All Rounders!! Tensei Shitara Youjo Deshita. Ie Ni Izurai No De Ossan To Bouken Ni Demasu - Vol. 1 Ch. 3
- Thread starter MangaDex
- Start date
Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2023
- Messages
- 723
It reminds me the face morphing of a certain seventh
Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2020
- Messages
- 1,402
"For a given value of "human", I am indeed "human" " 
But doesn't japanese have distinctions between "being a human", "being human", "posessing humanity", and "being of the human race"?
Same as the various terms that simply translate as "Hero" in english, but have a rather significant distinction between them?
I've the feeling something is not quite being conveyed by the translation, and that the two are both using different terms/concepts that translate to "human" here. So you miss out on some of the misunderstanding/humor there.
But doesn't japanese have distinctions between "being a human", "being human", "posessing humanity", and "being of the human race"?
Same as the various terms that simply translate as "Hero" in english, but have a rather significant distinction between them?
I've the feeling something is not quite being conveyed by the translation, and that the two are both using different terms/concepts that translate to "human" here. So you miss out on some of the misunderstanding/humor there.
Group Leader
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2024
- Messages
- 102
Used on purpose
Why tho? She's clearly a girl.
Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2020
- Messages
- 1,172
Ah... To interject.
Actually, looking at this wall of text, let me hide the bulk of it and give a TL DR summary instead.
I imagine that your question is from one of two points. Either you're talking as a viewer and you're just wanting immediate connective association based on what you know, which that's not the same as being consistent with the in universe knowledge of the relevant characters. Or alternatively, I can understand the paranoia over insertion of partisan political issues especially with the problems of localizers re-authoring work to fit their worldview and stuff like that as the insistence of inserting gender neutral terminology can bring up worries of insertion of intersectionality ideology where it may not belong.
But I believe the reason they're trying to stick to a gender neutral thing is because of language differences and the adventurer being uncertain of the sex of the kid. Japanese is filled with vagueness or lack of confirmation of sex in their language, it's part of the issue with how a lot of misunderstandings can happen because their language is built in a way that opens itself up to have a lot of misunderstandings.
For example, even though Ore is a masculine way of saying Me, and Atashi/Watashi is a feminine way of saying Me. They're not locked to male or female use. A tomboy can use Ore for example and nobody blinks an eye at that. They just assume that they're more masculine. You end up having to assume a lot of things with Japanese. You might have seen this oddity with automatic tarnslations, like when you translate a comment you found in Japanese talking about how cute a girl is, but the translation says something along the line of "He's so cute". Well, that's because the statement had nothing in it to refer to the sex of the person and therefore the automated translation had to default to something.
The other way they could avoid repeatedly using They would be to just emulate that sort of vagueness in an alternative manner. Like the adventurer consistently referring to the kid as "This kid" or "That kid" and completely eliminate the need for the usage of he, she or they. Where even the loaded worries behind the last few year's pushes on controlled speech related to gendered terminology, doing so would by nature bypass that as that sort of way to address a person can still sound normal while also maintaining complete neutrality where now even the reader has to assume what the adventurer is assuming, which may actually be more in line with the possible intent of the writer, though that's a lot of guessing.
Also, as a reminder, the adventurer has specifically already behaved in a way that seems to indicate he's not certain whether the kid in front of him is a guy or a girl, but solely noted that it looks like a girl. Now, from an English speaker's viewpoint, I can imagine that you would make an assumption and move forward with that. The most normal behavior would be to then assume that okay it looks like a girl, sounds like a girl, talks like a girl, must be a girl and default to she. And while a lot of people don't want to face that reality, we always make assumptions and move from there even if we say we don't. Same for judging people, the reality is that we are constantly judging. But we adjust our assumptions over time or we do not deliver final judgement, which is the reality of what people actually do when they follow the general statement of not judging people.
But we have a slightly different circumstance here, where the trope of a beautiful man or beautiful boy who looks like a girl is very common in Japanese media. Playing off that uncertainty is very typical, so there's still the same odd chance that he just assumes it's a very beautiful boy and immediately starts thinking he's a boy. In which case, he would have naturally started referring to the kid as a he.
If we could have a clearer idea of what the end gag would be, we could then adjust the translation to have the adventurer assume that the kid is a guy if at a later time he's surprised that she's a girl.
But if in the future he's not surprised that she's a girl, then the translation should be that he assumed she was a girl and it just ended up being correct.
My assumption then is that the translators probably don't know what the end result of this point is yet, so it kinda just defaults to using They to try not to commit to one assumption or the other until we finally get to the reveal, if we ever get there, in which case then maybe the translations could be retroactively adjusted though unlikely to occur because that's a lot of corrections to be made.
