I usually like what Artur has to say, but parts of that post were baffling.
Artur is yet another voice saying that JB's dialogue is more readable than Viz's. Which is an argument I absolutely cannot see the sense in. I feel like I'm going crazy here, I'm sure even people who preferred JB in the past had admitted that it reads too stiff and literal, as a trade-off for it being more accurate. But now it's apparently the peak of dialogue? The whole part about the language used in the official release made no goddamn sense to me. The choices of word comparisons are bizarre as well. Unless I'm reading this wrong, is "scrap" meant to be a more refined word than "duel?" I'd have had that the other way around. He complains that the formal language in Viz is too formal and the casual language is too casual (or at least, too boomer about being too casual), but isn't Japanese a language with a clear and important divide between polite and impolite ways of talking? Wouldn't it make sense to play up both sides so the distinction isn't lost in translation? Why does he mention an "abuse of apostrophes" but bring up two words without apostrophes as an example of that? It's just riddled with contradictions.
And let's be real, no one, in any translation of One Piece, speaks the way real people speak. At all. It's hyperbole to say almost any line is a real thing that could ever come out of a person's mouth. And that's actually okay. It's fictional dialogue, not a real conversation. It's meant to be funny, convey information and betray emotion to the readers in a precise and calculated way that genuine human speech never does. Realism isn't necessarily a bad thing when writing dialogue, but all of those aforementioned things have to come first, and so should having a good, smooth flow when read, fitting in the speech bubbles at a readable size and generally doing everything possible to make all of the above easy to understand. Good dialogue is different from realistic dialogue and even that requires a level of abstraction from the real way people talk.
For someone usually so analytical, I think it's also disappointing that Artur takes the inclusion of more Japanese terms in Wano as an inconsistency rather than an deliberate choice to make the Japanese-inspired country feel more Japanese. You're a smart man, Artur, you should be able to understand that.
Agree to disagree on whether translations should retain honorifics and things like "senpai," there's no necessarily wrong answer there. Agree to disagree on things like adding puns if there's an opportunity and they don't obscure important information. (Some may say it's disrespectful, I think if done right it can be true to the tone of the original - you make up for the joke that won't translate somewhere else with one only possible in the translation in another place, the chapter remains full of funny details, as Oda intended.) I don't think it's fair to chalk either of those up as flaws because they're a matter of preference to such a huge degree.
"Simply pointing at mangapanda’s asinine translations back in 2002 doesn’t reflect the current state of scans well and is misleading of the current situation" is an interesting line that's been coming up in different forms throughout the debate. I mean sure, JB is better than Mangapanda was. JB never went back and did the whole series from the start when they picked it up though. So for anything before whatever chapter they started, you still have to go hunting for another group and possibly run into the old stuff. And if it's a defence of scans that they're not like that anymore, can we not just remove all decisions made before Stephen started working at Viz from the table because the official release is also very much not like that anymore?
I'm also going to lowkey question how much of the official release Artur has read. Back when he was doing posts on the Vivre Card databook he commented on a lot of the romanisations used as being new and unexpected and different from how they'd been written before when plenty of those examples were actually just following the official release's spellings. But you know, why talk about the times Viz got it right and no one else did?
And the final part is this whole tirade about not harassing people who follow the scans? What? What the actual fuck is that? That's the side of this you choose to give a "calm down" reminder to? He admits himself that he got only one twitter reply even suggesting the official release was better. Meanwhile look at the hate being spewed towards the official release. Look at the refusal by most commenters to acknowledge anything the official release does right alongside its flaws. Even the most evenhanded analyses of the pros and cons of the official release die in new on Reddit. A correction that it was Mangastream, not Viz, who used Dogtooth was controversial at best as far as the site's scoring went. Oh I'm sure there are people out there who are going on the offensive against people who read scans and sending terrible messages, and yeah, fuck those guys as well, but I think we can all see where the bulk of the public discourse is. To write something like that without even an offhand acknowledgement of the toxicity of the other side is way off the mark. I'm not going to shame anyone for reading scans, but there should be at least a little shame over that.
