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Absolutely farcical

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Honestly, what the hell is going on over there.

EDIT: Just for reference to see the difference between the two, how I would have translated it was:

俺の知る限り、現存する妖精はラミリス一人。

ラミリスに聞いても、どうせ覚えてはいないだろう。何度も転生を繰り返しているようだし。
As far as I know, the only living fairy is Lamiris.

Even if I asked her about it, she wouldn’t remember anyway. She’s apparently reincarnated countless times after all.

86 thoughts on “Absolutely farcical”

        1. Ty lol i like how ur not like the other people that get pissed when someone says first, makes me being first sound like an achievement :)

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      1. Why should they rename themselves? They are clearly the circus act people who read a bit of the series go to when they want to laugh there ass off at the clowns translations? So I think the name fits well. Of course I’m a leecher who has not even spent thirty minutes going over the absolute basics of Japanese so I read it anyway because they are fast and I don’t have anything that makes me drop it in disgust. (Other than that one chapter where they acknowledged that they don’t know what they are doing.)

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      2. So, the parts where Rimuru basically talks for too long about nothing and remains so passive, it’s as if he’s Sloth from the lazy king, are all works of fanfiction?!

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    2. I don’t mind it having a bit of fanfiction, really. I wouldn’t have even noticed if it wasn’t pointed out. I am really surprised though. I mean why, if he’s making it up, would those sentences be constructed so poorly? Is he not a native English speaker? This was blamed on the editor after all, right?

      i.e. you gain an impression “of” a race, not an impression “to” a race.
      i.e. “I’ll keep my mind open to improvements” is not a common phrase. The “to improvements” part should be dropped unless it’s trying to specifically convey something that can’t be translated directly from Japanese.

      The other two sentences have awkward, redundant wording that should be removed too, but that would be beating a dead horse.

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    3. Nah, just an illiterate n00b… likely ESL or never from an English-speaking country at all + can’t read kanji AND/OR doesn’t know japanese.

      Might be Chinese or Korean exchange or foreign language student figuring spellcheck+MTL+recognizing individual chinese characters can replace knowing NEITHER japanese NOR english

      Hence: doesn’t know syntax or word order, can’t tell subject from object, doesn’t recognize synonyms or slang or expressions for what they are, etc etc…. structure collapses, sentences turn into a collection of verbs and nouns, meaning is guessed.

      “Extra” material isn’t fanfic or sabotage, but rather:
      1) inability to read/comprehend original source text in Japanese
      2) simuptaneous inability to make sense of machine translation’s result in English
      3) inexperience with MT / inability to differentiate awkward wording (=info’s still there…somewhere) from true lost-in-translation loss of content
      4) introduced misreading by trying to “restore lost fragments” = fixing errors that never existed….by needlessly adding words that might probably fit
      5) chaos gets introduced, meaning is lost

      …gotta AT LEAST know what words or parts of sentences a language sometimes omits aka what CAN actually be missing, what things MT often butchers, what order sentences flow in, and what untranslateable cues exist (i.e. stuff like how a bunch of “I” statements by boku,atashi&ore-sama are a conversation with 3 persons at least, and surely not a train of thought by a dude who loves his thesaurus… or that the different I’s plus further choice of words and honorifics make it fairly obvious who’s saying what, but that might not carry over easily into English and thus must be clarified…etc)

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  7. >.> so wat we gonna do about this? Scratch that..should be –>wat they(the translator/group) gonna do about this?

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  12. also, this
    “Yo, king! What business do you have calling me this time? I, Watakushi, didn’t do anything guilty!”
    PFFFTT~

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    1. last, my comment in that chapter:
      “Anyway, Machine assisted or Machine Translated then edit?”
      and WhiteSamurai answer:
      “No clue.”

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  13. I mean, I appreciate Smoggy trying his best; but ever since the other disaster (I think it was ch 89?) I take every chapter with a grain of salt.

