I really appreciate your response. It's great to have a candid conversation about this stuff with someone so clearly invested and energized about it. There are definitely a few points I want to address and clarifications to make.
With regard to interviews in these books, the majority tend to look like this:
There's literally nothing
BUT text on these pages. Sometimes there might be a profile photo for the subject/interviewee, but that's about it.
In this case, I'm not sure what value there is in us walking any more of a legal fine line by sharing the entire contents of the book/interview with our website visitors. If you already can't read the Japanese text in the first place — which is why you're reading our translation — looking at a full page of Japanese text isn't going to help you understand anything any better.
(And it's worth noting that the Japanese companies are the regularly-litigious and still-in-business ones, and have even sent us takedown notices in the past... on material they themselves provided! This is in opposition to since-shutdown American media who don't gave a rat's ass about their ancient material, and is why you'll notice in our "
Press Archive" we share thumbnails of the pages alongside our transcriptions.)
That said, we do a lot of (what I believe is fairly underappreciated) formatting work in a lot of our interview translations:
- In this Momoiro Clover Z interview translation, we matched the colors and font weight from the original print
- In this "Episode of Bardock" translation where Gine was first revealed, we matched the font weight (those bold phrases) from the original print (which, hilariously, I remember someone accusing us of trying to push some agenda by bolding certain words above others... I have no idea what that agenda might have been!)
Additionally, when images are relevant and important to the understanding of the what's being said, we
absolutely will include them (either snippets or sometimes full pages where necessary):
Truth be told, I think many folks haven't actually examined the wealth of material that we have on the site, and instead make up their own (unfounded) stories to fit whatever position they've already established for themselves about who we are and what we do.
(And, again, at the end of the day if you want to buy or steal these books to see the full pages yourself, you don't need our help to do that. The larger internet as a whole already has you covered.)
wrote:No one wants to go through WORDSWORDSWORDSWORDSWORDS of text without any visuals to connect it to like here, either viewtopic.php?t=14812 (well, there's always someone but I believe you get my point).
Real important point to make: that is not a page on our website. That is a forum post.
In terms of what we feel is important to translate vs. what is "fluff", sure, that's a judgement call: and it's our call to make on our site. I'm absolutely 1000% for you or anyone else going off and translating and sharing information about whatever it is you like. The more the merrier, so long as it's done competently, right? As for us, we think information about the production of the franchise and who said what about it in which place at what time is infinitely more important than fully translating multi-page columns that simply describe the events of the show... because that's what
a lot of these books are, and goes back to my point about wishing they were all officially localized from the start so more fans could truly see how fluffy they are.
Another EXTREMELY important point I want to make is: we're never done. Just because the one thing you see in the "Translations" archive from the
Perfect Files is the Nozawa interview doesn't mean we're done with it -- it just means that's all we've done
so far.
We have DOZENS of things — interviews, columns, etc. — all in various stages of acquisition (i.e., buying the actual physical volume to independently confirm it is real and says what it's supposed to say), transcribed, translated, and then formatted for the website. And they're from all points in time, too! We have things running the gamut from this 1985 Comic Box "Akira Toriyama's Delicious Days" interview, all the way up through things like the
Super manga interview from I think two V-Jumps ago. There are only so many of us that work on this site that have the necessary skills (and even then our translator base has grown recently!), and we work on our own timeline;
Kanzenshuu is, of course, a labor of love, not our job, and something we all do in our limited free time.
Hopefully that sheds a little more light on the process and what our site
actually does. I again want to say I appreciate your response and hope this helps a lot!
It's one of the reasons I kinda want to monkey's paw the whole situation and wish these books were all officially localized internationally from the start, so fans could really see how meaningless a lot of its content really is. There just aren't any other little hidden or secret details tucked away somewhere on a random page that sheds any new light on any content, in-universe or otherwise -- we've already gone through it all.