Thanks for explaining. Do you happen to know if there is a Japanese word for someone who is sleazy and manipulative--not because they have too much sex or sex too soon, but because they kind of push themselves on people they don't know and who don't like them? I can't even think of the exact English word, but the concept is defiantly there--something like a chancer or slimy leech... I don't know. I mean, if it were a guy in an old movie, the girls would call him "fresh" and slap his face for making assumptions. Would creep work? Anyway, we'd need the Japanese version of that.
Thank you for this. There are a lot of translations which I can't handle in anime/manga. Very often, when the character does not even mention anything closely related "bitch", the translator just goes ahead and uses this word because it's so prominent in the English-speaking world and he doesn't even consider how offensive it is. I have also seen many other cases where the translator dumbly uses words that sexualizes female characters even though it brings things out of the original context. This does not seem to be the case here, but I just had to bring it up somewhere because it's really annoying, sorry.
If people don't like reading just ignore it (I get quite wordy), just a comment about translations in general:
"And to all the people who argue that "any translation is better than nothing". I emphatically disagree. Once things get so bad that you arguably didn't read anything resembling the original work, you didn't read "A version of X", but "An interpretable dance of X". It is an insult of the highest order to the reader, and the author, to put out some work that makes people THINK they read something, when in fact they in fact didn't."
"Scanlations are bad. They don't know what they're doing and they often misinterpret lines. I've worked on one and the main character speaks Hakata-ben. No one except me could understand it. Everyone, including the translators, had to rely on me, the newest member of the team. Before I was around, they apparently winged it. Good thing I am pretending to be MIA."
"I am very critical of translations in general because they can present a person's hard work in the worst shape possible."
Even if you learn Japanese, you need to understand the context and subtleties, or else you'll be barely speaking the same language as the natives. This is true for all languages, especially unrelated ones with no shared roots. What happens frequently, especially with literal translations, is that the reader takes it for face value and interprets it using their own context and culture.
Plus, while legal translations have access to pointers regarding the meaning from the publisher and author, scanlators have none. They're also not professional translators (though professional is to be used loosely - some get paid but do no excellent job), and generally do not have that great of an understanding of Japanese that a native would have. Japanese language is extremely context-based, as words get omitted because they are obvious to the interlocutor and do not need to be repeated each time, and frequently what is literally said does not match what is meant (but is understood through a thorough understanding of the culture and ways they express themselves).
Japanese is a high-context language. French would fit into somewhere in the middle, and English is on the opposite - what is said is literally what is meant; it is a low-context culture/language. They are two very different communication styles.
"High context implies that a lot of unspoken information is implicitly transferred during communication. Low context implies that a lot of information is exchanged explicitly through the message itself and rarely is anything implicit or hidden."
This also leads people from high-context languages to have communication issues in English, it's not one-sided. We expect the same understanding, but more often than not we end up being more offensive than what intended, just by a unfortunate tone that came through some choices of word. "Thought you'd pick up on the undertone but didn't". Heck, French people and French Canadians often have communication issues as well, because both highly rely in the context of their own cultures for the intended meaning to get through.
What that means is, translations from Japanese to English are incomplete. You lose tons of subtle meanings.
Anyway, for all this long explanation, I haven't read the original yet. But in general, picking on choices of word in scanlations, or any translations to a lesser degree for that matter, is a slippery slope. Would be cool to have an input from a native in any cases.