Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.
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@Korppi Roll Over and Die also has some gruesome and graphic dialogue removed.
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@Hakogami
Proof would be nice. Any idea if it's on the translator or editor? With MT and CotE the translators themselves translated everything(some of them mentioned that during the time this discussion has been ongoing), but the edits were done afterwards.
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Official translation :
Japanese release :
The part of the exchange I marked is gone for example.
How it looks in the fan-translation for comparison:
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@Hakogami
Is the Japanese text from the light novel release or from the webnovel on Narou? If the latter it doesn't necessarily mean the excised portion was included in the Japanese light novel. -
@Korppi I wouldn't have posted it here if it was a WN/LN difference. I bought the book on Bookwalker just so I could check. In fact, the highlighted portion wasn't even in the WN, it's an LN addition I believe.
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@Hakogami
Thank you. That's the kind of clarification we need when discussing here. Not all people might take note of the different versions and just assume things, so it helps if it's mentioned. -
Personally, I think it's safe to assume that some gruesome and graphic content will be missing from most books Seven Seas has published in the last few years. Now the question is whether that affects the story in a negative way. In the case of Mushoku Tensei, I think it's very obvious that some of the cuts (completely rewriting Paul and Lilia's past for one) should never be okay. A lot of people who've read Seven Seas's translation have a very different interpretation of the characters and certain scenes than those who've read the fan-translation (or read it in Japanese).
They actually just translated/published a line meaning something like "Paul sneaked into Lilia's room at night and stole her innocence. She tried to put up a fight but to no avail. She was in complete shock that someone could do something like that" as "He snuck into Lilia's sleeping chambers and seduced her into surrendering her innocence to him. She couldn't resist -- she was swept off her feet, left in a daze."
Sure, she was left in a daze, not because she was seduced, but because she was raped by a man she trusted.
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@Hakogami You missed the next sentence they outright deleted, and the one after they... softened
Roughly translated:She didn't understand what had happened to her own body; she hadn't thought that the Paul that she'd been cheerfully talking with just the other day would ever do such a thing.
Paul had already left the city by the time her mother screamed when she came to check on her since she showed no sign of getting out of bed. -
@Hakogami Would you mind posting this in the Light Novels' Subreddit? I think it deserves the same attention as what happened with the censorship in 'I'm in love with the Villainess'.
Thank you.
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@amit34521 I thought the same thing. Although I'd like to point out, predating this, is the Me Too movement. Perhaps Seven Seas decided to change/cut questionable content (at least questionable by western standards) to avoid the internet backlash from the crazy feminists. (And by crazy feminists I mean the ones who were complaining about 'Baby It's Cold Outside. Serious, the US is tied with Syria in terms of rape and violence against women, but hey, lets all crap on a Christmas song from 1940's. That'll fix things.)
Gender equality has been pulled to the forefront again, and this might have just been a badly calculated move on SS's part to try and appear more sensitive to the to the bullsh*t women have to deal with daily. -
Yeah, I am laying this out right now, this topic will not be turning into a giant political back and forth.
There are many other places where you can discuss the “politics” of this situation, the J-Novel Club forums will not be that place.
And further political comments in this topic will be removed.
Thank you for your cooperation.
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@Microdynames Well, they're fixing the problem going forward. Which is great! But that does nothing to fix any previous titles that've been potentially edited/censored and not been discovered (yet) and/or brought the outcry that these 3 titles have.
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@Neil-zl2sst5 said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
@Microdynames Well, they're fixing the problem going forward. Which is great! But that does nothing to fix any previous titles that've been potentially edited/censored and not been discovered (yet) and/or brought the outcry that these 3 titles have.
Correction: They've said they will fix the problems going forward, but given it's happened with multiple titles it's more likely to assume it's a company culture issue than anything else. Until they actually release the fixes it's best to assume that things won't be completely fixed.
Also the press release they stated said it was editorial decisions to improve the flow. You don't improve the flow of something by outright deleting a bunch of paragraphs out of the original. That's censorship.
