#caleb cook

No. Please, please, do NOT do anything of the sort.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem real professional to me. 

Caleb’s biggest strength as a translator is also arguably his biggest weakness -- he has an excellent grasp not only of Japanese, but of English as well. meaning he’s very adept at translating Japanese dialogue into smooth-flowing, natural-sounding English. this is a different approach than what some fan translators use, because he doesn’t always go with the literal direct translation, e.g. “here’s exactly what this person said, word-for-word.” rather, his approach, which is the one most often used at the professional level, is to approximate what the person said, but in a way that flows naturally in the adapted language. e.g. “here’s how that person would have said this if they had been speaking in English.”

this type of translation has a lot of advantages, the biggest one being that the dialogue often sounds better/crisper/sharper than the somewhat-stilted dialogue often found in more literal translations. another advantage is that if done properly, this type of translation is easier to understand, because rather than trying to to reproduce exact sentences, the translator often strives for more simplicity while still preserving the essence of what the person was saying, and so the resulting dialogue gets the meaning across in a simpler way. one good example that shows how effective this style can be is “Catch-a-Kacchan”, which perfectly captures the playfulness and wordplay involved in the original dialogue by taking the pun that was originally used (see here for an explanation), and translating into something that is unique to the English language, but perfectly captures the spirit of the original. this is the kind of thing that Caleb is very good at, and it’s why he’s a professional.

however, the major flaw inherent to this style of translation is it relies very heavily on the translator’s understanding of what the original author intended to convey. you’re basically taking what they wrote and putting it into your own words. and so if there’s even the slightest difference between what you think Character X was saying, and what the author meant for Character X to say, the resulting translation is going to be off. this means the translator has to be dead-on in their interpretations 100% of the time in order for their translations to be 100% accurate. which basically means that they will never be completely accurate, seeing as that’s impossible.

so this is where the problem really lies, imo. to answer your original question anon, yes I have seen that take, and I do think he’s biased. but not any moreso than anyone else. every single person who reads the manga is biased in some way or other. we think the way that we read and interpret the series is the correct way, and that people who don’t see it that way are wrong. every single person has felt like this at some point or another. we all have our biases; they’re unavoidable, and the best we can do is try to be aware of them and avoid saying “this is objectively the only right way to interpret this” as much as possible.

so the problem isn’t really that Caleb is biased. the problem is that unlike most of us, his biases when left unchecked have a vastly wider reach than just about anyone else’s in the English fandom, because he is the official translator. and unfortunately, Viz’s particular style of translation means that even if Caleb tries his absolute best to be as objective as possible, some of his biases are still inevitably going to seep through anyway, because he’s essentially rewriting dialogue at times, and so his perception of the characters is going to affect that.

I know in recent weeks the discourse on this has mostly been about his translations of certain lines said by Best Jeanist, Dabi, and more recently Deku. but if we go back a bit, I think Bakugou is an even better example of this tbh. Caleb, like many people, wasn’t the biggest fan of him at first (i.e. he thought he was a giant asshole, which to be fair wasn’t exactly wrong), and as a result he was slower to pick up on the hints of his eventual redemption arc. he also didn’t quite grasp the nuances of Bakugou and Deku’s relationship at first. chapter 63 is a good example of this.

compare this to Fallen Angels’ version:

it’s abundantly clear, in the wake of Kacchan vs. Deku 2, that FA got it right here. this is a perfect example of how mastery of the Japanese language can still only get you so far. because Caleb’s understanding of Bakugou and Deku’s relationship was clouded by his biases, he went with words that lined up with his interpretation of them. “disgust” rather than “antipathy”; “inferiority” rather than “pursuit.” and of course, the completely warped Bakugou analysis of “awe, conceit, and rejection” rather than “fear, pride, and denial.” he literally couldn’t conceive of Bakugou fearing Deku in any way, so he went with a totally different word (which to be fair was still one of the possible meanings of the word used, but only rarely as far as I understand). also note the inherent put-down in the use of “conceit” rather than “pride.” and lastly, because he thinks Bakugou hates Deku’s guts, “rejection” rather than “denial.” so yeah. completely dropped the ball on that one lol. thankfully he has improved since then with regards to these two, though.