#ch 1112

i think that these days the viz translation is basically fine. it conveys what it needs to. often there's little quibbles i have with it, like little differences in how i might personally have phrased things, but i certainly don't think i could do better at translating whole chapters of manga on a week-to-week basis.

my new chapter reading process now that i'm properly caught up again starts with reading the raws in japanese, and then i skim both the unofficial scans from tcb and the official release from viz when they each come out to see what choices they made. doing this, i do see more mistakes in the unofficial scans than in the official viz translation. and that makes sense! the people who do the official viz translation are professionals who are being paid for their work and they have more time to do it.

like, just for one low-stakes recent example i noticed, in chapter 1112, the unofficial scans (left) messed up this panel by attributing both of the lines on the left to vegapunk, when in fact the second one should be spoken by pythagoras (something made clear in japanese by his distinctively polite speech pattern), a mistake which was corrected in the official (right).

and i'm not saying this to insult the scanlators, by any means! it's something i've wanted to get into myself, and they provide a really cool and valuable service largely for free as volunteers. i love scanlators. but if you are wanting the most accurate experience of the current manga as an english-speaker, the official is probably still your best bet.

however, from what i've seen (bearing in mind that my actual experience with the official translation is pretty limited, i mostly only look at it when people ask me questions or i have a specific curiosity) i do think the official translation has a lot more problems in the older arcs, roughly from east blue through, like, skypiea?

i've seen or been asked about a pretty substantial number of mistranslated lines and questionable choices from that stretch of the manga. for just one example, there's this one from drum i posted about a couple months ago, where a line that's quite thematically important to the series as a whole got cut up because of the translation's former unwillingness to use the word 'god' (also very visible and annoying in skypiea).

in York's talk with Mars, she says something that the unofficial translation put as "we don't wanna rack up any more sins. our relationship is already troubled enough." what do you think she's referring to?? what does she say in the original?

[chapter 1112 spoilers!]

so as i understand it, she's basically saying that the actions of the other vegapunks risk endangering her own relationship with the five elder stars.

the word she uses that's translated by the unofficial scans as 'sin' is 罪/tsumi, which can also mean 'crime' (it's one of the central words of enies lobby, which is why a lot of translations of that arc use 'sin' and 'crime' interchangeably) and then the verb is the passive form of 重ねる/kasaneru, meaning 'to pile up.' so the first half of this phrase is basically "if these crimes are allowed to keep piling up..."

This is…curious to me, because the panel directly after implies that Stussy’s staying behind to lower the barrier but that in and of itself isn’t inherently dangerous since that barrier’s been going on and off for the entire arc, so the gravity with which she’s saying this seems to imply that either she’s more wounded than she’s letting on or else there’s something else she’s planning to do.

Kaku: *sees the final form of a guy that’s technically one of his bosses*

Kaku: ew. gross.