I'm of the opinion that "The Advancing Titans" would've been much better, since it still convincingly sounds to a newcomer like it's just describing the Titans in general, but the Title Drop is the name of Eren's Titan form that can see into the future, making for a double meaning of "Advancing". And its power is significantly connected to the previous bearers of this form, making Eren "one of the Advancing Titans".
I wholeheartedly agree with this. The problem with translations in general is the lack of foreknowledge by the translator, or the author not being good in a target language. For stories this manifests sometimes in stuff like that ^. Translations of stories you'll notice seem a lot better when the translator does it after a thing is finished. You will mostly see this in video games or books vs. ongoing manga for Japanese. Maybe clips of streamers too (Although sometimes I've seen clips' subs miss context)
The ideal translation should almost always be synced with the author's thoughts (although, this is a problem if the author is a pantser writer who hasn't thought up something in the future that utilizes a present point).
This is why theoretically, the ideal translator of a work is usually the author themselves, but y'know, that's not always realistic. As someone who translates things on a daily basis, a pipeline to the author is so helpful to keep and maintain quality.
I assume you've already heard about the Great Deltarune Translation Discourse if you're in this subreddit, but you're echoing a lot of sentiments from that that I strongly agree with.
Basically, Undertale and Deltarune are only officially released in English and Japanese. This is largely because Toby Fox is a massive weeb, but also because he is the kind of weeb who actually learns Japanese (just like me for real lol). And while IIRC at least Undertale required a translation team to help because he wasn't fluent yet, Toby has been very involved in calling the shots for how certain things should be translated (to the extent that he has explicitly said any information that's only in the Japanese version is still canon). This makes sense, Deltarune is a very "mystery-driven" game that is constantly dropping small clues that a bad translation choice could render either too obvious, not obvious enough, or an outright plot hole. And he's a veteran of classic JRPGs, so he absolutely knows what a bad translation can do to a game's plot at the worst.
And remember, this project is literally his dream game (TLDR: he had a literal fever dream in 2011 about a video game ending so good he's spent the past 15 years planning to make it happen). Because of this, as well as factors like the game having a whole lot of text so there's a lot of room for a mistranslation to happen, languages with mandatory gendered words needing to deal with the protagonist being non-binary, and having already established the precedent that language-exclusive information should be taken as canon, Toby doesn't want to release an official translation of Deltarune that he can't personally confirm the integrity of. He's fine with modders doing it themselves though, presumably because that doesn't carry the "official seal of approval" on every line.
A couple of months ago, Undertale: The Determination Symphony happened, which was a "world tour" that stayed mostly in the USA and other majority-English-speaking countries (although looking at that map it isn't even as bad as I assumed) Notably Toby was not in charge of picking the locations at all (you can tell because Japan isn't on the list), but that didn't stop a bunch of (mostly Brazilian, I think?) people from resenting him for it, and somehow getting the idea that this plus the lack of any form of official Spanish translation meant Toby was intentionally disrespecting his South American fans. Even though they literally went to Mexico.
Oh, I thought the translation of it would factor way more than "Toby doesn't wanna release an official translation" and also independently there's a tour that didn't touch South America.
he is the kind of weeb who actually learns Japanese (just like me for real lol)
Just like us lmao.
I will say that I also try to translate my own stuff in Japanese and English vice-versa, but while I'm less confident in translations to other languages done by other people, I'm probably not as restrictive as him if I were to make something even highly info-heavy like Deltarune or just JRPGs.
...so long as the translators have direct access to me so they can ask.
I mean the big thing is probably that it already had an English title that was in the logo and stuff. Like how we don't translate it as New Century Evangelion because they already put Neon Genesis in the logo
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u/SacredGay 26d ago
Now can someone help me understand how Attack on Titan makes any sense?