Seven seas Censorship again
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Seven seas has recently been caught censoring dialogue from the danger's in my heart manga the word is X slave as well as changing a guy in another Manga who happens to like To crossdress into a trans person even though it's state by the author the character still identifies as a dude l. I hope unionization efforts fail they should not rewarded for shoddy work
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@Elijah203223 That's frankly a really damaging line of thinking. You should be paid for the work you do. If you do a bad job, then you shouldn't get more work. But it's really not a good look to imply that it's okay for someone to not get benefits or competitive pay because they did a bad job.
Also, unionization is for full time employees, which includes the people putting together your print books or digital books, people getting licenses and communicating with Japanese companies. They deserve to have benefits and competitive pay. It's just really unhelpful to hope that all of those people have no choice but to either suck it up or quit and find a new job because one product happened to be poor.
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Hello,
We have already had a topic for Seven Seas censorship, yes I am aware this is a newer situation, however we have been there, and had the topic open for a while, and then locked the topic down.
We also do have a topic for the Seven Seas unionization.
If there is different to add to this topic I see no reason why it has it has to be open.
There are plenty of places to express being upset at a publisher, the J-Novel Club forums is not that place.
I will also take this time to quote what I said in the unionization topic:
@Rahul-Balaggan said in Seven Seas' staff unionizing to improve working conditions, wages and benefits:
Hello,
Just here to remind everyone about what the current topic is about, the unionization of Seven Seas Employees, not the previously discussed (and closed) Seven Seas censorship.
Thank you
I will leave this topic open for a day, just to see if anyone wants to take this in a direction that is not people yelling at each other back and forth, or just individuals expressing their dislike of a publisher.
Thank you
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Was this censorship done after the previous one was discovered or just something that was already published at the time and was only discovered now?
If it was only discovered now that's one thing. But if they still did it after last time's shitstorm it's much, much worse... 🤦♂️
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@Elijah203223 said in Seven seas Censorship again:
I hope unionization efforts fail they should not rewarded for shoddy work
First, I'd rather Seven Seas not fail as a company as the only thing it'll do is make it so less manga and light novels make it to the English-speaking audience. There's also no doubt access to some, possibly all, of their current licenses will be lost and they're publishing a number of series that I would like to continue to read.
Second, punishing unrelated people for problems that a minority commit doesn't work well at all in the long term. It is a very good way to convince people to rebel and/or to depart for greener pastures.
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J-Novel Club shows that a group can do actual, good translations. If Seven Seas lost their licenses surely some better company would pick them up.
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@Planguy not on any kind of schedule that's helpful for readers of their series. Just look at Sol Press or Tokyo Pop for an idea on the timeline those kind of rescue licenses take. For fans, it's much much much much better if Seven Seas can improve rather than collapse.
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@Planguy Those companies would have to deem there to be enough demand to make it worthwhile, which may not be the case when an official English translation of something was already made available at some point in the past. You really have to consider how many people are willing to pay for the same product twice, only a certain subset of people are going to be following most of these controversies, so many readers may not at all be aware there may be issues with the translation.
Plus even if those companies want the licenses, if the Japanese publishers decide it's not worth it to deal with all of this anymore and their experience with a collapsed publisher left a sour taste in their mouths, they could simply elect to not bother licensing any of their titles out anymore.
I would not count on license rescues to see continuations of series.
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From what I've heard of the 'slave' one, it wasn't that significant, perhaps altering the tone of the text a bit.
However the first example mentioned, changing a cross-dressing(confirmed by author) to trans is a lot more problematic one, not least because it's essentially pitting one LQBT group against another. What I've also heard on reddit threads is the cross-dressing part becomes important plotwise later on and not only as just as a 'dressing' for the setting, so they'd have to at that point either alter the story itself or backtrack a lot.
At least in this case Seven Seas has acknowledged the issue(per their twitter account) and are looking into it, so hopefully that one is corrected.Edit; Here's an interview with the author that goes in-depth on the manga and the cross-dressing aspect of it;
The Author of "Koisuru (Otome) no Tsukurikata" Tells the Secrets To Making Things Cute - When the love for your characters inspires you.Also want to add, the unionization effort will not make these things harder to address, a company can always address if someone does a bad job. I'd say it's the opposite, making things more standard and stable will make it easier to keep things like these in check. Fortunately most of the replies on the Seven Seas twitter account recognize this.
On a funnier note, it's hilarious to see almost every reply to their posts having a footnote asking them to recognize the union, no matter what the original post is about, heh heh. Unfortunately can't contribute to it myself seeing as I'm twitterless...
Edit2; From Katrina Leonoudakis's twitter; (link post)
I know the translator and they've done their homework on this series, reading future volumes, consulting with trans people, and working hard to make sure it's as accurate as possible.
If this is to be taken literally, then the translator actually has willfully misrepresented aspects of the story, or possesses an inadequate grasp of the Japanese language, and Seven Seas would be in their right to react regardless of union status.
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@Planguy said in Seven seas Censorship again:
J-Novel Club shows that a group can do actual, good translations. If Seven Seas lost their licenses surely some better company would pick them up.
I'd like to clarify one bit, when I said "their current licenses will be lost" I meant it as "we an audience will lose access to their licenses." Seven Seas even as a defunct corporate entity can still potentially hold onto their licenses preventing them from being rescued, then we an audience would have to wait for existing contracts to expire.
