Looking at Minorigate and the Tokyo Loli Ban through Anime Expo 2010
I went down to Anime Expo this past weekend, surviving almost a week of no sleep and irritable fans. Amongst the many stories worth blogging about, perhaps what seemed most surprising to me about Anime Expo 2010 was the powerful presence of visual novels. While other blogs, such as AnimeDiet, have covered extensively some of [...]
Minorigate, or, How to Piss Off Otaku Without Really Trying
There’s been quite a hubbub in the eroge-playing community this week, sparked by minori (ef, Wind, eden*) inducing an edit war on TLWiki’s eden* page. Now, for those of you who remember, minori was one of the first eroge companies to block website access from foreign IPs last year after the Rapelay controversy exploded, citing [...]
A Different Approach to the Translation of Ero-Scenes
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I translate sex scenes (エロシーン, ero-scene) in visual novels. It is one of the least pleasurable aspects of my hobby, and I’m rather glad that I never had to deal with ero-scenes during my time as a fansubber. Ero-scenes are notoriously difficult to translate well; several inherent linguistic barriers [...]
My Paradigm
In his latest article, Sorrow-kun addressed the issue of dialogue in anime. As a non-native speaker, he said, he had to rely on translators to understand what was going on at all times. It’s inevitable that non-Japanese anime fans have to place their trust in translators, as without them, anime-watching becomes an utterly pointless exercise [...]
Voices from the Other Side: ef ~melo~ Episode 9
Back again with my semi-regular column. How’s everyone? This week, I was asked again to fill in for our translator, who was absent due to personal reasons. In this installment, I’m going to give all of you a deeper insight into my job as a translator using Episode 9 as a case study; the second [...]
