Kaizoku Fansubs

[Karri Pretty]

Anopen question to you all: which manga/anime translations do you think are the most accurate to Oda's work? I know many of you on this wiki know Japanese and don't have to rely on translations to acquire information but myself and probably a lot of the others get most of their one piece experience from some form of translation, be it fansubs, scanlations, or official translations. Personally, I mostly rely on the guys at mangastream for the manga and the funimation simulcast for the anime currently. Up to about the start of the new world saga, i followed kaizoku fansubs to ep. 307, vegapunk/whatever i could find until 380s and yibis up to roughly 500. I've checked out kousei but I feel like their subs are off because i watch the simulcast.

Don't use Yibis. They localize too much. Kousei has the same lesser issue but they are much better than Yibis. It's a lesser of two evils kinda thing since K-F is so slow. Also as Galaxy already said Mangastream are terrible so use Mangarule. For older translations look for Franky-House or later releases of Null/KEFI. SeaTerror (talk) 18:36, June 30, 2013 (UTC)

Mangarule seems to have become pretty inconsistent over the past couple months, their last release being over four weeks ago. Mangastream has also gotten worse with their translations, with characters pointlessly swearing all the time. Check out pages 8 and 9 of chapter 720. I liked Mangapanda's chapter more this week which should never happen. I guess I'm just lost on who I should be reading now. Breterbie (talk) 12:20, September 7, 2013 (UTC)

That idea of exploration is the key to understanding One Piece. The series is a shonen manga* about the age of pirates in a world of endless ocean. Monkey D. Luffy is a 17-year-old boy who wants to become the King of the Pirates, and fights for this goal using the power of a cursed fruit that turned his body into rubber.

I\u2019ve been expecting this moment ever since the pandemic began. While I\u2019ve been trying to focus on working through a backlog of new media or revisiting smaller series, the entire time I\u2019ve been home the 73 volumes of One Piece sitting atop the headboard of my bed have been taunting me. It was only a matter of time before I finally committed myself to giving my favorite manga a reread.

One Piece occupies an interesting position in my life. I started following it in high school and, though the intensity of my devotion has waxed and waned, it\u2019s been a consistent interest of mine ever since, simply because the series is still ongoing. Still, oftentimes I miss the intensity of my initial passion for it, when I had a whole new world to explore and hundreds and hundreds of chapters or episodes to catch up on. Reading one new chapter a week is an entirely different experience.

It\u2019s a deeply, deeply silly series that also tackles serious subjects like slavery and systematic oppression \u2014 not always with the deftest of touches, but in ways other series in the genre wouldn\u2019t dare touch. As Luffy and his crew travel the world, each storyline takes them to new locations, allowing for shakeups in the tone and backgrounds that keep the story feeling fresh. Every new wonder Luffy\u2019s crew discovers is a new wonder for the reader to discover too, and some of my favorite moments are when the story is briefly put on the back-burner in order to just immerse the cast and reader in a new location and civilization. It\u2019s also made me cry more times than I can count. One Piece is essentially engineered to make the reader sob like an infant, not just over heroic sacrifices or the main cast\u2019s tragic backstories, but even over the fate of a small dog, or a wild snake, or the \u201Cdeath\u201D of a boat. Seriously, I\u2019ve shed more tears over that stupid boat than I care to admit. For all his flaws (and it\u2019s not a perfect series by any means), One Piece cartoonist Eiichiro Oda is a master storyteller (nobody can set up plot points and twists then pay them off hundreds of chapters later the way Oda can), and revisiting the series from the very beginning has been an absolute joy.

*Manga is just Japanese comics, and shonen is an action-focused genre aimed mostly at younger boys, around the age of 12 or so. Dragonball would be the most well-known example. That said, most shonen series have much wider audiences, and One Piece especially has a huge female fanbase, millions of adult fans, and from the very start was strangely popular with older women. It\u2019s the best-selling manga in the world, and in everywhere but America is pretty much just widely and universally loved.

Interestingly, what really struck me during this reread was the particular translation I was reading. Obviously, unless you know Japanese, it\u2019s impossible for an American to read and understand One Piece in its original form (though I do own an original Japanese volume of the manga just for kicks), and the translation you choose plays a huge role in how you experience and understand the series.

