Sus Sus Sus: Sus sus sus sus, sus sus sus

 Srsly?

何だFUCKがお前のJLPTレベルのか,ヤDORK。。。
Get literal with that, ya 馬鹿ck suckers.

I wrote this without an outline.
It's far too long and not an easy read.
This will not be over quickly.  You will not enjoy this.

Treat all links as NSFW. They aren't all that but I'm not labeling every single one.

So weeaboos are losing their shit because someone did a good job of translation and not transliteration in an anime.  The catalyst of course is Nagatoro: They used the words "sus" ...so totally sus to do that in such a sus way.

Things to suss out
First thing, is first: Translation is not Transliteration.  They are different things that's why they have different words.  It is also not Interpretation either because anyone who has had to do that in real-time (especially in a Japanese-English dynamic where one is super explicit and the other is so implicit that it's almost as important to mention the not-mentioned), the purpose is to get the point across, not to give a vocabulary lesson.  There are so many instances of the intent of a statement being more important than the separate literal definition of each word that makes it up.  Context plays more of a role in effective translation than dictionary definitions. 

I'm not even just talking about the absurd examples of translating "hot dog" into "heated canine."   Actually... let's talk about that:  Think about "hot dog" for a moment and the realize:
It's a noun: A food item that one Nathan's brand is famous for, also refereed to as a tube steak, or red-hot, the physical shape of which has lead to a connection in Modern English to serve as a conduit between "someone from Vienna" Weiner, and Penis, but not someone from Frankfurt "Frankfurter" (oh we'll get back to that).  And red-hot is so dated that it's instinctive definition is no longer a meat product but if you are Gen X-Y it's candy and for Zoomers is half of something that means "gossipy-shit" ...unless you're in Australia, where it means something mad different. 
It's a verb:  If someone is "hot dogging" they aren't in the process of manufacturing or preparing hot dogs.  They are also not heating up an actual dog.  It usually means they are showing off, but not just showing off, they are showing off with an unnecessary significant risk. Hot dogging causes you crash your B-52 into the ground killing everyone on it including that one poor bastard in the back who had no idea what was going on. No one who speaks English is going to have trouble with that.  Now try it in Mongolian... yeah, you're gonna be using different words that are not food related.
It's an adjective: If a person is called a "hot dog" they are not being called a food item, or a heated canine.  A dated equivalent could be "rascal" but if you use that in dialogue for a character that is known for overuse of contemporary slang, it's not going to be a good fit, and you might go with "drippin stan... not gucci" RAWRXD.  Either way, the trans-literal accepted  definition of food-item or the absolute-literal definition of heated-canine do not apply.

Om nom nom

Remember when I mentioned we'll get back to Frankfurters, penises, and hot dogs?  Well one sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, has a musical number in a certain movie where the line is "you're a hot-dog, but you'd better not try to hurt her, Frank Furter" (and this line is even preambled by a reference to mustard).  Don't get hot and flustered, but translating this into another language while somehow trying to preserve the literal meaning of hot dog as both food-item and adjective for a type of person, and a cultural double entendre (name of character + reference to Frankenstein), while maintaining the tacit double meanings implied by the lyrics that relies on the audience already being familiar with the entire linguistic matrix of interconnected values, AND keeping whatever the final product is on-tempo with the actual song it's in ...well it's just not possible if your goal is complete preservation of exclusively literal meanings that an ESL student would be familiar with recently having learned.  ...I told you not to get hot and flustered, here use this.

ソーセージを口の入れてほしい？
Si, verdad.

I once was translating curriculum materials for a Graduate Level course regarding inter-organizational communication and one of the sessions focused on the film "12 Angry Men" (the Peter Fonda one, not the later one).  If you haven't seen that movie, go watch it.  Come back to this spot right here: -THIS SPOT RIGHT HERE-  ...there ya go.  Now, let's consider Juror #12's  line; "let's put this out on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up."  It's not just an English Language thing, it's such a New York thing that students with native-level abilities from not where I am from were having trouble with it. To simply translate that literally, would be just so worthless. Furthermore, in the film as dialogue, the line is meant to indicate a character who has a very significant lack of confidence in their ideas, for no rational reason. It implies that the Mad-Men bosses he works for are such mean bastards that they've worn him down to nothing but barely functioning self-doubt.  I had to somehow come up with a line in both Japanese and Mandarin which gets his entire point across and fits into the rest of the scene, uses an obfuscating reference that makes sense to the target audience, and I had less than an hour to do it. Thankfully I know a Chinese-Italian-American 3rd generation NYC family that I messaged and they gave me something to work with that would at least make sense to ABCs and it went from there.  Japanese was more difficult and I don't remember what I put because this was in 2010.  I'm sure there must be existing translations out there but I didn't have them handy and I had from 1am to 8am to get the entire lesson done not just that part.

