#I think I might actually be a bit more known *for* the Dungeon Meshi art than the MDZS content at this point.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Have you watched Dungeon Meshi yet? I feel like you would LOVE dungeon meshi (see also: I think it would give you obsessive brain rot)

I uh... um... yeah I like Dungeon Meshi a normal amount.

[mask131]

Alright so there seems to be a slight misunderstanding in the reblogs...

I am not saying "ogre" can't be translated as "oni". In fact, I would encourage and understand "ogre" being translated by "oni" in Japanese, because the "oni" does fulfill well the archetype and idea of what an ogre is. But I am getting a bit annoyed at how the Japanese word "oni" is being translated by American editors (and commonly called by American fans) an "ogre", because while an "ogre" is indeed a part of what is the oni, the oni is far more than a simple ogre. Oni are ogres the same way they can be trolls, and demons, or even angels. To be translating "oni" as "ogre" means you take their more folktale approach as "antagonists of folktales or fairytales, brutal monstrous entities who eat people, get killed by heroes" ; but what to make of the oni who are the guardian of the underworld, or the various spirits who torment and torture the damned in the Buddhist hells?

You know, if one retells the story of Momotaro going to Onigashima, the Oni Island, yes there "oni" can become "ogre".

But if you try to talk about the anime Hoozuki no Reitetsu, an humoristic "workplace comedy" except the workplace is the Hells and the workers are oni... you know, you are here talking of the "demon" side of the oni.

But even then, it is not THAT I am talking about. The actual reason of my annoyance comes from fantasy animes and mangas. Where the oni species that is specific to Japanese culture (and is often one of the very rare Japanese monsters thrown into the standard-D&D fantasy world of elves, halflings and dwarfs and orcs), is constantly translated in America as "ogre".

Like in Dungeon Meshi, to take a recent example, where the oni girl becomes an "ogre girl":

Or the Reincarnated as a Slime anime, where again, "oni" becomes "ogre":

Or Goblin Slayer where, again, we are talking of traditional oni, yet official translation makes it "ogre":

I think I said it before, but the parallel can be drawn to how the troll of Norse folklore/Scandinavian legends can literaly be translated as "fairy", "sprite", "giant", "ogre", "dwarf", "witch" or "goblin" depending on the case and situation in which it appears... But people prefer to go by "troll" because it is more true to the spirit instead of fragmenting it into pieces. And today, as you evoked above, people use "jinn", "djinn", instead of "genies" most of the time. So... I guess an effort can be made, ESPECIALLY since all of the examples above explicitely use the oni imagery from Japanese mythology, art and religion.

You can contrast it to the more troll/giant ogres of Overlord, who here are definitively not oni:

As I said above, it makes sense to translate "ogre" as "oni" in Japanese - but in English (or even in French) the word "oni" can be used... notably because it has been used before.

I don't know about America but here in France the word "oni" is quite known and has been used multiple types in fiction and non-fiction. It is a concept people are familiar with, even if they are not experts. Again this might just be my personal bias because for us, since we have the classic French fairytales, we do know that an ogre is this:

And not this:

I thought people knew about the term since oni is literaly one of the most famous creatures and name non-Japanese people know about Japan. Even the term "yokai" is (in my experience) relatively "young" in the mind of non-Japanese media, and "oni" was well known long before that...

But again, it might be just a French thing. Or even my personal experience. The reason I thought Americans also were more aware of oni was due to how I literaly learned about onis as a kid thanks to an American media. The Jackie Chan Adventures cartoon, which had an entire season centered around the oni, and was aired quite a lot in France back in the days:

I literaly knew about the oni years before I knew anything else about Japanese culture. (That, and the Pierre Dubois Elf Encyclopedia had an entire double-page about the oni). To take a more recent example, Miraculous Ladybug even had an oni-themed villain

But again it might be just a French thing, since in France there was a huge interest in Japanese culture, to the point that France was the first European nation in term of manga and anime following. And English dubs and translations of animes/mangas have a very famous tendency to change terms quite a lot. The most famous being the "jelly doughnut" of Pokemon, but a case I am more familiar with would be the shinigami in Black Butler: in English they went with the cultural equivalent of Grim Reaper, which is a correct translation since not only is it a true cultural equivalent of the shinigami (unlike oni with ogre/troll), but also because the characters of Black Butler ARE based on the European Grim Reaper. But the French translation preferred to keep the literal translation to reflect the Japanese roots: they are "gods of death" or "death gods". Now this case is less problematic and mixed up than the "oni/ogre" case, but it does reflect how there is still a gap between trying to find a cultural equivalent and trying to convey the original term. Both are correct translation methods and for the "shinigami" case it works in both cases.

... But for the oni case problem is that, while a folktale oni works as an "ogre", and a religious oni works as a "demon", there's the in-between case of fantasy oni, who do not fit the traditional ogre role, and do not exist as "demonic" entities, rather as their own species. I guess it fits the idea of an ogre in fantasy as D&D popularized it in America... But honestly when you have a creature famous enough, well-known enough, with its own distinctive imagery and iconography, sometimes Americans could force themselves to do a bit of importation of foreign concept... (Also, mouse, if you think I am harsh about this wait to see about what some manga companies in Japan have to say about American translations! Currently there's a whole scandal about the "localizing" practice in English translations and... it is a hot, hot mess far nastier than anything being said in these reblogs :p)

This was a much-too-long explanation, because it can be summarized in one thing: if you ask me to translate something, I'll translate "oni" as "oni" and I do not like when people do not do this, especially when people keep translating alongside it "tengu" as "tengu" and "yokai" as "yokai" and "kappa" as "kappa". [In fact that's other element to my defense of the translation of "oni" as "oni": back when "oni" used to be translated "ogre", "tengu" and/or "kappa" used to be translated as "goblin". Today nobody does that... but the "ogre/oni" case still stands. I find it so weird how translators expect people to know the intricacies of "yokai" or "tengu", and yet think "oni" is too much for them.]

Speaking of cultural misinformation there is something that drives me nuts, but that all Americans seems to have adopted due to the official translation of Japanese mangas and animes.

STOP CALLING AN ONI AN OGRE!

An ogre is a fairytale character from Western Europe. Oni is a religious and mythical character from Japan.

Yes "ogre" was once used to translate "oni"... Back in the 19th century and early 20th when Europeans didn't give a fuck about the specifics of Japanese culture. Seriously, all these talks of "ogre" but you show "oni" are just a return back to the "One Hundred and One Nights ~ French Edition" days, back when a djinn became a "genie" and a pari a "fairy".

Oni is oni. Ogre is ogre. The end.