But I believe the reason they're trying to stick to a gender neutral thing is because of language differences and the adventurer being uncertain of the sex of the kid. Japanese is filled with vagueness or lack of confirmation of sex in their language, it's part of the issue with how a lot of misunderstandings can happen because their language is built in a way that opens itself up to have a lot of misunderstandings.
For example, even though Ore is a masculine way of saying Me, and Atashi/Watashi is a feminine way of saying Me. They're not locked to male or female use. A tomboy can use Ore for example and nobody blinks an eye at that. They just assume that they're more masculine. You end up having to assume a lot of things with Japanese. You might have seen this oddity with automatic tarnslations, like when you translate a comment you found in Japanese talking about how cute a girl is, but the translation says something along the line of "He's so cute". Well, that's because the statement had nothing in it to refer to the sex of the person and therefore the automated translation had to default to something.
The other way they could avoid repeatedly using They would be to just emulate that sort of vagueness in an alternative manner. Like the adventurer consistently referring to the kid as "This kid" or "That kid" and completely eliminate the need for the usage of he, she or they. Where even the loaded worries behind the last few year's pushes on controlled speech related to gendered terminology, doing so would by nature bypass that as that sort of way to address a person can still sound normal while also maintaining complete neutrality where now even the reader has to assume what the adventurer is assuming, which may actually be more in line with the possible intent of the writer, though that's a lot of guessing.
Also, as a reminder, the adventurer has specifically already behaved in a way that seems to indicate he's not certain whether the kid in front of him is a guy or a girl, but solely noted that it looks like a girl. Now, from an English speaker's viewpoint, I can imagine that you would make an assumption and move forward with that. The most normal behavior would be to then assume that okay it looks like a girl, sounds like a girl, talks like a girl, must be a girl and default to she. And while a lot of people don't want to face that reality, we always make assumptions and move from there even if we say we don't. Same for judging people, the reality is that we are constantly judging. But we adjust our assumptions over time or we do not deliver final judgement, which is the reality of what people actually do when they follow the general statement of not judging people.
But we have a slightly different circumstance here, where the trope of a beautiful man or beautiful boy who looks like a girl is very common in Japanese media. Playing off that uncertainty is very typical, so there's still the same odd chance that he just assumes it's a very beautiful boy and immediately starts thinking he's a boy. In which case, he would have naturally started referring to the kid as a he.
If we could have a clearer idea of what the end gag would be, we could then adjust the translation to have the adventurer assume that the kid is a guy if at a later time he's surprised that she's a girl.
But if in the future he's not surprised that she's a girl, then the translation should be that he assumed she was a girl and it just ended up being correct.
My assumption then is that the translators probably don't know what the end result of this point is yet, so it kinda just defaults to using They to try not to commit to one assumption or the other until we finally get to the reveal, if we ever get there, in which case then maybe the translations could be retroactively adjusted though unlikely to occur because that's a lot of corrections to be made.
So, as a much shorter one paragraph summary. I don't know if you're just having a disconnect between reader POV and in-world character POV, or having some worries about partisan ideology insertion. But I think it's good to remind you that the adventurer seems uncertain about whether she's a girl or a boy. And also Japanese language is by nature very vague in certain cases. Such as terminology in regular speech that identifies man or woman. The most common example to give an idea of this lack of clear cut gender in language is how you say me, Ore is masculine, Watashi is feminine, but notice it's not Ore is Male and Watash is Female, that vagueness allows it to be used by either man or woman. And being non-committal now might be because we don't know if the gag is he'll be surprised she's a girl, or he always knew it and isn't surprised.
Group Leader
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2024
- Messages
- 102
Next chapter should explain why
Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Nov 25, 2020
- Messages
- 1,172
I didn't call you a bigot. And I had no intent of insinuating you were one. I just thought of different potential valid criticisms and wanted to unpack it as a whole, as any address in a public forum is an address to the public. I have no clue who you are, what your life experience is or what your general thoughts are outside of what you just stated, so to condense a long back and forth to discover it all, I just went with a wide shotgun blast of potential starting point you may have had to attempt to address it.
And to expand on it but also to not take up more space than is necessary, going to shove a wall of text in a spoiler so that it doesn't stink up the place except for people curious and wanting to read.
And there are valid reasons for people to just not want the interjection of western ideological values in places where it doesn't belong, such as fantasy stories written by an author from an entirely different culture who likely has zero clues of the tensions and issues spoken of in an entirely different country at the opposite side of the world. Which some of those inconsistencies paired with recent issues of major translators like Seven Seas opting to entirely re-author whole stories to the point where multiple volumes had to be recalled and re-distributed with new translation because the translators opted to change the story to fit their personal worldviews is a thing.