I was thinking of buying the English release of this, but now I definitely won't unless substantial proof of removals fixed is given.
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@mlindner Yes of course. You're right. I was oversimplifying and taking the bad editorial decisions ceasing as a given for the point I was making about the back catalog, but the distinction you make is an important one.
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I'm hopeful that everything will be fixed and Seven Seas will change their ways, but I think that's unlikely.
In my experience it's rare for a company to completely change how they function just from some bad press. How a company acts is a result of the culture of the combined people who work at the company think and act in my experience. The fact that large deletions went through quality checking and lots of other steps of the editorial process and everyone just found no issue with it (or didn't find a big enough issue to leak it to the press) says that the company's process is broken and in need of a large overhall. Even if they go back and fix the issues I think they're extremely likely to just happen again if they don't fix the root cause of the issues. (I was at a company that was trying to change it's culture, it's incredibly hard and takes years and causes large employee turnover.)
But maybe I'm just overly worried and exaggerating how bad things are or things work differently in this industry than my industry and parallels can't be drawn. Hopefully I'm wrong.
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I think at this point, the best thing to do is to wait and see. The problem is a lot more nuanced than might be apparent.
Over the past couple days, I've made it through the first chapter of ILV's second volume side-by-side with the Japanese. It bugged me that people were talking about giving up the series because of what happened - I don't want anyone to abandon the series just because of a complaint I wrote went viral - so I started this effort hoping to be able to exonerate it. Doing this has given me an appreciation for the work professional translators and their editors do, even beyond what I had previously from the behind-the-scenes approach that J-Novel Club takes.
Removing passages to improve flow is something that happens. Language is complicated. Lines which in the original were clever preambles or witty conclusions might translate into something ramble-y or repetitive. Sometimes a back-and-forth makes no sense because the characters are responding to a bit of wordplay that can't be translated. While a perfect localization might translate these into things that have a similar effect on the reader in the target language as they did in the source language, translators capable of doing that reliably in all cases are rare - doing so takes the skills of both a translator (to understand the original author's intent) and an author (to express that intent in the target language). That's not even getting into concepts that can't be expressed in one language or the other without adding more information, such as with gendered pronouns, honorifics, or pluralization.
All of that is tangential to the kind of corruption of the work being talked about here (where an editor removes a passage of text because they presumably don't like the content), but I hope it provides some context for how hard the problem is to solve. The editor is already removing and editing things to try to make the story more readable. Telling them they're not allowed to delete anything ever for any reason would prevent them from doing their job, and we'd get worse translations as a result.
I think it's wrong to characterize Seven Seas as an unwavering villain here. They're not a large company, in the grand scheme of things. The negative attention this generated is probably the biggest problem the company so far this year, and I can't imagine they're not taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.
So what's a fan of a Seven Seas title (or really, any localized light novel) to do?
If you can read Japanese, read your favorite works in both languages. Not side-by-side playing spot the difference, but see if your impression of the work is significantly different between languages. If you spot any, and are sufficiently certain of the correctness of your analysis, send Seven Seas a polite email alerting them to the discrepancies. If they give you the runaround, share your findings with other fans - but check your work thoroughly first. These things can apparently go viral overnight even from a small forum like ours.
Additionally, if you don't spot any major omissions, I think it'd be good to let other fans of the series know that someone's done the work and that the translation is good. I've read comments from people who are worried about that and feel like they have no way of knowing if they're read a modified work. This also helps reward good work and good corporate behavior instead of being all-stick-no-carrot.
If you can't read Japanese or don't have time to spare, then you have a few options.
- If you don't mind potentially reading a modified work, there's nothing morally wrong with continuing as usual. Ignore the rumors surrounding the company. If one of your favorite works is affected, maybe re-read it after reading the corrections so you can experience the original work, too.
