I'm probably procrastinating with JRPGs right now

Sadly, I don't think it's likely I'll ever be able to get around to them. As interesting as the novels are, some of them are really long -- we're talking more than 70 or 80 pages -- and with the limited free time I have, I'd rather use it on things that have higher urgency (things with high franchise lore impact, etc.). I won't say 100% no because I don't like to definitively shut down any possibilities, but I also don't want people to get their hopes up 💦 Sorry!

The best way I can put it is that I'm "keeping an eye on the situation". The fact it's MTL offends me on a theoretical level for sure.

But the part I want to keep an eye on is the question of "how much damage will there be if it's not retranslated?", because regardless of how much something annoys me in principle, going as far as retranslating something with an official translation means doing it to counter practical consequences. So for instance, I will do this for things like Megumi Tachikawa manga because no matter how conscientiously or not the official translation was done, the fact is, the final product is misleading to dangerous levels that misrepresent the source material. Likewise, my problem with Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna's official translation is not about whatever process they used for the translation as much as the fact that all of the mistakes and shaky wording had to impact the parts where the movie's themes are most important. Same goes for The Beginning (to a lesser degree, but it's still a problem). All of these are human-translated, but all of them have problems in a way that I felt were dangerous when left unaddressed.

So what I want to look out for is exactly how damaging this translation is going to be to the final product, and how people are reading it (especially since I know I'm not the only person keeping tabs on this). Of course, there's going to be some damage; there's no way of avoiding the fact that a lot of the character personality doesn't feel right by vibe. Ideally speaking, this should have been properly translated from day one. But in regards to the issue of whether it's worth actually getting the team together for this and setting up a workflow to keep up with the entire thing...that's not something I can decide until I get a better pulse on how necessary I would be.

I'm sorry I can't give a more positive answer than this! If I had all the time and energy in the world, I would gladly do it anyway, but since I don't, I have to make sure it actually is more necessary than other priority projects first.

Honestly, very little. Actually, as far as changes that were clearly intentional go, I didn't see very many (perhaps surprisingly so for a Tokyopop manga at the time?), and they weren't really that damaging to the story by themselves; if they were, they were only a small part of a wider problem where the relevant subplot wasn't reflected properly in the overall translation.

The main issue is simply that the translation is extremely sloppy, failing to account for a lot of nuance in how the Japanese dialogue is phrased and failing to maintain the importance of certain recurring words/phrases. At times, a lot of it comes from the translation being too stuck on the dictionary definitions of the words in the sentence instead of being more flexible with phrasing, and when there are liberties taken in the wrong direction, the problem isn't about taking liberties at all, but that someone involved seemed to have misinterpreted the story context and phrased it in a way that made things stop making sense. And of course, some lines are just full-on technical errors, or in other words, clear byproducts of the translator misreading a word or sentence to begin with.

(Incidentally, I'm specifically referring to the manga translation and the anime subtitles; the English dub is a whole other can of worms, but it doesn't cover the full series, so I think talking about whether the story makes coherent sense with it is kind of a moot point.)

All things considered, I do think there are some really good choices in the official translations, to the point where some lines even make me think "man, I wish I'd come up with that!" I also fully concede that I was able to make maximum use of language resources and research materials available to me on the Internet in 2023, something that definitely would not have been as possible in 2001. So despite everything I've said, I do have respect for the work that must have been put into the older translations and don't hold a grudge against anyone or anything. It's just that I also believe it's important to be critical of a bad translation when it's bad, especially when it's a professionally produced one that still misrepresents the original source material this badly.

The most well-known examples I like to refer to are Final Fantasy VII (the original game) and Final Fantasy XIII. Whatever you think of the overall quality of their respective stories is subjective, but I'm specifically talking about the part where I would see VII be called things like "surreal" for its stilted phrasing while English-speaking players of XIII would complain that it doesn't sufficiently explain certain plot-important terms like what a l'Cie is, etc. Both games make coherent sense in Japanese, it's specifically the translation that phrased things weirdly and made it unnecessarily confusing. But they're also both professional localizations that have passable English grammar (and in particular, VII came out at a time when people had a tendency to equate "good translation" with "it has swear words in it"), so anyone who's not familiar with Japanese probably wouldn't notice.

Another one that's less well-known but is still a good case study is that of Part 5 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (Vento Aureo). I've never actually read a fan translation of JoJo myself, so this is a story I've heard about via hearsay and short samples, but from what I understand, Part 4's most prominent fan translation had been done by someone who didn't have a good grasp of English grammar, so everyone saw the clumsy grammar and phrasing and knew to take it with a grain of salt. (From the samples I've seen, the translator seemed to actually have a good grasp of Japanese and translation theory, it was specifically the English grammar that was a problem.)

But since the most prominent fan translation of Part 5 seemed to be in coherent English, people accepted that it must be a better translation and that it couldn't be that bad...when in fact there were actually a lot of nuance and character voice problems, as well as lines that were just made up wholesale. But since people reading it didn't notice the problem, they'd often blame anything that didn't make sense on the writing itself, so Part 5 got a bad reputation with things like "the main character (Giorno) has no personality" or making "what does King Crimson even do?" into a meme. Then the anime adaptation with a professional translation came out, and people getting into it thought Giorno was a perfectly well-written character and had no problem understanding how King Crimson works...but until then, people often wouldn't believe you if you claimed the translation had made that much of a difference.

(And this is why being a translator can be kind of scary sometimes. Depending on what you're translating, the stakes can get pretty high...)

They're mostly the same translation, and (correct me if I'm wrong) my understanding is that any full English translation of the series released up to last month had been based on the original Tokyopop translation from 2001. If the translation you know of uses the phrasing "...for I use no gimmick or trick" for the transformation phrase, it's probably based on that one. It does seem like there's been modifications by different people here and there, and I mainly made reference to the Discotek release because it's the most recent official release, so I wanted to make it clear that the problem was still persisting up to even as recently as last year. But fundamentally speaking, they're all working off that one specific translation.

Unfortunately, that translation seems to be in that exact dangerous territory where it's just good enough for anyone looking at it at a glance to think it's mostly usable -- it's a seemingly simple series, the English grammar looks okay, and the story mostly seems to make sense, so there isn't too much problem, right? -- when in fact it's got problems all the way down to the core. These kinds of translations are bad in a very deceptive way, so I can hardly blame anyone who figured that they might as well work off an existing translation since it was technically done already, but I wouldn't have retranslated the entire series from scratch if I hadn't felt it was so much of a disaster that it was easier to just retranslate it than try and salvage it.

When I was going over the Discotek release line-by-line, I did a tally and found around 200 technical errors (as in, context and logic errors or semantic misinterpretation of the original Japanese line), around 30 of which were ones that I felt had a major impact on the plot or story themes, especially the final arc, ending, and epilogue. These are just the technical errors, so that's not even getting into the inconsistently sloppy terminology/naming that seemed to flip back and forth between episodes, the way it often mishandled nuance in characterization (poor Asuka Jr. really got the short end of the stick here), or the gripes I had with the phrasing in general (the fact it had so many choices like rendering a word meaning "inelegant" as "unfeminine" or "no sex appeal", for instance). And unfortunately, the manga, which normally should be a good reference to work from, had an even worse translation (also by Tokyopop) that threw any concept of nuance out the window and had lines that were genuinely incomprehensible.

It pains me to think about the fact that this was all people had to work with for more than 20 years, so that's why I hope even people who have seen the series already can give it a chance with the new translation, because I really do think it's possible it'll come off as a completely different series to them.