As I did not know where you were coming from, I wanted to cover all potential bases that I could immediately think of. And I view all those potential criticism as valid for different reasons. If you want to believe that some of those worries suddenly means you are being framed as bigoted or accused as being so, even though most of it primarily stems from not wanting to see a story be incorrectly translated and the maintaining of an author's story's integrity, then that's your prerogative, but it was not the intent.
Additionally, regarding the statement from the guild. It's still just a guess at best and not an affirmation that this is who he's been having visits with. Keep in mind that our MC is dressing up in poor clothing, they are extremely suspect with the level of power that they possess as well which is way outside of the norms, so he has one person whose words he can't fully trust yet and the spoken memories of someone at the guild who not too long ago also screwed him over by sending him into noble territory and omitted important information. So you have two sources that while they do coincide still leaves him with room for doubt. Again, as I stated, the translator then needs to decide how to translate that vague Japanese language into the more straightforward English language. If it were up to me, I would just safely opt to just assume the guy thinks it's a girl and keep translating that way. And if at some point he actually thought the kid was a boy, then just asterisk translator note. Like how sometimes a name is re-translated midway through a story because there were some intended references that was not known prior and changes how a name should be spelled out.
And as I stated before, the usage of They is still common, people use that regardless of the sex of whoever you talk about. It's a choice, but it's what was chosen by the translator. What you can infer from that then if you have a problem with it is limited, especially in current days with the current issues that are flowing around, and in the manga/novel translation circle there is the issue of localizers re-authoring. And I also agree that it doesn't sound very natural in some instances, but that may be my subjective nature as I would think just saying she would flow more naturally.
And finally for an in-world setting. While a high nobility isn't the same thing as royalty, typically royalty were referred to in the plural, and they referred to themselves in the plural because they represent the country. You can possibly extrapolate from that and make the assumption that perhaps high nobility are also given a similar treatment of respect where they are addressed in the plural in the same way as they govern and represent a large mass of people. Though that's also a localization thing of adjusting vague language like Japanese into English where certain code of conduct does not translate well and we're stick trying to figure out how a person translates that.
As I did not know where you were coming from, I wanted to cover all potential bases that I could immediately think of. And I view all those potential criticism as valid for different reasons. If you want to believe that some of those worries suddenly means you are being framed as bigoted or accused as being so, even though most of it primarily stems from not wanting to see a story be incorrectly translated and the maintaining of an author's story's integrity, then that's your prerogative, but it was not the intent.
Additionally, regarding the statement from the guild. It's still just a guess at best and not an affirmation that this is who he's been having visits with. Keep in mind that our MC is dressing up in poor clothing, they are extremely suspect with the level of power that they possess as well which is way outside of the norms, so he has one person whose words he can't fully trust yet and the spoken memories of someone at the guild who not too long ago also screwed him over by sending him into noble territory and omitted important information. So you have two sources that while they do coincide still leaves him with room for doubt. Again, as I stated, the translator then needs to decide how to translate that vague Japanese language into the more straightforward English language. If it were up to me, I would just safely opt to just assume the guy thinks it's a girl and keep translating that way. And if at some point he actually thought the kid was a boy, then just asterisk translator note. Like how sometimes a name is re-translated midway through a story because there were some intended references that was not known prior and changes how a name should be spelled out.
And as I stated before, the usage of They is still common, people use that regardless of the sex of whoever you talk about. It's a choice, but it's what was chosen by the translator. What you can infer from that then if you have a problem with it is limited, especially in current days with the current issues that are flowing around, and in the manga/novel translation circle there is the issue of localizers re-authoring. And I also agree that it doesn't sound very natural in some instances, but that may be my subjective nature as I would think just saying she would flow more naturally.
And finally for an in-world setting. While a high nobility isn't the same thing as royalty, typically royalty were referred to in the plural, and they referred to themselves in the plural because they represent the country. You can possibly extrapolate from that and make the assumption that perhaps high nobility are also given a similar treatment of respect where they are addressed in the plural in the same way as they govern and represent a large mass of people. Though that's also a localization thing of adjusting vague language like Japanese into English where certain code of conduct does not translate well and we're stick trying to figure out how a person translates that.
Basically, I can't read your mind. I can only guess based on the complaint you made. And while I did forget what the guild did say when replying to you, it didn't really alter much of my arguments and only adds a few more potential reasons why the translation is the way it is. It just adds more possibilities of why. And I say that as someone who thinks it really should have just defaulted to translating it as she as it does seem like this is where it would naturally flow towards and just doing a quick translator note in the future when future context comes up, unless of course the translators have read a few raw chapters ahead and have a specific reason to translate things in a specific way that leads to an intended payoff that translating in real time releases may not have had the foresight to do so.
Similar threads