Then there are the reasons @GeorgeMTO and @jpwong covered, but there's also localization throughput (i.e., how many licenses collectively the industry can handle) the remaining half-dozen (more?) translation companies out there wouldn't even be able to absorb the influx of all the licenses even if it was possible to immediately relicense all of them then hire all of the original translators, editors, and support staff.
@Korppi Since you brought up the translator having an inadequate grasp of the Japanese language. While I can't say anything about the translator's language skills, I can say that language is funny. It's highly inseparable from cultures its used in; which I find makes cross-language dictionaries near useless for anything more than crude interpretation, because dictionaries really only include obvious cultural distinctions.
English has very distinct LGBTQ+ terms and categories, but I don't know enough about Japanese to know if they have all the same cultural distinctions. That means if there's ambiguity the translator either has to pick one and probably get it wrong or do the much harder task of trying to figure out how to keep the representation ambiguous between the different categories without it being called out for censorship in the other direction (i.e., not committing to a potentially wrong representation).
Honestly it seems like translation is just a no-win scenario and any translation is inevitably going to piss off some subset of people. Making the only real concern: whether the pissed off group of people can keep the discussion civil or not (see JNC volume discussion threads for more civil instances). And with Internet Denizens it's a crapshoot.
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@endoftheline I don't think there was any ambiguity to the character considering themselves male despite enjoying dressing as a woman. Call the character trans is not the result of an understandable translation choice in an ambiguous situation. It's implanting American culture into the work where it doesn't belong.
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I've been reluctant to step into this topic again. Doubly so since I haven't read the work in question, so this is just a 1000-mile view from someone who was involved in the previous debacle.
To me, this actually looks like tremendous positive progress since last time.
This seems much more ambiguous. Last time, the translations were simply incomplete - scenes and inner monologues that were present in the original were omitted or materially altered in the translation. No one is accusing Seven Seas of doing that here - instead, fans are disagreeing about the interpretation. That's progress.
Second, the interpretation that is being disagreed about is hard. As I said above, I haven't read the text, but I'm confident that even if I had read the text in question (source and translation), I would not be qualified to opine as to whether the translation was accurate, because my grasp of Japanese nuances and culture (especially Japanese LGBTQ+ culture, most of which occurs in private where I can't see it to learn about it) isn't that good. Unless there's other things wildly wrong with the translation (and the internet would surely be up in arms about it if there were), then Seven Seas is no longer producing work that someone on my level can find fault with. That's progress.
I feel like a lot of this is being made out to be a lot more black and white than it is. For example:
@Korppi said in Seven seas Censorship again:
Edit2; From Katrina Leonoudakis's twitter; (link post)
I know the translator and they've done their homework on this series, reading future volumes, consulting with trans people, and working hard to make sure it's as accurate as possible.
If this is to be taken literally, then the translator actually has willfully misrepresented aspects of the story, or possesses an inadequate grasp of the Japanese language, and Seven Seas would be in their right to react regardless of union status.
There are four more possibilities here:
- The translator could have made a call that is controversial but correct. Even if the author has out and out said that the character identifies as a man, it's possible that the implications of "identifying as a man" are different enough between Japan and whatever country in the West that the translator was using as their target that translating the character as transgender is simply correct to a western audience.
- The translator could have made a mistake. The translator could have assumed that the case above was true, but working from an incorrect understanding of LGBTQ+ culture in one country or another.
- Both interpretations could be correct. It could be that the character's intended gender identity simply has no parallel in western conception and localizing them as a trans woman or a crossdresser are both "just as good." (It's also possible that "Gender identity" is a western frame and Japanese transgender people think of gender differently than we do. I've heard anecdotally that Japanese TG people think of gender being more like verbs than like adjectives, which would explain why someone might translate crossdressing = transgender - but I don't know and you should not take my word for it.)
- It could be all smoke and no fire. When my post about ILTV went viral, more than 10,000 people saw my accusation before anyone had checked my work. I count myself lucky that my complaint didn't turn out to be a mistake (and that I wasn't working from a misprint or the like). If someone had a mind to troll, claiming Seven Seas mistranslated something sensitive can get thousands of people's attention even if it's completely spurious.
Bottom lines:
- Translating things - especially sensitive and private cultural things that don't have a large public corpus of translation conventions to work from - can be hard. Transgenderism itself is not new (neither in the west, nor in Japan), but each side has a lot of mostly-unwritten history. A translator today has to translate divergent cultural understandings of what it means to be a gender (as understood by people who haven't been able to talk about their understanding of gender publicly very much), not just words in a dictionary.
- Experts disagree all the time. It's entirely possible that the fans who initiated this argument and the person who produced the initial translation both have good reasons for believing what they do, and the rest of us don't know enough to understand those reasons. Right now, we're only getting one side of the story.
- Even if Seven Seas turns out to have made a mistake here, this is much better than last time. It's possible (though unproven) that it's even more damaging to the work, but it's a much harder mistake to catch. They're not letting the easy stuff slip by anymore - so we shouldn't say they're "making the same mistake twice."
Let's not drag anyone's career through the mud or curse anyone's family until we know more.
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Locked by
Rahul Balaggan
