@Galaxy:

We hope you've enjoyed the long road through Enies Lobby. What's next?

Baratie would be nice if it's an easy quick fix to spit out fast, otherwise, Water 7 would be preferred.

@Blake:

Sorry I keep harping on this but you guys don't seem to care much, but would it be fine if I made more dub edits? I don't expect them to be like considered official ones, I'm guessing you guys want to EVENTUALLY do what youre doing with enies lobby to the whole series and youre probably much better at it, just to like provide for accesibility for the series in the moment. I understand if you wouldn't want me to though, I'm reusing your own work.

I think it would be pretty hypocritical of the One Pace crew to not want their work reused while they themselves are editing the series without Toei's blessing.

@TARIPAR:

I disagree. I think it's very relevant. All five of your English examples are, after all, different words with different histories and intentions. The Japanese くそ does not have the same intention behind sht. Sht is explicitly vulgar in the majority of English speaking cultures. くそ is not vulgar in any Japanese culture.

Yes, I agree, "shit" is exclusively vulgar in English, and you only use it in casual context. That's why we're having this discussion in the first place. "Kuso" is not analogous to "shit" in all instances, this is where the concept of Japanese formal and informal language is important. English has no formality system since we dropped it in the 1600s, thus, we have no grammatical structures that are inherently vulgar in how you phrase sentences or words. We only have singled out crude words. I agree "kuso" is not 1:1 with "shit", because there is no 1:1 translation for "shit" in Japanese. Vice versa, there is no way to express Japan's formality system in English other than crude language, or for historical works falling back on shakesperean sounding language. Though, in the greatest of ironies, the "thee, thou" language associated with yesteryear is actually informal vulgar language, not formal language, which is what modern English is left with.

I would also argue くそ doesn't possess an intention for feces either, as the intention of feces in English is to abstract the crudeness of the object through a foreign language (i.e. Latin), so that it's "couth" to speak of in professional/medical circles.

I agree and literally pointed this out later with my comparison of "くそ (kuso) vs うんこ (unko) vs 糞 (fun)", "fun" being the equivalent of "feces". We both agree that context, history and other things matter. Not literal meaning. The fact that, literally, all of these Japanese words, and all of the English words listed (Shit, dung, excrement, poop, feces) refer to the same object is also something we agree on. It's the connotations of where it's used that matters. Let me restate, "kuso" is not 1:1 equal with "shit". Let's attack this from a different angle though. What is the most vulgar, informal way to refer to poop in Japanese? As far as any of my research, it's "kuso", nothing slides down more on the formality scale. If not "kuso", what word would you translate "shit" to in Japanese? Because it's not "うんこ" or "糞".

Ah, I'm glad you brought that last bit up. I'm not a fan of localization as it's commonly done. It's a form of censorship/watering down imo.

We agree on this explicitly. The problem literal translation problem tries to solve and localization tries to solve are two very different problems. However, there are certain contexts where translating literally is just obtuse. Again, to use an extremely vulgar example on the subject, translating a Japanese person having an orgasm as "I'm going, I'm going" instead of "I'm cumming, I'm cumming" benefits no one.

Whether it's changing the names of characters needlessly (Fire Emblem) or inserting mild language where there isn't any, I think it's silly, and you should instead port the original as faithfully as possible, linguistic quirks in all. Because then you actually pick up on how Japanese people think, and nothing is calqued or filtered out except basic parsing (it'd be weird if Japanese sentence structure was retained, as that'd be completely illegible in English 70% of the time).

I would agree, there are situations that are just silly, changing character names is a pretty stupid example of localization.

So that's probably where our perspectives primarily disagree. Since no Japanese person recognizes a "swear-tier" subset of words in their language, I don't think we should use any of ours to translate their words (unless, as stated before, they use one of our words for that purpose).

Again, I don't believe in localization unabashedly. If you're not going to localize to any degree though, how do you propose to capture Japanese thinking as far as formal language goes? There's no English equivalent to Japanese informal/formal scale. The conjugation changes, nouns change, but the words remain mostly the same give or take. The most basic example of this is that English has "you" (and used to have "thou") and Japanese has "omae", "anata", "kimi", "sochira", "kisama", "temee" and "onore", that is, when the Japanese even bother with pronouns. There's no literal way to translate these words differently. They all mean the same thing in English, "you". Yet you will lose a lot of context without some way of conveying tone and formality/vulgarity. We have to work with the tools given to us. Either you use English's closest equivalent to a formality system, the presence of lack of swears, or we need to engineer a formality system into the English to make translation in such a manner possible. The Japanese recognize vulgar speech, this can not be argued, what differs is how Japanese as a language executes vulgarity vs how English executes vulgarity.

I would like to just restate my position that "fuck" or "shit" should not be used very often in One Piece, nor other Shounen works (well, maybe excepting Chainsaw Man). It's heavily contextual, and you lose shock factor when you over use expletives. Expletives need to be exceptional to serve their intended purpose.

@TARIPAR:

I'll chime in on this since I know a fair bit about Japanese grammar. The bulk of this isn't even directed at you, but more knowledge in general for knowledge's sake for those who care to know it.

