Netflix is notoriously bad at this. CR gets a bad rep, but compared to Netflix they’re a godsend.
It’s annoying when Netflix or Amazon gets exclusive rights to a show. You either need to wait for fansubs (and you’ll only get them for the most popular shows after a wait) or deal with this bullshit.
Most official subs are AI these days. Companies are feeding the show’s transcript into the machine and it’s spitting out translations for all the different markets. If it’s not dialogue, it’s not getting translated.
Chainsmoker cat is not a great phrase, it’s clumsy and hard to say. Yani Neko is actually her name, why is this a big deal?
I am talking about the untranslated text bubble, not the name. I have noticed that sometimes it is translated, and sometimes it isn’t.
Yeah, whether or not on-screen text is translated seems like a total crapshoot. Some translators go the extra mile and format the translated text to look like the original, but far too many just ignore it entirely.
In all seriousness, there might be style guidelines that explicitly say to not translate proper nouns like character names that have literal translations.
And in most cases this probably makes sense. Frieren is reportedly a bit cringy for people who know German because the series uses on-the-nose German words for basically every character and place. Frieren = freezing, Himmel = heaven, Stark = strong, Fern = far/distant, Heiter = cheerful. There are probably similar examples for Japanese characters in other series, though I can’t think of any at the moment.
Chainsmoker Cat is an ideal show to bend that rule though. “Thanks for the help, Chainsmoker Cat!” is legit a better line than “Thanks for the help, Yani Neko!”
It’s like that scene in Coffee and Cigarettes where GZA and RZA from the Wu-tang Clan meet Bill Murray in a cafe and they constantly refer to him by his full name. Never “Bill” or “Mr Murray”, always “Bill Murray”. It’s not always funnier to do that, but sometimes it just is.
“Thanks for the help, Chainsmoker Cat!”
Chainsmoker Cat?
There are probably similar examples for Japanese characters in other series
yeah for example every name in komi san can’t communicate is a japanese pun or a play on words that describes the character and they are also better left untranslated
I assumed OP was talking about the white rectangle that says "Penname: Ochinpo Tatsuo (Dick Tatsuo) Real Name: (I have no idea how to read that sorry Japanese names are hard)
Yep, I meant the white rectangle that is why I said untranslated.
Oh, whoops lol :3
I think it’s Tatsuno Saori, but don’t quote me on it.
Here to step on a landmine and say the dub is good.
Someone introduced me to “ghost stories”… The English dub of that definitely better
I watch dub with caption and often times the caption phrases things in a better way to me.
Lack of love?
Lack of money. I’m sure most translators would be happy to do a better job if they were given the time and money necessary to do so.
Also I’m not certain Crunchyroll’s new player can even render the subtitles while also rendering more English text for the name. There was a lot of concern about that when they switched tooling.
CR’s new player can actually do this, but Chainsmoker Cat is not done by CR. This is on Netflix
Lack of love by whoever paid for the translation.
Well I can agree with that. Crunchyroll has been on the decline ever since Sony bought them.
Ain’t no way they named the cat Yoni Neko
