing.
kiawe_fire 4y ago
It might be unfair to generalize, because there are some shoddy fan translations out there, and I’m sure there are some studios / professionals that do great work. But it can be jarring to see fan-translated versions put more care into preserving intent and readability in translations, and even preserve artwork like onomatopoeia while also providing context, only to see what appears to be sloppy disregard in the official release. It feels like an industry where you as the customer never really know what you’re getting, because the standards are all over the place. For all the legit criticisms, anime has at least generally evolved to have a minimum acceptable standard by which most studios operate, with considerable blow back when that doesn’t happen (see early Netflix dubs that they later re-dubbed based on complaints). The same can’t be said for manga, afaik.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Manga does pretty well with fanlations since there is less overall text. It's when you get into webnovels / light novels things get hairy and you pretty much have to lower your standard to the proper nouns being consistent and nothing else. But the alternative is to wait 2+ years for yen press to ship (Overlord addict here).
  - falcolas 4y ago
    As a former reader of "The Irregular in Magic High School", official translations are not proof against poor quality. I get it, the original author used lots of arcane and formal Japanese, but good lord it was terrible.
- klodolph 4y ago

subjectsigma 4y ago

This is becoming even more widespread despite immense negative feedback from fans and it is really concerning. Companies like Crunchyroll carry around a laundry list of translation (as well as other) controversies but for most American anime fans there is no alternative, you either watch on Crunchy or you don't watch at all.

tarentel 4y ago
Or you steal it. It's really weird how some of the companies mentioned in this thread are run. I like this stuff, have the money, and I am more than willing to pay, but as others pointed out the quality is usually much worse than the same thing posted online for free. Whether fixing these quality issues would lead to less piracy overall I don't know but they'd have at least one more customer in me. Also, wrt to physical manga, availability is often time an issue. I don't want to read everything on a screen.
dragontamer 4y ago
I can think of at least 3 major groups doing anime in the USA: 1. Crunchyroll (aka: merged with Funimation) 2. Netflix 3. Hidive (aka: Sentai Filmworks) Amazon Prime tried to do a thing (and still holds some licenses), but I don't think they have done any recent anime. (Especially with the stupid "double-paywall", requiring both Amazon Prime + an anime-specific subscription to get access... it was doomed from the start by bad business decisions)
- astrange 4y ago
  Btw, HiDive/Sentai are owned by AMC now. There's also Retrocrush and Discotek.

19870213 4y ago

Don't get me started on the original (the later omnibus is way better) official english publication for Inuyasha... even ignoring flipping the reading direction and not updating references to which hand someone is using (so referring in text to a right hand, but visually a left hand) the amount of translation errors and swapped text bubbles was just maddening.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bananamerica 4y ago

You're in north America, I'm in Brazil. I have HBO Max, and I know for a fact that even on HBO dubs and subtitles are heavily censored. If you don't speak English, you'll think that the harshest word in The Sopranos is "damn".

babypuncher 4y ago

How prevalent is censorship of imported anime/manga today? American media in general has become far less puritanical over the last 15 years. I can't imagine those changes being made to Fullmetal Alchemist today.