Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.
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@saskir said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
as far as I know even the translators didn't know that it was changed. Seems it was censored from the editor department.
It looks like a few of the translators commented as much. See the third link in the OP.
Edit: Here's the actual tweets that were linked from two MT translators:
https://twitter.com/henyome/status/1362571079730962432
https://twitter.com/koestl/status/1362096365782851588 -
@amit34521 The ones in MT are in books released well before amazon started pulling their shenanigans.
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@myskaros maybe they took away from you guys while you werent looking?
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What they did to Mushoku Tensei is unacceptable. I don't read Japanese light novels to have western publishers rewrite the content they find questionable according to their ethics. Their answer also makes me think that they don't really want to bring back the original scene and they are waiting for people to forget the incident. Needless to say, I'll be wary from now on when deciding to buy series published by Seven Seas.
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Personally, I had no issues with the majority of the edits. I know there are some purists out there that want a word for word, phrase for phrase accurate translation.
Even within European languages with common root languages there are issues with that, so you can only imagine the issues between English and Japanese which have no relation.Translation is not an exact science, Heck, its taken me years to even grasp the basics. What matters is why the editing has been done in my opinion.
If it purely to censor, I would have to frown upon it unless it describes something which the laws of a country do not allow to be described. If it to maintain the flow of the novel because it would be translated poorly in its "pure" format, absolutely. There are many novel series in all companies which have needed this treatment.
Author of Praetor's Blood.
Find out more at www.jmacnovels.com -
I think we've discussed the "art" vs. the "science" of interpreting/translating in previous threads. It takes genuine talent the translate/interpret a work between languages and sometimes there will be differences in opinion as to what choices a translation team makes. That doesn't appear to be what happened here, at least in some of the instances scenes were edited out (supposedly to make the final piece more marketable?). In principle I am ok with this if the original creator of the work is involved in the decision to edit. THAT is the part of what is going on that makes at least some of this torrid event censorship and wrong. I suspected that publishing MT in English would be problematic (w/o a 18+ label) and that edits would need to be made for it to be offered in the LN section at the local Barnes and Noble, but I believed that the Japanese creator would be making the edits or at least approving the ones made by SS. Even though the anime is watered down vs the LN, it is getting flak, and has been banned from some streaming services (in China, were tolerances are lower on many things and Censorship is more rife)
I read banned books
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Uff. This is a tough one. I dropped all my pre-orders from SS and will stop buying from them entirely until I know how they will handle the Mushoku Tensei rewrite (I already have 9 volumes D:). This doesn't look good.
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@Jon-Mitchell said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
In principle I am ok with this if the original creator of the work is involved in the decision to edit. THAT is the part of what is going on that makes at least some of this torrid event censorship and wrong. I suspected that publishing MT in English would be problematic (w/o a 18+ label) and that edits would need to be made for it to be offered in the LN section at the local Barnes and Noble, but I believed that the Japanese creator would be making the edits or at least approving the ones made by SS.
That sounds like you know the Japanese publisher didn't know about these changes. Do you have any sources?
Also, to add to the above, if SS had informed potential readers that there were changes, while I would still have taken my money elsewhere, even so I would have, begrudgingly, accepted their decision...
By not informing was the worst possible decision they could have made. Ie, from now on, if there's a chance a title of theirs may be controversial, I will hold of on the actual purchase until I'm certain something similar didn't happen. And I also don't think I will place any further preorders on their stuff...
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So here are my thoughts: I don't like censorship, especially in a translated work, since the fact that it is translated means it is harder for me to know if it has been censored.
That being said, I will probably still buy manga from Seven Seas; there are series that I'm too invested in to stop. However, until this whole thing shakes out, I will probably not be buying light novels from them.
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@Korppi
If the Japanese publisher knew, SS wouldn’t have had to apologize (unless this is SS “falling on their sword “ to protect the creator...which I doubt)I read banned books
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Thank you for bringing this into forum. This certainly makes me reconsider whether I will continue to purchase from them, especially their physical books. And who knows how many titles were affected.
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@custodes said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
Personally, I had no issues with the majority of the edits. I know there are some purists out there that want a word for word, phrase for phrase accurate translation.
Even within European languages with common root languages there are issues with that, so you can only imagine the issues between English and Japanese which have no relation.Translation is not an exact science, Heck, its taken me years to even grasp the basics. What matters is why the editing has been done in my opinion.
If it purely to censor, I would have to frown upon it unless it describes something which the laws of a country do not allow to be described. If it to maintain the flow of the novel because it would be translated poorly in its "pure" format, absolutely. There are many novel series in all companies which have needed this treatment.
I agree with the last parts you said. But I must say I disagree with you mentioning that a word to word translation gives issues. Let's take MT. It is not like there is no translation for rape. And they altered the character for Paul by this change. And this was even done post translation.
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@Jon-Mitchell I really doubt, the edits were needed for Mushoku Tensei to be published normally considering that worse LNs have been published without much problem, and what was removed from MT was really tame.
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@Jon-Mitchell Adding onto that, normally if that were the case, the statement from the company would normally contain something along the lines of working closely with with their Japanese counterparts when they need to make edits that change the context of the story.
I will probably still get the series I was planning to get from SS unless this starts spilling into more series at this point, but I have no compelling reason to pre-order anything and am definitely going to wait until the volumes have been out for a while before making my purchases now.
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I am really wondering aboiut one thing. Why do they change things in some series and in other they leave them. Did a double check in my copy of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear Volume 2. And we all know this is mostly a heartwarming Slice of Life story. But they left in there the part that this noble raped girls, imprison the victims and anyone asking for those woman and afterwards killing them all.
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@saskir Part might be that was more background info rather than direct description of things happening.
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@saskir from the random things I'm hearing, several people seem to think it was a specific editor acting on his own and not something the company endorsed, and so it was only projects that editor was involved in.
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@pcj I really hope that's the case since Seven Seas is publishing several series I enjoy.
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I feel like an opportunity was missed by not going with, "Seven Seas in rough seas for heavy-handed alterations to light novels."
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@Paul-Nebeling yes any monetary investment would be seen as support. thare is a website that has them and they can be downloaded without giving monetary support
