I decided to do a bit of a writeup/deeper look into what made Saint Tail's official translations so dangerously misleading, as well as what kinds of notes I had to take for the retranslation project. I don't usually post my notes up in this kind of detail, but I felt this was a good opportunity to show off how complex the series' writing actually is (and show off more of the translation process, because I just love talking about translation too much in general). If you're interested in the series, or you're just interested in how translation works, please check it out!
By previous translations of the Kaitou Saint Tail anime being bad, do you mean both the Tokyopop and the Discotek versions?
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.
As of today, all 27 manga chapters and 43 episodes of Saint Tail have been fully retranslated from scratch! Please click here to check it out!
This project started at around the beginning of July, so I have to admit that it's quite the feeling to have finally finished all of the translation work! To be honest, I was a bit self-conscious about how the unusual release schedule and the abnormally extensive documentation would be received, but we've gotten quite a few supportive comments, so thank you so much!
(Look, it's just really hard to make a claim like "almost every page of the manga has wordplay or some kind of metaphor, meaning previous English translations lost almost a whole half of the plot and made the entire ending and epilogue come off as saying the opposite of what they're actually supposed to" unless you have sufficient evidence to make a case for it...)
It may not be exaggeration to say that this has probably been the most challenging translation I've ever tackled to date, even though the deceptively simple plot doesn't make it come off as that kind of series at first glance, so I hope all of the effort that the rest of the team and I put into it can come through and that people can enjoy it as much as possible.
In regards to future plans: I want to take a look at some more of Tachikawa's works (I made a post about this earlier, but none of her other work has been treated well in translation), as well as perhaps some other magical girl series that need translation love. But I can't make any explicit promises, especially since I'd have to juggle it with a huge backlog of other stuff...and also, I need a break after almost six months straight of this 😅 I'm off to enjoy the rest of the winter holiday, and I hope you all do too. If you do decide to check out the series with the new translation in the meantime, I'd definitely be really happy if you posted reactions 😊
Here's a pet project I've been working on for the past few months: a full retranslation of the 1994-1996 phantom thief/magical girl series Saint Tail, both the manga and the anime! This is a series that has had quite a bit of a troubled localization history: every official English release of both the manga and the anime has been full of severe story-damaging translation problems, ranging from semantic error mistranslations to destroying most of the double-meaning wordplay and foreshadowing.
If you've read/watched this series before, I would heavily recommend you try it again with the new translation, because you may be surprised to find that it is a very different series from how previous translations had presented it as! A full explanation of the problem is on the project page, but to put it simply, there's an incredible amount of depth and nuance that had gotten completely lost, and the main reason I started this project was to give this series the proper chance it deserved.
Currently, we've finished the full manga (24 main chapters plus 3 extra chapters) and the 24 anime episodes that were adapted directly from the manga. I'll be continuing to put out the 19 remaining anime filler episodes one by one, so be sure to follow the project progress for updates if this series interests you!