kenkamishiro:

I’ll just copy and paste the comment (read: essay) I wrote on Reddit regarding the Barnes and Nobles interview with the Viz editor for Tokyo Ghoul:

I hate to admit it, but this entire article leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

There is nothing wrong with the article and the interviewer herself, other than that the opening image for the article is not official art and is most likely from some artist on Pixiv. But that’s not the reason why I’m pissed. I got the impression from this article that despite having edited the series for two years, the editor, Enos, doesn’t really understand the story of TG, and doesn’t care for it. And I’m pissed because Tokyo Ghoul didn’t get the English translation it should have deserved.

In Enos’s words, being an editor means that you have to “think about the audience”, and “think about how it will be perceived”. Yet there are multiple errors in the English translation. I’m not even talking about grammar or spelling mistakes, weird phrasing (like ‘nip in the bud’ or ‘rubbing’) or even the fact that Ui was mistaken for a girl. I’m talking about consistency errors that impact the reader’s ability to understand the story. For example, special TG-related terms will be written in both the localized and transliterated version (examples include 'Sekigan’ and 'One-Eyed’, and 'Maen’ and 'Devil Ape’) in the same volume alone. They are the same thing, yet non-Japanese readers would never know, and the change of terminology would only serve to confuse them when there are terms like 'One-Eyed Ghoul’, 'One-Eyed King’, and 'One-Eyed Owl’. If Enos had thought of the audience like he has claimed, he would have questioned the Japanese terms and eventually realize that they could easily be written localized.

There were other assumptions about the story that Enos made that made it seem like he didn’t understand the story. I’m not even gonna address his comments about assuming TG was a zombie story and his comparison of TG to Spiderman because of the teen angst (…really though?) because those are somewhat fair assumptions to make at the beginning, however odd they are. For example, the interviewer mentioned how it seemed like Ishida had planned out the whole story and had dropped hints starting from the beginning. Enos could have hinted that it was Souta and the Clowns that had caused misfortune for Kaneki, or that Kaneki’s beloved author was the One-Eyed Owl, etc. But all he had to talk about were simple points about ghoul biology that don’t have much to do with the mysteries in the plot. In addition, what bothered me the most was his comments on the last three volumes of the series. He said that those volumes were “pretty much pure, all-out, bone-crunching gross”, but those three volumes were about the Anteiku Raid and the build-up leading to it. If all he got out of the despair of the Anteiku raid, Touka breaking down from losing the people she loves once again, Juuzou accepting Shinohara’s love when it was too late, the entire V14 scene and the 'death’ of the protagonist was that it was “gross”, it seriously makes me question whether he even understood what he was editing, or if he even bothered to read through the entire thing.

Another thing Enos said that annoyed me was how surprised he was to see TG cosplay everywhere after the first three TG volumes were released, and how popular it was, because his words made it seem like it was the manga volumes that he worked on that led to the popularity of TG he saw at conventions. Yet if he had done even a little bit of research, he would have known that TG had come into popularity in the West because of the anime. Tokyo Ghoul being on the New York Times bestsellers list for manga was not because of himself and the Viz team, it was because of the anime, and him implying that he was responsible for the English manga’s success despite his subpar editing is ridiculous.

It’s disappointing that despite how popular of a series Tokyo Ghoul is, Viz couldn’t be bothered to have more than three people, with no proofreader and one of the staff being a less-than-stellar editor working on the series despite lesson-known series having at least five people working on them. I’m worried for :re’s translation if Viz keeps the same number of people, because there will be mistakes once again like the ones we saw in the original TG. Please Viz, please, hire a proofreader and get a better editor…

Edit: Added in some more points and fixed some grammar.