Jaw meets floor.

[nenena]

Oh my. It's been a good several years since the last time that I've had the comments section of a post devolve into such a stunning example of case in fucking point.

Edited to add: Okay, look. I am hardly the only person who has publicly called out proglution and the others in that thread on bleachness for their BS. Many, many people on fandom_wank are making the same points. kuromitsu in particular is someone whose opinion ought to carry some weight, being a damn good translator of Japanese.

Protip: It is never a good idea to start a wank about translation by insulting a professional translator, and it makes you look like even more of an ass when you then go on to twist around and bullshit about what was actually said. When enough people with enough accumulated knowledge among them are continually pointing out that you are wrong, then it is time to step back and consider the possibility that maybe you might be wrong.

proglution and suzukaze are right to argue in my previous post that pobody's nerfect. The same applies to them as well. I have had people more knowledgeable than me point out my translation errors before. And I've corrected them right away. It does nobody any favors to write ten pages worth of comments defending your shitty translation and continuing to insist that the professional interpreter in question was "misleading" when she wasn't.

This, then. This is pretty much the perfect example of the type of posturing behavior that I was trying to call out in my first post.

ETA again: Meni just pointed out one of the bigger, ickier issues that got buried by the translation wank, and I tried to articulate a coherent response on the matter. But this is another one of the things that I wanted to discuss in my first post (before it got so spectacularly derailed): the difference between showing cultural knowledge vs. expressing stereotypes. There's definitely a Pretendian/Wapanese inclination to attempt to speak for people from other cultures, rather than letting them speak for themselves. And that is exactly what happened in Moritagate, when the shippers relied on oversimplified, essentializing cultural stereotypes to deny the possibility that Morita might actually mean what he straight-up said. Talk about twisting cultural knowledge to fit a personal agenda.

Comments

Wow

[(Anonymous)]

What a complete and total load of bulshit that was. (In previous comment section). I can't believe [info]proglution went on such circular rants (and this did seem the case from my perspective) that proved nothing in the end except that they fail in arguments. Oh, and by the way, I'm inclined to believe the one with actual credentials. (AKA, you.)

Re: Wow

[nenena.livejournal.com]

To be fair, it shouldn't be a battle of credentials. People with credentials can still say stupid, stupid shit about Japanese language and culture - witness suzukaze and my favorite overhyped academic John Whittier Treat - but one of the points that I was trying to make in that post was that, really, it's important to recognize the limitations of your own knowledge, regardless of your credentials. And it's asinine for somebody who admits to not being fluent in Japanese to slam a professional translator for doing a "half-assed job," being inaccurate, being misleading, having a shipping bias, etc.

I don't think that this is a complicated point, but it managed to completely sail over both of their heads.