So when someone runs a contemporary slang equivalent like "sus" up the flag pole to see who salutes it, the only people who are going to be upset are those who have just attained the level of novice understanding in terms of the cultural and linguistic nuances-Japanese, a source of organic gamification points within the fandom and then end up feeling de-valued because they don't see the result they themselves expect. 

Translation is about getting as much of the audience as possible to do the above concept.
It's not about reinforcing your sense of self importance, audience member. The professional translator has no time for that, sorry for the cognitive dissonance.

Historical History:
Anime fandom is particularly sensitive to translation irregularities.  From TV stations making last minute changes because of no-no words that just can't be on a kids show and since all animation is a kids show; boom censoring; to the war-crimes of Carl Macek just making up shit regardless of what the original work was about, anime was too often defaced by poor translation or deliberately malicious action.  Knowing that such things have happened, and that they detract from the original intent of the storytelling as entertainment that appeals to them, anime consumers have almost always reacted negatively to such things, especially when it is discovered after the fact.  I once got in an almost knock-down drag out trying to explain to a former writer/director for Bucky O'Hare and Rambo: The Force of Freedom, that no; doing things the old way to an anime and just changing names and inserting dialogue where there wasn't any was so not OK, especially since viewers could switch between both languages with the push of a button on a DVD remote. I wasn't allowed back in the studio for a while despite doing the "that's not my job but the boomers are making me do it anyway" dialogue translation and rewrites.

So fans are rightfully touchy, which is why one sees this subject get bought up every time a new generation of fans thinks they're the ones who discovered anime.  But not always rightfully correct.  There's a good reason localization is now thought of as a necessity, and with both subtitled and dubbed versions not being separate packaged media any more, there is no cost risk at all.  Since like there used to be such risk of buying a very expensive "bad dub" or sub job, fans would be steadfastly cautious to buy what they wanted doing as much research as was possible.  If you were lucky, your local video rental place had a big anime selection maintained by a serious otaku that would only order the subbed versions.

These days now literally more easy to find in the Cowboy Bebop universe than real life.

Subtitled versions could get away with less localization sometimes by using on-screen notes.  Famous example being the "Natta de Cocoa" scene in Yugen Kaisha, which really liked to play the Japanese homonym double meaning joke on the audience (I mean 幽幻怪社 ...it's in the title ffs).  Can't always do that with subtitles let alone dubs that are gonna go on TV.   A little leeway is needed and expected.

Do you really want both the written manga and English voice cast anime lines to call her "Bunny" every time?  "Usagi" sounds better to your non-Japanese linguistic sensibilities doesn't it...?  Mixxzine, I'm lookin at you...


Loss of Status Reaction and Loss Aversion Psychology:
If you go through the fandom hard enough and young enough, you will have a phase where this whole new world opens up to you and you all of a sudden gain an understanding and nomenclature of a semi-cloistered group.  "Normies" all of a sudden doesn't include you anymore and you have something that sets you apart.  That something has value.  It can be seen with the evolution of hip-hop lyrics into what marketing suits now call urban vernacular, and it can be seen with otaku as well.  It's that moment when you've heard enough words you know what they usually mean but not always.  So these fans end up thinking that when a wife calls a husband "anata~" it should only be translated as "oh, you" and not sugarpie, muffin, sweetness, honeybun, puddin', darling... light of my life... even though those terms are actually more accurate in conveying the intended meaning most of the time in that context.  The "spectrum" (yes that spectrum) comes into play here as well, because "implied meaning" can be a stumbling block for some people. Such things should not be dismissed.  But imma not go into it anyway (this is gonna be tl;dr as it is).

So in situations like this, all of a sudden here comes something to take away that value.  To tell a person that what they thought they knew is not an entire book, but just that single page in the beginning with nothing written on it, which (if removed) has a new zero effect on the quantitative or qualitative value of its contents. The position they believed themselves to be in is thrown into sharp releif from the light of an elevation that has emerged from so far up the hierarchy.   What is lost may not be tangible but the feelings it creates are very real.  Furthermore, to have to face that realization because of a causal factor created by someone who has a more adept skill-set than said fan, fulfillment not only a sense of loss, but a sense of lose by malice, something stolen... something taken they were powerless to prevent. That moment when the guailo with the yee-haw accent responds in perfect Chinese to a conversation between 2 other people, or when the little Korean girl spits perfect DR Spanish to some cabron who's running his mouth about her, thinking she doesn't know what he's saying (only in New York), that instant impact of the loss  of anonymity and feeling exposed is off the same tree as what the anime thing does when something is localized by someone who knows Japanese context better than the audience.  It's like when your skill set doesn't help you.  When your collectables appraise for less than what you originally paid for them... this feeling lives in that triggering of a status loss, and the inability to mitigate it can lead to things like little nuggets of frustration, aggression, withdrawal, depression, or scapegoating.  Loss aversion is a fear reaction.  In extreme cases, it can have damaging effects, even on people who you might not empathize with.

