Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.
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BookManiaReader said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
So Seven Seas Entertainment is in trouble ...
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... heavy alterations to were in breach of contract with Japanese license holder.I've been trying to follow this somewhat, so just to confirm, this part is speculation, correct? I haven't previously seen any mention of a reaction or legal interaction from the Japanese publisher(s).
Not that such things couldn't be happening behind the scenes, but the only publicly visible "trouble" I've seen is fan discontent. So just trying to confirm I haven't missed something.
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@ShipTeaser said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
PS restaurant to another world is great. Aletta is such a cutie .
I had been hoping Sam could snag that title, but alas, it was not to be.
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Hopefully this SNAFU will not impact jnovel and yen press. Time will tell
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@hatguy12 I doubt there's actually a breach of contract. Unless they did something to hide the changes from the JP publisher, there likely isn't any legal issues, and it seems really unlikely that they would do something that could potentially jeopardize their whole business just to change a few parts of 2 series anyway.
Most likely, at worst, it will just somewhat damage their relationship with publishers or authors who hadn't realized the text had been meaningfully changed.
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@frankinnola
I don't know about YP but I don't think JNC will have any problems with this since people can realise as early as the pre-pub release if JNC starts altering or omitting things from the original Japanese. There are a lot of readers here who also reads the Japanese Versions after all. -
Just a thought: Amazon was creating trouble with titles saying the content is not suitable and all. SS might just take the same approach to avoid this situation.
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@jampodevral said in Seven Seas in Trouble for Heavy alterations and censorship of light novels.:
@Wellwisher I'm in the same boat.
Do I continue buying from Seven Seas?
I have so many series from them, how many need to be dropped.
Is this a single editor? Single translator? A whole group?
Censorship is something I am against, in nearly every circumstance.as far as I know even the translators didn't know that it was changed. Seems it was censored from the editor department.
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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.
