► Did Yuri Propose to Victor?

toraonice:

I very much agree with this blog and I’ll take this occasion to say my two cents about that line (and then I don’t want to talk about this topic anymore, lol).

Unlike what some people say, I personally do not think that Crunchyroll’s translation was “completely off”, because it’s pretty obvious in Japanese that Yuuri was meaning just that (as mentioned in the blog, it is common for Japanese to omit details that can be understood from the context), so it does make sense as an adaptation. Victor comments about the marriage proposal because Yuuri’s “vague” wording is ambiguous, but of course he is perfectly aware of what he was actually meaning. However, I do think that in English it doesn’t sound as effective if you put in the word “coach” because it loses the ambiguity, therefore if it were me I would have left it more vague (like “please take care of me”). But that’s just my personal choice.

Please always remember that the purpose of a translation is to “transform” the original text into something that makes sense in the destination language, and with “makes sense” I mean from a grammatical point of view too. Especially when it comes to languages like Japanese, that have a completely different sentence structure than English, it’s very hard to do literal translations that will sound nice in English as well. To do that you often need to arrange them to an extent. It’s easy to explain a line’s exact meaning with a long commentary, but on the screen the only thing you can do is substitute it with a translated line of similar length that needs to make sense in English.

I haven’t watched the subs and don’t know how many lines accused to be “mistranslations” are actually wrong and how many are just the result of adaptation choices (with which some people may agree and some may not of course), but if you are curious to know the 100% exact meaning of a Japanese line you have two possibilities: 1) learn Japanese yourself (this takes time but it’s the one that works the best I’d say, lol), 2) enjoy the subs as they are and then look for more detailed commentary on reliable blogs to get a deeper insight.

I believe recently there are too many people ready to jump at any “wrong translation” they see (like “OMFG they translated ohayou as ‘hello’ but it means ‘good morning’!!!”), and they often seem to be people whose Japanese level is below average. Please always ask/refer to reliable sources if you have any doubts or questions~.

Thanks for reading this far. Now I’ll go finish another translation and then psychologically prepare for tonight’s episode 10…
By the way, thanks to all people who are sending comments! I sometimes don’t reply to anonymous ones because I can’t do “reply privately” and I don’t want to fill the blog too much with stuff not directly related to translations, but I appreciate all of them. (To questions I will usually reply within 1-2 days…!)

(P.S.: Just to avoid misunderstandings… of course “hello” is a perfectly fine adaptation for “ohayou”!)