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  14. This is an outrage! Grab your pitchforks everybo-is what I would say except the only parts from the chapter I remember are the elves coming to Rimuru for help, and that he managed to threaten his way to a peaceful resolution. Not saying this isn’t bad, but I’m not really that upset that a bunch of irrelevant fanfiction was added.
    As someone who lacks the moonrune comprehension skill and google translation fu skill, all I hope for from a translation is they get the important stuff down and the rest of the fluff is comprehensible enough that my auto spell check skill allows me to read it smoothly. Of course, I would love it if every novel I wanted to read had a high quality translators like Este, but beggars can’t be choosers.
    One day though, I will learn moonrunes myself. I just can’t justify taking some basic classes for it right now when they aren’t related or in any way useful towards finishing my degree, and don’t have the time and energy to learn it by myself until I get a solid foundation.

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    1. This is a first for you, you just don’t know the trauma of tlc’ing master of monster ch 9-11(for me) or the others first chapters which resulted in casualties, lol

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  16. ….now why would they do something that would clearly annoy everyone? They trying to improve the story or something? Not needed.

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  18. I’m a believer in conveying the “feeling” of something in a translation, and often that doesn’t lead to a literal one, however just making sh!t up is a completely different kettle of dead fish…

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  19. Could this be a LN/WN problem?

    Sort of reminds me of the differences between a “Good News” bible, “New International Version” and “Old King James” Version.

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  21. What in fuck
    It’s bad enough that they’re throwing in made-up shit in those rewritten lines, but what makes it embarrassing is how the rewritten line still reads like it’s badly translated. If you can’t figure out how to make the translated line sound good in English, you are evidently not very good at English to begin with and adding your own flavor text will not help. Now it’s badly-written AND inaccurate.

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  22. I feel like whenever I read the chapters by that translator, that I should just go read the raw with my limited understanding of Japanese and rikaikun or something. That and the fact that neither the spacing nor some of the obvious mistakes have been fixed is… I don’t know what to say about that.

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    1. I suspect it’s a problem with her management. There’s no real accountability for any of the translations done by other people, but it’s being hosted on her blog so people are fooled into thinking it’s all the same degree of accuracy and integrity.

      I suspect that there aren’t any TLCs and they just leave each translator up to their own devices.

      Or rather, when you have something as astoundingly disgraceful as this, there absolutely isn’t any TLC. It would be disingenuous to even call these people translators.

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      1. Now I know why some translator prefer to work alone rather than collaboration. Managing is really hard especially when online and no RL sort of meeting and managing. It is tiresome and extra attention since you’re monitoring people and their work.

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  25. Wow, that’s just…..wow.
    I’m usually in favor of the “translating the general meaning” method because Japanese is so freaking hard to translate literally. Many words don’t have a direct equivalent in English; even if they do, it’s not always clear which English equivalent should apply in that case.

    In fact, a few months ago, it took a half-hour conversation between a native Japanese speaker and myself to decide on the English translation for a sign notifying people in the international dorm about the duty rotation for chores like taking out the trash. In the end, we decided that a nonliteral translation was best because the concept of “duty rotation” is less obvious in the English-speaking cultures (or at least, in my locale).

    However, this goes WAY beyond that. There isn’t much question about what the real content of the sentences is in Japanese–my interpretation was pretty much the same as Este’s and the reddit poster’s. Translations like this make me glad that I usually read the story in Japanese if I’m really interested in it.

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    1. Oh, we have something like that in our country back in school. Something like a cleaning duty roster, I guess?
      It’s fine if that’s the case..
      Especially for Japanese idioms/sayings that English speakers find hard to understand/relate to..
      But I agree that adding made up stuff like that is hardly faithful to the story..
      Especially since it changes the tone of the paragraph..
      Their trans make it seems like Rimuru was considering the matter at least half-seriously while Este’s & Araere’s trans gave a very casual tone, like passing thought..
      I imagined Rimuru with a slight frown in his face for the former and more of a ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌ for the latter..