Shounen manga is targeted to "shounen", which is designated as adolescent boys (12ish–18ish). PG-13 is a pretty fair comparison in that regard. You're correct in that 13 to the Japanese mind is different than 13 to the far more protective Western mind. However, that doesn't change linguistics.

Our cultures value different things, yes (the West is as lenient on violence as the East is on sex), but that doesn't change the fact that grammatically くそ (kuso) means poop. The most vulgar that word could be translated is "crap" or "dung," neither of which are actually vulgar in the US. Year 1 Japanese students say くそ.

I agree with your general sentiment, but it is irrelevant that "kuso" literally means "poop". "Shit", "feces", "poop", "dung" and "crap" all have the same meaning in so far as the literal object it is referring to. The difference is concerning the intensity and the context. The only exception in the previous list is that sometimes "shit" is just used as an expletive, however, in any casual context, "shit" could be used to refer to human feces grammatically correctly. In regards to Year 1 Japanese students using "kuso", you're again projecting a Western mindset on language policing. Just because children are saying it, doesn't mean it isn't vulgar, it means it's allowable for children to be (contextually) vulgar. Children in Japan start off with very informal, impolite language and will use it in multiple contexts that may not be appropriate. In Japanese culture, the way language changes as you get older and more aware of a formal/informal language that changes as vocabulary is refined for conjugation rules. Of course, eventually, either by parents or teachers, a child is taught when it is or isn't appropriate to useくそ (kuso) vs うんこ (unko) vs 糞 (fun). The mindset towards language is different on a fundamental level towards what a child should be talking like when they are a child vs when they are older and know better. This is hard to translate of course, because swears are the closest thing modern English has to a formality system (it is okay for children to swear when talking to other children, it is okay for adults to swear around other adults, it is not okay for adults to swear around children and vice versa). As I previously stated, this is an issue of translation strategy. If we go by literal translation then yes "shit" does not exist as a word in Japanese, nor "fuck", or any other swear. If we go by localization you want to replicate contextual vulgarity which is fundamentally subjective. If we start going down the route of literally translation though, translating any orgasm gets awkward because literal Japanese translates to "I'm going, I'm going".

tl;dr F and S have absolutely no place in anime subs unless the words are ファック (fakku) and シット (sh*tto), which are just the English words ported into Japanese. For an example of the latter, check out episode 2 of Sonic X, where Sonic unironically says it. It's rather amusing as an English speaker.

I agree that F and S have very few uses, as previously stated, but I won't budge on there being specially timed uses for them. (For reference the original screenshot in this thread is definitely not warranting of it.) While it is a different situation, you did bring up "PG-13 movies" and for context those ARE allowed to throw around "fuck" once or twice and "shit" as they like. As far as direct quotes goes, that's an entirely different discussion, taking into account that half of the Japanese population are not English speakers. There's enough pictures of graphic t-shirts from Asia including phrases like "chocolate fucking jesus" to understand that they aren't using fuck the same way an English speaker does. Again, this comes down to a translation strategy between literal and localization.

@Zo-Na:

But its literally in a magazine targeted for 13 year olds.

One Piece is, basically, what would be PG13 in English. No hard swearing. No hard sexual content. No excessive gore.

I am aware swearing in Japanese and in English is very different, Japanese having much less actual swears and its mostly about context/attitude/content/ect, but even then One Piece is clearly meant to always be pretty kid friendly. Oda has always given off that feeling in everything he writes. He may make a little dirty joke/answer a dirty joke in the SBS from time to time but its still mostly meant to be light and the jokes never get TOO bad.

So while the swears in OP and the swears in an "r-rated" japanese film may be similar/the same its the context/attitude/actual content that wildly differ.

I agree that One Piece characters shouldn't be dropping f-bombs left and right (if anything it cheapens the words use), but you're projecting a lot of puritan values on the Japanese with phrases like "targeted for 13 year olds". What the Japanese think is appropriate for a 13-year-old and what a contemporary American/European does differ greatly. Sanji smoking is a good example of something Americans would balk at and have edited in the past. Oda seems to even push the envelope for WSJ with scenes like Whitebeard's death that got censored for the anime, the Japanese are far more restrictive when it comes to violence. Meanwhile, you say things like

He may make a little dirty joke/answer a dirty joke in the SBS from time to time but its still mostly meant to be light and the jokes never get TOO bad.

when someone in Japan doesn't think sex is a taboo subject for young boys. The notion it would be doesn't even cross their mind (barring full on nudity, but that's actually a weird legal construct from when Americans were occupying them.) A "dirty joke" to you isn't even dirty to the Japanese, it's just a sex joke. Have you ever actually read the original Japanese or just translations that others have done that have preconceived notions of what's appropriate for children?

In the end this is purely a localization issue since, as has been established, Japanese vocabulary never developed proper swears. The question becomes should the work be released with the American notion of what is or isn't appropriate, (no swearing, violence is A-okay, boobs and other things need to be heavily censored) or try to preserve as much as the original context. Again, I am not advocating that One Piece should drop "fuck" every other sentence, it's obvious that is not the level of vulgarity it's portraying. Just be aware that the majority of your experience with WSJ has been sanitized by corporations and translation groups that have a Western mindset when it comes to child appropriate content.