- If you want to avoid reading modified works but don't have any sort of grudge against Seven Seas, talk to fans of series you're interested in and ask them if the 7S translation is any good. Seven Seas translations are going to be subject to more scrutiny than before now, so if there's issues with the official translation, there will be fans who are aware of it and will tell you about it.
- If you have a grudge against Seven Seas and want to see them go out of business, stop reading their products. Don't buy them, but don't pirate them either: It's not good enough for my tastes, so I'm just going to take it without paying for it is a cheap excuse used by grifters and extortionists and people will see through you. Also, don't assume that everyone is in this boat - most people I've read comments from sound like they'd be most comfortable under the second bullet, but most comments from people under this bullet sound like they're making it a moral imperative to punish. You'll make enemies if you push too forcefully.
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To be clear I'm not reading ILV and only heard about it today. I'm concerned about Mushoku Tensei as that's the series I care about. I'm also more worried about the company as a whole and what they license in the future.
Edit: It would help if Seven Seas was honest in their press releases btw. The press releases so far on both the Mushoku Tensei case and ILV case are quite obviously not truthful and knowing how such a thing could happen would be helpful in restoring people's trust. If they hide it in corporate speak then it'll only damage them as people will imagine the worst.
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@rsog412 said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
Removing passages to improve flow is something that happens. Language is complicated. Lines which in the original were clever preambles or witty conclusions might translate into something ramble-y or repetitive. Sometimes a back-and-forth makes no sense because the characters are responding to a bit of wordplay that can't be translated.
On that I'm going to strongly disagree. That is never okay to do in any real translation written for adults. You can't just delete it because you can't figure out how to localize it. At the very least you need to rewrite it into something similar in the language you're translating it to, and also run it by the author to see what the characters were thinking in such a scene to make sure the meaning is carried across. Mushoku Tensei had paragraphs deleted that were descriptions of a scene with nothing to replace it. And they weren't allegorical or anything. They were simply descriptive prose.
Edit: I see you later said what I wrote above is also not okay, but I don't see how you're not contracting your previous statement. I disagree with your statement that editors shouldn't be prevented from deleting things wholesale. I think editors should be disallowed from deleting things wholesale. If it doesn't flow very well for one paragraph occasionally, well then oh well. That's a sacrifice that should be made in the name of retention of original content.
(As to your bullet points, I'm in the #3 camp if policies aren't actually changed and we see this behavior again, but at the same time I'll read it if fan translators take Seven Seas' work and add back in the removed content and release the pirated + fan translation version. If they fix the behavior then I'm in #2 camp and I'll buy it.)
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@mlindner said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
(As to your bullet points, I'm in the #3 camp if policies aren't actually changed and we see this behavior again, but at the same time I'll read it if fan translators take Seven Seas' work and add back in the removed content and release the pirated + fan translation version. If they fix the behavior then I'm in #2 camp and I'll buy it.)
Alright. I understand where you're coming from. What happened to Mushoku Tensei seems a lot worse to me than what happened to ILV, but I'm not familiar enough with that series to really be able to tell.
I don't think there's any reason to assume at this point that there has been a failure to course correct. All of the issues that have been found so far are in titles that were published before this blew up. Charitably, this could all be a strategic blunder where they misunderstood what their customers wanted.
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@rsog412 said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
Removing passages to improve flow is something that happens. Language is complicated. Lines which in the original were clever preambles or witty conclusions might translate into something ramble-y or repetitive
Can you give me an example of 'removing passage to improve flow'? As far as my opinion goes, removing passages should not be justified at all. If anything else, I say this is lazy reason. English Language is vast. You always can find one way or another to improve flow without removing a thing at all.
I think it's wrong to characterize Seven Seas as an unwavering villain here. They're not a large company, in the grand scheme of things. The negative attention this generated is probably the biggest problem the company so far this year, and I can't imagine they're not taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.
This had happened in the past before ILV. And did they improve? Not at all. This same thing happen again and again. All they did was fauxpology which tell by the way 'having changed the way they edit' and ILV was released before they change. That's bullshit and they don't even tell what series are affected by their edit.
