[US] Sailor Moon & Codename Sailor V manga kanzenban thread

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Sep 9, 2011
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#21
I was apprehensive about double-dipping until I read about the new translation. That sealed it for me. I will be picking these up. Kodansha's existing translation is really clunky, dry, and stale, with no personality. It READS like a translation. So glad they've improved since the bad old days.
 

JayD22460

Aurorae Lunares
Dec 20, 2011
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#22
MrShoujo said:
January 2018. Hell of a long time to pre-order a book. I'll wait for a listing in Previews.

An all new translation means "translator" William Flanagan shouldn't have his name mentioned like at all. It took Kodansha USA a while to finally get another translator for their 1st set of republished books. I hope there will be color pages this time. I'll re-buy. It will make... how many sets?

1 - Original Japanese
2 - Tokyopop release
3 - Kodansha USA release
4 - Kodansha USA 2nd release - Eternal Edition

SnowWolf said:
Their quality control is much improved then it was back then. Maybe they will get a consistant letterer as well.

Which translator would you want? My vote is for the Nibley sisters.
Oh god, no. I'd rather not have them. They worked on Negima and I think some of UQ Holder.
It seems like they are Kodansha USA's go-to translators.

What should be done is some sort of survey to see what terms are most popular among fans for key phrases and ones that are accurate and literal to the original work and find an agreement and compromise. And of course, keep colloquial and slang English out of it, keep honorifics, and just make a translation that can't be dated.
Just to correct you...there are three Japanese releases and now with the Eternal Edition, there will be three English releases. Original Japanese, Japanese Renewal, Japanese Perfect. Tokyopop, Kodansha, Kodansha Eternal. That's not counting the individual issues Tokyopop (Mixx) released back in the day.

Also, I'm going to reiterate what others are saying: NO HONORIFICS. That is the sign of an unprofessional translation. Even if it's common in anime and manga nowadays, it's still not the best way to translate something.

No surveys for what the fans want because that almost never works out well (Funimation asked the fans if they wanted DBZ on Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio or cropped for widescreens, and most fans stupidly voted for cropping).

Colloquial and slang English DO belong in English translations because IT'S A TRANSLATION. These are sometimes the best ways to localize Japanese jokes that simply don't work in English.

The translation needs to be accurate to the original work but it also needs to be localized to a degree, and it needs to come across as modern English.
 
Nov 1, 2010
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#23
I'd also prefer not to have any honorifics in the new translation, but from what I could tell from searching online, Kodansha Comics tends to keep them in its manga releases. Does anyone know of any recent releases from Kodansha that don't use them?

I'm still excited for this release though. I bought two volumes in Japan while I was there last year, and the quality is really great!
 

NJ_

Gurges Ater
Oct 31, 2009
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#24
John said:
No surveys for what the fans want because that almost never works out well (Funimation asked the fans if they wanted DBZ on Blu-ray in its original aspect ratio or cropped for widescreens, and most fans stupidly voted for cropping).
Time to kill that myth again...

https://twitter.com/lheiskell/status/621190503548129280
https://twitter.com/lheiskell/status/623695483081351169

Lance Heiskell (former marketing director) said:
Don't ask about 16:9 vs 4:3 ..... I fought and lost.

I can't trust DBZ fans after they voted for 16:9 Blu-rays.
Majority of surveys voted 4:3. Then it was ignored internally. Past sales of 16:9 sold better than 4:3.
This was posted back in 2015 and 2 months after he left the company so basically, the 16:9 Blu-ray decision was ALL on FUNimation and not the voters.

Another example of a wasted survey from them was the Dragon Box one from 2012 which at first implied that they were interested in releasing more than just DBZ's Dragon Boxes but that never happened which was a damn shame because out of the other DB shows, the original series needed it the most...the DBZ movies also needed it but their press release for the show implied that they had the masters for those films. : / )
 

JayD22460

Aurorae Lunares
Dec 20, 2011
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#25
Jesus, I never knew that! I'm not really in the DBZ fandom so sorry for not knowing that wasn't true. I'm so surprised it was ignored internally. Oh man. Faith restored in my fellow DBZ fans, lmao.

That said, I still don't think polling fans for their opinions is a smart thing to do. It was disastrous for Final Fantasy XV. I can only imagine what something like this would look like for Sailor Moon. They would only try to end up pleasing as many people as possible and make some weird translation choices.
 

