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Originally Posted by areaseven

I'm personally not gonna argue on which is better, but there have been numerous occasions when Over-Time botched some translations. One classic example is episode 26 of Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, where the Hurricanegers quizzed Satarakura Jr. Nanami-chan saying, "The bird is the word," made absolutely no sense compared to TV-Nihon's translation of sekitori (a class of Sumo wrestler) being "a fat bird".

With stuff like the elaborate puns and jokes in some of these shows Over-Time's approach is to try and make a working joke in English, even if they have to take more liberties with the exact phrasing. TVN favors keeping the phrasing, often at the expense of the joke losing any sense of humor. There was a lot of this in Fourze, especially the Cancer episodes.

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And so what if TV-Nihon leaves some words untranslated? There are some of us who want to learn Japanese, anyway. If some words bother you, either get a dictionary or just don't watch their fansubs at all.

The purpose of translation is to make a foreign work accessible to an audience that doesn't speak that language. If you are arbitrarily leaving part of the text in the original language then you are working against that goal of accessibility. If you want to learn Japanese then study Japanese. You aren't going to become fluent in the language just because you had to look up what "itadakimasu" or "ore sanjou" mean.

A case in point: I watched TVN's Dairanger subs awhile ago. Every time Jin was in an episode there was a lot of talk about "kenpou" and "kensei," with no explanation of what those terms mean. Now I'm smart enough to figure them out through context, but I shouldn't have to do that. A translation should be a translation, not a partial translation except for the things that look cooler in Japanese. There is no reason why you need to say "kenpou" instead of "martial arts" or "kensei" instead of any of the dozens of English words that mean "warrior." It's just masking laziness under the guise of pretending that some words can't even be approximated in English.