Skewed in Translation

Flareups in the past several days of “complaints about the translation of anime, manga, and related works into English” got to the point where I couldn’t miss them. I do try to keep an even strain about this, prone to telling myself “these light entertainments aren’t worth getting so upset over” (and perhaps I’m not that far gone from the days of “the first upslope of anime and manga popularity” I was around for to have forgotten the possibility of not setting up extra walls against others getting into it too), although I can worry that people get so upset because it’s a distraction from getting upset over bigger and more ominous things.

In the midst of all of that, though, I was working my way through the story segments of yet another challenge event in the Love Live School Idol Festival All Stars mobile game when one of the teenaged girls was translated as saying something a little too coarse for my very scrupulous nature to repeat. That’s not to say I can’t imagine other characters in the franchise using the phrase, but I suppose it didn’t match my own sense of the girl in question. I didn’t “fly into a rage and resolve to learn Japanese so I don’t have to depend on anyone else’s skewed take on things,” but I do have to admit that for at least a moment or two I might have come a little closer to comprehending the indignation of others on disagreeing with “cheap translations of works aimed at an audience not quite a long-refined market for foreign art.” (So far as not having made the effort to learn Japanese, there’s a little matter of lazy streaks too.)