SnowWolf

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May 17, 2012
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#27
ShinraiTenchi said:
I'd also prefer not to have any honorifics in the new translation, but from what I could tell from searching online, Kodansha Comics tends to keep them in its manga releases. Does anyone know of any recent releases from Kodansha that don't use them?

I'm still excited for this release though. I bought two volumes in Japan while I was there last year, and the quality is really great!
Attack on Titan doesn't use them. Across the various companies, it always seems to be the shojo titles that keep the honourifics while shounen releases remove them. Do they think Japanese honourics work best in romance or girls want then left in?

MementoNepenthe said:
I just hope this time around we get "Amazones" and "Seiren," and no more "Princess Beryl" and "Spark Ring Wide Pressure."
To be fair, "Spark Ring Wide Pressure" was fixed in the second printing so that's one error you definitely won't have to worry about.
 
#28
Wow! And here I was, just a couple of days ago, whining about how they didn't translate the Kanzenban edition, what with it's beatiful covers and COLOR (!) chapter art.

I know others have said they expected the perfect edition to be released in the US - but I never imagined it would come out so quickly! Wasn't the shinsoban edition "just" translated in 2012? I suppose that was five years ago, but I would assume Kodansha would want to get a large ROI for that translation before producing this next one. Maybe they already have.

And this is great news, but I just bought box sets 1 & 2 this past Christmas... I would've waited to buy if I had known they were going to publish the perfect edition over here so quickly! :supercry:
 
Sep 9, 2011
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#29
I didn't like the honorifics, but my biggest problem with Kodansha's old translation was that it lacked serious characterization. It's like the translator just found the proper technical words, and called it a day. Everyone was talking like Ami, even Usagi and Minako.
 

Neon Genesis

Solaris Luna
Oct 31, 2015
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#30
SnowWolf said:
Attack on Titan doesn't use them. Across the various companies, it always seems to be the shojo titles that keep the honourifics while shounen releases remove them. Do they think Japanese honourics work best in romance or girls want then left in?
It's my understanding that the decision to keep honorifics were made at the request of the manga authors, at least that was the explanation Tokyopop always gave for why they kept it in their unflipped titles.
 

SnowWolf

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May 17, 2012
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#31
I wasn't a fan of the honorifics either.

This blog post I wrote details the major problems I had wth the release.

http://mangaanotherstory.blogspot.com.a ... ailor.html

Neon Genesis said:
SnowWolf said:
Attack on Titan doesn't use them. Across the various companies, it always seems to be the shojo titles that keep the honourifics while shounen releases remove them. Do they think Japanese honourics work best in romance or girls want then left in?
It's my understanding that the decision to keep honorifics were made at the request of the manga authors, at least that was the explanation Tokyopop always gave for why they kept it in their unflipped titles.
I'm not sure I buy that. What are the international translations for Sailor Moon like? Can anyone answer if the French or the German translations, for example, keep the Japanese honorifics?
 

NJ_

Gurges Ater
Oct 31, 2009
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#32
izzie-chan said:
Wasn't the shinsoban edition "just" translated in 2012? I suppose that was five years ago...
The shinsoban editions were announced in March 2011 and were released from September of that year (with Codename Sailor V) to November 2013.

izzie-chan said:
And this is great news, but I just bought box sets 1 & 2 this past Christmas... I would've waited to buy if I had known they were going to publish the perfect edition over here so quickly! :supercry:
Did you get the 2 short story volumes? Those weren't included with the box sets.

IIRC, the short stories were put back in with the main manga chapters for the kanzenban editions.
 

JayD22460

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#33
MementoNepenthe said:
I just hope this time around we get "Amazones" and "Seiren," and no more "Princess Beryl" and "Spark Ring Wide Pressure."
"Spark Ring" was atrocious and like someone else pointed out, I believe it was corrected in future printings. "Princess Beryl" was also embarrassing and I remember the translator tried to defend it, as if we didn't have access to the Japanese text ourselves. Ridiculous.

On the other hand..."Amazones" and "Seiren" really shouldn't be anywhere near an English translation.