I was first introduced to One Piece by my best high school friend, who lent me the first 100 episodes or so of the anime adaptation on DVD (he had borrowed them from a kid who fell into a coma immediately afterwards, so I guess there was no rush to return them). There was no official American/English translations or releases at the time, meaning that everything was handled by fans, and the quality of translation \u2014 not to mention the editing \u2014 fluctuated wildly between each group of translators. Kaizoku Fansubs was the best and most well-known, translating accurately with great grammar and cute, color-coded subtitles. On the other end of the spectrum were some of the subs I received, which apparently had been translated from Japanese to Chinese, then Chinese to English. Yes, they were as bad as they sound.

Those translations were like reading the final result of a game of telephone. They couldn\u2019t even get character names correct: Zoro became Sulon, Usopp became Lysop, and Luffy was Roof (there\u2019s at least an explanation for that one: the letters L and R are interchangeable in Japanese, so Luffy got misinterpreted as Ruffy, and somehow that slowly morphed into Roof). The grammar was atrocious, to the point where there were entire scenes that I just couldn\u2019t understand because the dialogue was incomprehensible to me. For example: in one sequence, swordsman Zoro defeats a villain named Hachi, who a few episodes later, in the middle of a different fight, stands back up and tries to attack Luffy only to have his wounds burst open and drop to the ground, down for good. The fan translation I had for that episode made it sound like Zoro used some kind of delayed reaction technique on him; it wasn\u2019t until years later, after the official American release, when I realized that Hachi\u2019s wounds just reopened because he tried to move too soon (in contrast to Zoro, who defeated him in combat despite still recovering from wounds several magnitudes beyond those he inflicted on Hachi himself).

At least their subtitles looked nice. When I ran out of DVDs I started downloading fan-translated chapters of the One Piece manga from the internet*, and man, scantilations are of even more dubious quality than subbed anime. Not only do you have the quality of the actual translations to worry about, but also the quality of the image. Scantilating involves scanning the original Japanese versions into a computer, removing Japanese text, and replacing it with the English translations (this was before the time of official online releases of the manga, which has increased the image quality and consistency in fan subs tremendously). Even good translations can be ruined by images that have become grainy after being scanned and saved multiple times or editors who use terrible fonts or don\u2019t know how to properly fit text into word balloons. Lettering is an art too!

*At the time I had dial-up internet at home. It took me an hour to download a 19 page manga chapter, but at least that was manageable; while the episodes were available to download, it would have taken days for a single one, and I couldn\u2019t tie up the phone line that long. I do not miss dial-up. In my senior year of high school I ended up downloading over 100 chapters to read on the school server, getting called down to the school office, and single-handidly getting the entire school internet heavily censored and restricted for the rest of the year. This is my legacy.

But even if you have the best translator in the world, problems still arise. Some aspects of Japanese culture in the story aren\u2019t easily explained. Also, Oda is a writer who loves puns and likes to mix strange references and other foreign languages into his work (Sanji\u2019s attack names are in French, for example). Even the structure of the Japanese language itself can prove to be a major challenge to translate, with words that can mean one thing when written but another thing when spoken. One of Zoro\u2019s attack names has three or four concurrent meanings, and there\u2019s no single English term that can encompass them all. It\u2019s so complicated that I\u2019m just going to post the One Piece wiki\u2019s explanation (only the second half of this really matters):

The most infamous cultural difference, though, probably comes in the form of Luffy\u2019s brother, Ace. On Ace\u2019s back is a tattoo of a symbol called the \u201Cmanji.\u201D The manji is an ancient symbol that represents divinity and spirituality in certain Hindu and Buddhist religions. Unfortunately, the manji also looks quite a bit like a swastika.

While the American editor\u2019s notes play the two symbols off as being completely unrelated, a quick Wikipedia search shows that the swastika used by Nazi Germany was their take on the manji (the symbol had represented good luck in the West up to that point). The manji is still well known in its original meaning in Japan and surrounding areas, meaning that Japanese audiences didn\u2019t bat an eyelash at this, but outside of the East it obviously caused countless problems. Foreign translations had to cram massive editor\u2019s notes into the margins of the pages explaining that, no, this isn\u2019t a swastika. It was such a nightmare that in Ace\u2019s next appearance his tattoo was changed entirely.

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