#yes viz fails to properly translate things at times

[thyandrawrites]

On Caleb's translation

Obligatory clarification post since I see that my words and my posts on the matter are already being used to imply how I'm trying to get Caleb to lose his job because I'm "an instigator"

1. First of all, I urge you to take a deep breath. Before you cock the gun at any of the people involved in this, consider the facts. I am a weeb who writes shit on the internet on a random tumblr blog. Caleb is a professional translator. A freelancer, yes, but one with several titles under his belt. We both might have big platforms, but our voices don't remotely hold the same authority in the eyes of Viz. Viz has no idea who I am, cause I'm a no one. I'm just a reader. I don't have credentials that they can see, because my tumblr blog is a clutter of fandom stuff, and not a portfolio of my studies. So even if all the stuff I've written on the matter were to somehow reach Viz, it would virtually account as nothing more than weeb talk. Viz has no way of making sure that I have any competence in Japanese at all, so they cannot consider me a reputable source of criticism on one of their employees' work. At max, they might consider me a buyer (I'm not even that, because I buy my own country's official release of bnha and not Viz's). So at max they might consider me (and other tumblr users who have been vocal about the bias in Caleb's translation) as potential disturbances in selling a product. But that's admitting they even hear about this. Again, I'm just a random weeb. Why should Viz care about pleasing the masses by punishing a translator who doesn't translate wrong, per se, but just misses nuance? You can't even argue that he's translating beans for potatoes. He's just adding "ew" every time he mentions beans. That's not grounds for firing someone for lack of skills.

2. I never said I wanted Caleb to lose his job anyway. Trust me, I don't want that. I have a degree in translation too, and I have attempted freelancing. I know you can't really make a living off this job unless you accept to work for crumbs, do hella overtime, and take more titles than you can properly handle. I know how shitty a job it is, and how hard it is to translate from Japanese, because Japanese doesn't translate well into English in general. And I know how translation is not a field that offers a lot of personal gratification. Translators are supposed to stay invisible (all textbooks on the job explain this, this is not a jab at Caleb), so a job well done typically means that your work is invisible and doesn't get you any cred. If you notice, the only time the topics of translation, localization and adaptation ever come up, it's always when something failed spectacularly, or when the source text presents a particular challenge that makes the translator's job impossible to be invisible. See for example the whole "Hodor / Hold the door" thing with Game of Thrones.

so. I am well aware of how being a translator is a job without glory, and one that doesn't pay off at all for all the hard work put into it. I lived it. I know. You don't normally learn the names of the translators making foreign content accessible for your country, do you? Not the same way you memorize the names of actors, sceenwriters, or mangaka. Our work is mostly invisible. So I perfectly understand why Caleb has a twitter where he comments on his works and shares random trivia. It might not be entirely professional, particularly since he's the sole translator for bnha, but I understand it. And to an extent, I appreciate that he's so invested in the series he works for, because typically that means a bigger effort is put into offering a good product and translating accurately.

The fact that his translations (and his trivia threads) have started becoming biased and lacking the impartiality required by the profession is the sole criticism I make of his work. Because aside from that, I don't really have an issue with anything else. If he woke up one day and decided to clean up his act and stop erasing parts of the original text's nuance, I would make peace with him in a heartbeat, because none of my gripes with his work are on a personal level. I don't want to screw the guy over. I want him to be a professional. You know, cause he's been employed to be one. He's getting money for this. He's not an hobbyst like me. If people are paying for a product, they deserve that profuct to be as polished as can be.

3. Adding to point 2, I have never once stated that people should not buy Viz's release. In fact, I've encouraged people to keep reading the official translation, because supporting the official release is the only way that we as a fandom, as consumers, can ensure that bnha keeps being translated, and that Horikoshi and the people across the world who are employed thanks to bnha get the credit they deserve, and the means to make a living.

What I meant to do when I called attention to the bias in Caleb's translation, was raising awareness that there was bias to begin with. Cause most people in the western fandom don't read japanese, and have no way of knowing that the english text differs from the source in nuance. My aim was to make it so that people could know to look for said bias, spot it, and understand that the original text is more complex than the english release would make it out to be. And that's cause I'm a meta blogger. Discussing writing and its nuances is what I do, and that means commenting on the wordings of things too. Believe it or not, writing is all about phrasing. Words have power. Words can change or otherwise affect people's perception of things without them realizing. That's the entire purpose of propaganda for example. Propaganda relies so heavily on word choice that there's entire fields of academic research dedicated to the analyses of its patterns (for example, political discourse analysis is a branch of said field). With this of course I'm not implying that Caleb is attempting to put propaganda in his translation. I'm making an example to show that phrasing holds power, and that misusing it can have consequences on how people perceive a product, and even interact with it. Even if sometimes the consequences are just a fandom so unsympathetic for the villains, it starts being aggressive towards anyone who feels any sort of attachment towards them.

4. Similarly to point 3, I have never once encouraged harassment of Caleb on twitter. I don't follow him and I stopped reading his threads a few months ago, because his stance on the villains bothered me. And I encourage others to disengage with him on twitter as well if that is true for them too, because that's my stance on the matter. If people still choose to go over there and do callouts, or to demand explanations out of him, that's not on me. It's true, I was one of the first people who called attention to the issue, and I'll admit that I did so in pretty salty terms. That doesn't mean I'm responsible for how strangers on the internet choose to act by wrongly assuming my intentions with said posts. I never urged people to harass him. I have encouraged them to keep consuming his work critically instead. How that translates into me being an "instigator" is beyond me, but I was told that's what I did. Honestly, I don't think I'm anyone's babysitter. I have no control over other people's choices. However, I have control of my own platform, and I never used it to tell people to swarm his twitter with complaints.

fo clarity's sake, I firmly believe that demanding explanations on his translation on twitter is not only childish and inappropriate, but it's also a form of cyberbullying. The man's a professional so it's fair to have questions and gripes with his work, but that in no way entitles anyone to demand more labour out of him on social media, under the threat of calling him stuck up when he refuses to oblige. Let me remind you here once again that translators don't even make enough money with freelancing to make a decent living. Most of the time their work is underpaid because it's not properly regulated (at least, it's not in my country). You don't get paid per hour like other minimum wage employees. Caleb himself once said that he gets paid per page. So if a page is full of text and it takes him, say, three hours to translate, he will still get paid the same amount of money he'll get for translating a page with a single line of text.

So. No matter your gripes with his work, you're not entitled to demanding he explain his reasons on twitter. You're not entitled to his overtime, or to his time in general, when he already doesn't get paid enough for this. He, however, is allowed to block you for it. Cause you're being an asshole.

Besides, complaining or challenging him on twitter doesn't really make a difference. At most, something that could change the situation is reaching out to Viz to explain the situation and ask for a better quality and content check, but that too is dicey because (a) again, Viz doesn't have to listen to the complaints of weebs on the internet, even more so when the critics said weebs move against Caleb are almost entirely based on scans and raws that we get illegally. This could backfire spectacularly on us, because Viz could take the excuse to take legal action against the remaining distributors of illegal material. (b) we don't really know the inner workings of Viz anyway. We don't know who exactly oversees Caleb's work, not the extent through which his stuff is fact-checked. So we cannot complain that his work isn't submitted to a quality check in the first place

I hope this explains my stance on the matter. To clarify, no one's attacked me directly yet. But I've seen vagues and unrest in the fandom on this subject so I'd rather cover my bases before this escalates further. I urge you all to think carefully about this as well.