I've read the articles on Dies Gaudii about why "Amazones" might be the intended term, but I don't buy it at all. Takeuchi clearly used "Amazon" to refer to the trio (male) and "Amazoness" to refer to the quartet (female). Yes, the Amazons were female warriors in Greek mythology, but Takeuchi is clearly using the term "Amazon" to refer to the rain forest in the manga. Since the Amazon Trio members are male and the Amazoness Quartet members are female, it seems pretty clear that -ness (as a feminized version of Amazon, which is typical in English) is the intended spelling.

I always thought that the "Amazones" debate existed purely for the sake of being contrary. I don't think it holds up well at all.

You didn't bring this up yourself, but since it's associated with the Amazones/Amazoness debate: the term is also "quartet" and not "quartetto" -- the Japanese ALWAYS use "karutetto" to write "quartet" in Japanese katakana, as seen for the Japanese release of the film "Quartet" a few years ago.

Going by that logic...the term should be Aluminum Siren, not Aluminum Seiren. Yes, I know what the katakana says -- but the katakana is approximating the Greek word that is pronounced like "seiren" -- the English equivalent is "siren" and a search for "seiren" doesn't bring up anything resembling the creatures on Google. This is another instance of the Japanese approximating the original word (just like karutetto for quartet) but we don't need to use the original words in an English translation when we have perfectly usable English equivalents.

I would be all for using "Quartetto" and "Seiren" if the English language did not already have equivalent terms like "quartet" and "siren" that are arguably more readable and encompassing than random foreign words just because the Japanese language prefers to approximate the words from their original languages. Few people would call a siren a "seiren" just because that's how it's pronounced in Greek.

The reason why the Japanese approximate the word "seiren" from Greek as opposed to "siren" from English is because in English, a "siren" can also refer to an alarm. If the Japanese wrote "sairen" for Aluminum Siren, it would be interpreted as an alarm and not a creature from Greek mythology -- but in English, we do not make this distinction.
 
#34
NJ_ said:
izzie-chan said:
Wasn't the shinsoban edition "just" translated in 2012? I suppose that was five years ago...
The shinsoban editions were announced in March 2011 and were released from September of that year (with Codename Sailor V) to November 2013.


izzie-chan said:
And this is great news, but I just bought box sets 1 & 2 this past Christmas... I would've waited to buy if I had known they were going to publish the perfect edition over here so quickly! :supercry:
Did you get the 2 short story volumes? Those weren't included with the box sets.

IIRC, the short stories were put back in with the main manga chapters for the kanzenban editions.
Okay, so it's been a while since the shinsoban editions came out.

And, no, I never bought the short stories. I didn't know they were included like this in this new edition, either. Well, now I have the perfect excuse to buy the new edition! Awesome, thank you!. :happy:
 

JayD22460

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#35
I hope the Eternal Edition corrects a problem from the Japanese "kanzenban" edition. The back covers show silhouettes of the Senshi from the front covers (like volume 1 has Sailor Moon on the front and the back, volume 3 has Mars on the front and the back, etc.) but volume 2 accidentally had Sailor Moon's silhouette on the back with Mercury in the front. I'm not sure if this was ever corrected in later Japanese printings of the kanzenban.
 

Memento

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Mar 8, 2012
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#36
John said:
MementoNepenthe said:
I just hope this time around we get "Amazones" and "Seiren," and no more "Princess Beryl" and "Spark Ring Wide Pressure."
"Spark Ring" was atrocious and like someone else pointed out, I believe it was corrected in future printings. "Princess Beryl" was also embarrassing and I remember the translator tried to defend it, as if we didn't have access to the Japanese text ourselves. Ridiculous.

On the other hand..."Amazones" and "Seiren" really shouldn't be anywhere near an English translation.

I've read the articles on Dies Gaudii about why "Amazones" might be the intended term, but I don't buy it at all. Takeuchi clearly used "Amazon" to refer to the trio (male) and "Amazoness" to refer to the quartet (female). Yes, the Amazons were female warriors in Greek mythology, but Takeuchi is clearly using the term "Amazon" to refer to the rain forest in the manga. Since the Amazon Trio members are male and the Amazoness Quartet members are female, it seems pretty clear that -ness (as a feminized version of Amazon, which is typical in English) is the intended spelling.

I always thought that the "Amazones" debate existed purely for the sake of being contrary. I don't think it holds up well at all.

