Whatre people up to? I'm caught up with the anime (ep...111? 112?) but I'm a few chapters behind in the manga...I've been lazy LOL
I'm caught up on the anime, too busy and preoccupied with other things to read the manga, although my sister does (and I've scanned summaries enough to know what you're talking about).
I wish that they'd have finished the fillers differently so that those three mod souls wouldn't still be around (but at least it's probable they'll just be forgotten about, thankfully), and that it would be seamless to just pick up with the current arc at the end of the second half of the first Soul Society arc. I don't know, pull a Dallas on people or something*.
*For those that don't know what I mean: one of the seasons of Dallas attempted to reverse the decision to kill a main character (Patrick Duffy's) by making the entire season where he was dead a dream. The scene where the audience realized this has been parodied in other shows.
One thing that really annoys me - not just about Bleach, but in selected other fansubs (although this has also happened in English dubs as well) - is that the ones doing the translating think it's somehow cool or better to incorrectly deal with foreign loanwords (or those which are meant to simply
sound like foreign loanwords) by not correcting for the language it's supposed to be taken from, or for leaving too many untranslated Japanese terms in for the sake of having a buzzword - this is more problematic in dubs since English-speaking actors rarely can capture the nuances of the original pronunciation, and it just ends up sounding stupid (leaving such things untranslated in subtitles can just be rather jarring). Incorrectly dealing with loanwords/supposed loanwords
always sounds stupid, and reeks of Engrish. To some extent I can understand that the reason they deal with it incorrectly is that they're going solely by the word's pronunciation, but the problem there is that it often clashes with official spellings, or worse, doesn't make any sense at all.
Commonly-seen mistakes are, for instance:
Using B instead of V (Japanese lacks a V noise) - a good example of this is in Galaxy Angel, whenever a reference is made to Transbaal; by all means it's clear that the name is supposed to be taken from the Trans
vaal River in South Africa, and in the first season I seem to remember the dub actually did use the v translation. Also in Dragonball Z Vegeta's name is actually pronounced with a B noise in Japanese.
Using R when it sound be L, and L when it should be R (Japanese has neither a distinct L or R noise; it's a single sound that's halfway between the two, but it's used in instances of translating both letters from a foreign language to Japanese, which means that it takes discerning to figure out which one is to be correctly used when figuring out what the word is in English or other languages) - this one shows up a lot, so I don't think I need to provide an example.
Replicating foreign sounds by using Romaji vowel pairings instead of those of the intended language ('ai' for an I - as in 'eye' - noise in English being somewhat more common from what I've seen, although replacing E noises with I is common too). I have actually seen people refer to the 4th opening of FMA as 'Riraito', which is incorrect; not only are they saying 'Rewrite' (albeit with the accent), but the official name of the song is also "Rewrite". This is also seen in Death Note with Light's name - the author of the manga even contacted one of the original scanlation groups and told they did it wrong. My source on this was one of AnimeYuki's staffers who made a post about this on the group's website:
3rd. Toriyama World has a long history of subtitleing, but it did little to help them in a few specific regions. First, the opening graphic for the title was TOO "Death Noted". By that, I mean they twisted too many letters in their name to try and match the Death Note emblem that it became a confusing heiroglyph of a graphic. Forgiven. A second version was released in 24 hours after the first, meaning that they released the episode (the FIRST episode of an important series) ill prepared. It happens to the best of us. The fonts chosen for the subtitles were all very plain. Uhh...It kind of takes me out of the show, but I'll keep going. They called Ryuk, Ryuuku. Off with their heads!!!
Let me explain. Years ago, when the only expose America had to Death Note was through a Manga subbing group called We The Fans, the creator of the manga, Ohba Tsugumi himself, contacted them. He did so to tell them that they were mis translating the names of two main characters and to ask that they translate them as he had originally intended them to be. Yagami Raito was supposed to be Yagami Light (probably for ironic and plot related purposes both), and Ryuuku was supposed to be Ryuk. This is an easy trap to fall into for tranlsators, since the Japanese language doesn't have an "L" in their language they use "R"s in place of them (hence, engrish), and there is no solid, hard "K" in the Japanese alphabit, so "ku" was required for print (I'm not sure about the second "u" though). Also, the english translated Mangas have the names as Light and Ryuk. Now, either nobody in TW fansubs caught this because they lacked this knowledge, or they were overruled and the episode was released with the phonetic spelling of "Ryuuku" instead of the intended "Ryuk".
Leaving end vowels when the word should end on a hard consonant (Japanese only has one solitary consonant sound - n - and it isn't hard; all the other sounds are consonant-vowel pairs) - normally the end vowel that gets retained incorrectly is an o. This was actually partially addressed in that quoted portion, but it's not just K's that have that problem. This is something that the FMA titling and the thing from Death Note fall prey to, and so does (to bring this back around to Bleach) using 'Bounto' instead of 'Bount' (which isn't really correct either; that's the English vowel combination for the 'ou' sound, but the word is supposed to sound German - CDJapan, whom I assume uses the official spelling, has those DVDs listed as 'Baunt', which agrees with the way the 'ou' noise would be spelled in German; part of the reason the German connection makes sense is because German is what those characters spoke when calling forth the dolls - and it makes sense that a few of the dolls themselves had properly German names, like Goethe).