This guy is dealing with some shit.

It is real to someone who feels real reactions to things.
Don't always let your first reaction be to simply laugh at someone in that situation.  Doing that makes you feel better at their expense.  Star Trek actually depicted an extreme example of this loss reaction. Like all of DS-9, this story arch started good and then ended stupid as hell.

Not every encounter with this phenomenon goes so off the rails into actual psychosis.  A lot of it leads to bickering about the "wrong" way things were done and an irrational vortex of all the logical fallacies by those who are angered but have no recourse of logical argument.  The demands to remove that "wrong" way which has caused this sense of value loss are simply justified with "because, reasons!" or something to that effect.  If left to continue, it ends up causing intense feelings to the point where the id takes a larger share of control. A reaction idiotique so to speak. Their thought processes and existing cognitive structures are then thrown into the spotlight when someone gets intense and... what... what in the non-visible spectrum of ALL the fuck...

@Locksneedfartin: A thing that happened.

マジで verità.

What has been see can not be unseen:
Wow.  OK, so Nagatoro is gonna be known for not just having sus in the translation, but now for the way this uber-chud who either is a total garbage human, or was just born in a different multiverse that hat it's big-bang 14 years later than we did and just woke up here with bad trolling skills in this one thinking the year is 2007 without noticing.  Yes, (former) Twittererererer @Locksneedfartin managed to just create a Charge of the Light Brigade into chuderry chud-ness of chudding, so hard that it made it to Know Your Meme 24 hours after it happened.  It took no time at all for this wackadoo to start soapboxing about MAGA issues like transphobic shit and just being totally racist because apparently they think that's how the world works and anything else is so wrong that the other people against it are all deliberately bad-stoopede.  When people get worked up, their "don't say the quiet part out loud" bigotry cloaking device malfunctions and we get this:

How to lose your twitter account in MAGA easy steps

Twitter was always a dumpster fire, but the color of the smoke is an indicator of what the toxicity is and where it's coming from at any given moment.  Somehow it's worked its way into fandom and it's time to address that. This person, and a whole bunch of others who didn't know a single correct thing about what translation, localization, slang, context, licensing, Japanese language, sus, scrub, and other words actually have established histories, end up going fundamental when their brains short circuit in a fit of rage-lag. 

The whole insane thing that ended with this, shows this dorkoff knows nothing about Japan, Japanese, Translation, Localization, Word Origins, or how not to be a scumbag.

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS!
There really is no more to say about this person that hasn't already been said.  What needs to be asked, is how do so many, out of a generation that should know better, end up nodding their heads and approving of stuff like this and liking it.  It's not really because this fandom attracts that kin of demographic, or creates incubators for such ideas to gestate and ferment to toxicity.  It's the much larger social, cultural, and economic environment that has come to dominate us all (people who live on planet money, excluded of course).  I sure as hell don't want to defend this guy but I also think it's important to study what the fuck is going on with these people.  I think it's important because, as mentioned, the overall macro environment is the largest causal factor in this, and though we can close the roof of the stadium, the game is still going on. So yes, once the roof is closed attention can be focused on the doors and what comes through them, but that's not an easy thing to do or maintain.  This shit is sneaky and sometimes people who follow these philosophies genuinely think they themselves aren't being harmful, so confrontational methods can end up being counter-productive and actually intensify what one seeks to stop. Not this time though.  This one was... I still don't know what that was other than terrible.

There are so many things I still want to cover now, but if you're still reading at this point, congratulations, you don't exist because no one is gonna read this far.  Mitigation without malice is too often treated as some sort of tacit support for what is deemed the explicit problem, even though it is not.  So Someone's still gonna think I'm defending this @Lockneedfartin fuckwad who needs a pencil shoved up the diickholle and then broken off in there.   I'm not, so it should be obvious.

Getting back to the plethora of perplexing panorama panoply:
This is the beginning of a contracting phase of fandom and ipso-facto the domestic and international market for all otaku related things. Things will get worse before they get better.  For this kind of thing, self regulation is not easy when it's bottom-up, but top-down is nothing but a nightmare scenario.  And it's only one of several challenges on the horizon (oh you better believe I already have another post in the works already about awful shit happening to anime fandom). This will not be over quickly.  You will not enjoy this. 

Oh and since this Locksneedfartin shitstain seems like a badge-bunny:



BLM
ACAB

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