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      1. Um, do you use Skype? I created two skype convos, and there are a lot of translators, both Japanese and Chinese there. We all talk to each other. (: About 20-ish people per group, including a few editors and readers.

        If you or your team ever wants to hang out with us on Skype or need some help, just leave me a comment (I read all of them) and tell me your Skype usernames.

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      1. Because guro sucks at english :D
        I had to do quite a lot of TLC.

        Special thanks for Yukkuri since he actually bother to help him make sense XD

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      2. Ah, so the editor/cleanup crew went over the base translation to turn it into a more legible English form.

        In a way, it can’t be helped. Unless the editor is proficient in Japanese and has access to the raws, in that case, the editor might as well translate it himself.

        In short, this is more of a shortcoming of the two step process (trans->edit) rather than a bad translation.

        And yes, my comments are pretty mild. I’m a moderate at heart, shotguns are for really serious screwups only.

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        1. It can be helped. Better back-and-forth communication between editor and translator, and an editor who doesn’t decide to write his own story.

          Even if he thinks it sounds better, that’s a reimagining and not a translation.

          For example, when you make up a character’s whole THOUGHT like “Honestly, it isn’t a good first impression to a race, but i’ll keep my mind open to improvements.”

          There are certain things that are absolutely unacceptable, and I think the low quality, shit-ridden environment of web novels has made a lot of people forget this.

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        2. And no, whatever process they use, a bad translation is a bad translation. It’s all about the result.

          And to be honest, my problem is primarily with the lack of management of this stuff. I remember working on GunOta with some absolutely atrocious (inexperienced with Japanese, that is) translators, but it all turned out well because things were well managed, translation checked, and once again, well managed (I say this twice because it’s important).

          Looking at this group, considering that they haven’t improved since THIS farce (https://oniichanyamete.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/rather-important-rant-about-translation-quality-and-integrity/) (https://www.reddit.com/r/LightNovels/comments/3gqgh8/jpdisc_tensei_shitara_slime_datta_ken_wn_chapter/cu0p5nx), I really can’t help but infer that they have a massive management problem.

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  27. Soooo, as it’s just too mainstream for MTLS to cut stuff or just being atrocious in general, this one decided to ADD stuff instead and become bad in a different, more swag way or something?

    Did I get anything wrong?

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  28. Good thing I put on halt reading it. Now rather than slime, I’m enjoying reading a story about a certain spider.

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  30. At least the translator didn’t say the raw is incomprehensible and blame the author for his awful translation like in chapter 89. And they also didn’t pollute the chapter with their comments every two paragraph.

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  31. As the newest chapter out now, I plan to not care about it anymore. As even the owner of that site never discuss with me about bringing the person in question to the project.
    And frankly the editor was very *creative*. hahhaha *sarcasm

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    2. You guys are translating together on a shared Google Drive right? I think you just need to get multiple translators and editors to come and edit/proofread your work? A single editor might end up making some mistakes, but they will get corrected by others.

      For Overlord translations, we have 8 or so people constantly checking and re-editing every chapter, by the end, almost all of the mistakes or poorly worded sentences would have gotten fixed. However, for that to work the translator has to finish the chapter at least a week prior to release, to give enough time for others to work their magic.

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  33. Um, so… just wondering…. If I were to attempt to translate something and accidentally completely butchered it…. Would people come and murder me in my sleep? Because, if so, I’m not sure I want to try translating anything after all….

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    2. Honestly though, if you understand Japanese, even if you butcher something, it will still be okay by our community’s standards. A lot of my translations are sort of hack-jobs as well, if you want to be strict.

      But at least I understand Japanese grammar. And honestly, I don’t know why anybody would attempt to translate if they didn’t.

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      1. Okay, no problem! :)
        I was planning on putting warning signs up everywhere, and I don’t particularly want to earn money from this (that would require me posting regularly).

        ….erm… I don’t understand Japanese grammar and I want to try…. Well… I guess it’s different because I’m trying to learn it, but… only know five characters…. :P

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