You didn't bring this up yourself, but since it's associated with the Amazones/Amazoness debate: the term is also "quartet" and not "quartetto" -- the Japanese ALWAYS use "karutetto" to write "quartet" in Japanese katakana, as seen for the Japanese release of the film "Quartet" a few years ago.

Going by that logic...the term should be Aluminum Siren, not Aluminum Seiren. Yes, I know what the katakana says -- but the katakana is approximating the Greek word that is pronounced like "seiren" -- the English equivalent is "siren" and a search for "seiren" doesn't bring up anything resembling the creatures on Google. This is another instance of the Japanese approximating the original word (just like karutetto for quartet) but we don't need to use the original words in an English translation when we have perfectly usable English equivalents.

I would be all for using "Quartetto" and "Seiren" if the English language did not already have equivalent terms like "quartet" and "siren" that are arguably more readable and encompassing than random foreign words just because the Japanese language prefers to approximate the words from their original languages. Few people would call a siren a "seiren" just because that's how it's pronounced in Greek.

The reason why the Japanese approximate the word "seiren" from Greek as opposed to "siren" from English is because in English, a "siren" can also refer to an alarm. If the Japanese wrote "sairen" for Aluminum Siren, it would be interpreted as an alarm and not a creature from Greek mythology -- but in English, we do not make this distinction.
"Aluminum Siren" doesn't really bother me, and I understand your point/reasoning completely; I just prefer "Seiren" because I happen to think it looks better, so I'd like to see it used.

I agree with you on "Quartetto." That just seems overly fussy/clunky. I really doubt that was Naoko's intention.

As for Amazon/Amazones/Amazoness... Naoko is playing on both meanings of the term. "Amazon" in its mythological sense refers to a race of women, so "Amazoness" just seems redundant. At the same time, "Amazones" (the plural of "Amazon") is also redundant since "Quartet" already indicates there's more than one. (Personally I'd just call them the "Amazon Quartet," but if they're going to tack on an ending, I'd rather it be -es than -ess.) As for the Amazon Trio... They may be men, but in her concept art pages for them, Naoko clearly indicates that they're transvestites with effeminate voices and that they're gay. Naoko has always been (and, as Toki Meca indicates, probably still is, unfortunately) kind of messy in her depictions of gay characters, so I wouldn't be surprised if the intention of calling the male(?) trio "Amazon" was to suggest something about their gender/sexuality. It wouldn't exactly be the first time Naoko's done that sort of thing; just look at the chapter of Sailor V where Minako asks Artemis is trans/gay (depending on what translation you're reading) because of his name (despite "Artemis" being used as a unisex name for quite some time).
 
Sep 13, 2009
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#37
I'm not expecting it to happen, but this would be the perfect opportunity to restore original and more correct "Sailor Soldier" translation to "Sailor Senshi".

John said:
Going by that logic...the term should be Aluminum Siren, not Aluminum Seiren. Yes, I know what the katakana says -- but the katakana is approximating the Greek word that is pronounced like "seiren" -- the English equivalent is "siren" and a search for "seiren" doesn't bring up anything resembling the creatures on Google. This is another instance of the Japanese approximating the original word (just like karutetto for quartet) but we don't need to use the original words in an English translation when we have perfectly usable English equivalents.
While I do agree with you regarding "Amazoness Quartet", it's arguments like this "Seiren vs. Siren" one that lead to people making the same arguments for changing the names of the Black Moon clan.

You say that while the Katakana evokes the Greek word "Seiren", we should instead use the Greek word's English equivalent "Siren" instead. Well, what's the difference between that and keeping the French "Esmeraude" and "Saphir", the Latin "Rubeus", and the archaic German "Demand" instead of just using all their English equivalents:"Emerald", "Sapphire", "Ruby", and "Diamond"? Why should one foreign word name be ignored and replaced with its English counterpart, but not others?

MementoNepenthe said:
As for Amazon/Amazones/Amazoness... Naoko is playing on both meanings of the term. "Amazon" in its mythological sense refers to a race of women, so "Amazoness" just seems redundant. At the same time, "Amazones" (the plural of "Amazon") is also redundant since "Quartet" already indicates there's more than one. (Personally I'd just call them the "Amazon Quartet," but if they're going to tack on an ending, I'd rather it be -es than -ess.) As for the Amazon Trio... They may be men, but in her concept art pages for them, Naoko clearly indicates that they're transvestites with effeminate voices and that they're gay. Naoko has always been (and, as Toki Meca indicates, probably still is, unfortunately) kind of messy in her depictions of gay characters, so I wouldn't be surprised if the intention of calling the male(?) trio "Amazon" was to suggest something about their gender/sexuality. It wouldn't exactly be the first time Naoko's done that sort of thing; just look at the chapter of Sailor V where Minako asks Artemis is trans/gay (depending on what translation you're reading) because of his name (despite "Artemis" being used as a unisex name for quite some time).
Naoko drew up a LOT of her male villain characters as effeminate types, so the Amazon Trio hardly stand out in that regard.

