[Den-O]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

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.


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.

But it has nothing to do with laziness when contextually speaking those words make more sense in their original language.