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.