Plus, in the finalized version of the manga, Naoko more predominately used the word "Amazon" in reference to the jungle, as the Dead Moon Circus made heavy use of that place and its imagery as part of the circus's advertisement. The circus promoted itself as having come from the Amazon and utilized a whole jungle inside its big top tent during the confrontation with Xenotime and Zeolite. Not to mention the stock of herbs from the Amazon that Hawk's Eye had in his store.
 

JayD22460

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Dec 20, 2011
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#38
Sabrblade said:
You say that while the Katakana evokes the Greek word "Seiren", we should instead use the Greek word's English equivalent "Siren" instead. Well, what's the difference between that and keeping the French "Esmeraude" and "Saphir", the Latin "Rubeus", and the archaic German "Demand" instead of just using all their English equivalents:"Emerald", "Sapphire", "Ruby", and "Diamond"? Why should one foreign word name be ignored and replaced with its English counterpart, but not others?
Good point.

Here's a better argument, then:

The Japanese language ALWAYS writes "siren" (the mythological creature) as "seiren" (セイレーン). It is only written as "sairen" when referring to alarms.

So yes, Takeuchi did intentionally use words from languages other than English (and Japanese), and she also used dated/archaic terms, and I agree that we should not use their English equivalents; however, in the case of siren vs. seiren, the Japanese ALWAYS write "seiren" when referring to sirens. It's not Takeuchi making a choice to specifically use the Greek term and expecting us to localize it that way; that's just how Japanese works with this word all the time.

Writing "Demand" instead of "Diamond" is intentional on the author's part; writing "seiren" instead of "siren" is just correct Japanese (or correct Japanese approximation of a foreign word).

It's like...if there are ever mythological sirens in an anime or manga, and they're referred to as "seiren" in the story itself because that's how the Japanese write that word, it's not going to be translated as "seiren" in any official English version. It makes no sense to refer to them as "sirens" literally 99% of the time, with the remaining 1% being when a Japanese person writes about sirens, just because their language automatically approximates the Greek word.

It's the same case with Quartet, which is usually written as "karutetto" in Japanese because its approximating a language other than English. Even when something is officially given the name "Quartet" in English, the Japanese still render it as "karutetto" -- that doesn't mean we're going to start calling string quartets, etc. "quartettos" in English.

The whole thing started because Sailor Moon is infamous for having all kinds of mistranslations, mistransliterations, and weird foreign words thrown in throughout the entire franchise. Ian Miller did a great job with Dies Gaudii and he corrected a lot of old errors and misconceptions that were running amok in the fandom, but the "siren"/"seiren" thing was way overblown IMO.

MementoNepenthe said:
"Aluminum Siren" doesn't really bother me, and I understand your point/reasoning completely; I just prefer "Seiren" because I happen to think it looks better, so I'd like to see it used.
Fair enough! :)
 

Neon Genesis

Solaris Luna
Oct 31, 2015
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#40
SnowWolf said:
I'm not sure I buy that. What are the international translations for Sailor Moon like? Can anyone answer if the French or the German translations, for example, keep the Japanese honorifics?
In any case, that was the excuse the American manga companies always gave. Several years ago there was also a vocal group of anime fans who thought including honorifics in the translation would give the reader a more "authentic" manga reading experience. That movement has largely died down as fansubbed anime has slowly died out but it was still fairly vocal when Sailor Moon was first re-released in English. Also it does seem like the moment characters start calling each other by their first name or a nickname is a bit more common in manga with heavy romance themes than in a lot of action manga, like in Cardcaptor Sakura or Usagi calling Mamoru "Mamo-chan' in Sailor Moon. In any case, I doubt the decision is being made because of gender stereotypes or something but there was a time period when a lot of manga fans did want honorifics in English translations.