I recently bought all the manga in Japanese. All, or almost all of them were printed between 2016 - 2018.
I see there are some pretty huge differences between these new Japanese prints and my Norwegian prints, so I wonder if the text has been changed in the new Japanese prints? (If they were, it's a giant bonus if anyone knows when some of the changes were made.)
I'll post two examples here (not too big images, but putting in spoilers for easier viewing):
From vol. 05, ch. 41:
Spoiler:
My Japanese isn't good enough to translate properly yet, but Conan says something like that guy should be more careful calling Ran "Ran-chan".
Conan: I'll give you "cute Ran", you bargain casanova!
Here, "cute" is used instead of "-chan" which makes sense for Norwegian, but "bargain casanova" (which I love) is such a big difference, I wonder if the translator actually did come up with that himself, or if the older Japanese prints had different text. I was actually disappointed when I got the Japanese ones.
I'm not entirely sure but it's possible that font has changed over the years, as better editing tools and such have become available. The font in other languages isn't the same maybe because there's no direct equivalent or each respective publisher has their own criteria on what fonts to use.
Also, what Conan grumbles about in the Vol. 5 scene is that the guy is showing too "familiarity" with Ran even though they just met. It'd normally be etiquette to call a girl you've just met "Ran-san", "-chan" indicates that he's trying to get "familiar" with her and so hence why Conan is annoyed at his playboy behavior.
The prints have definitely improved in quality. The reason I think the Norwegian version is based on the first prints is because the quality of many of the pages are pretty bad compared to the new Japanese prints.
If the text has been changed, I might consider trying to get the old Jp prints, as the No version got more character and useful info (they were unfortunately discontinued around vol 30).
While writing this, I remembered one other example. Maybe the translator just liked to add "casanova" to his translations. I tried finding somewhere I could ask him, but haven't found anything yet.
Vol. 11, ch. 105:
(I'm probably a bit off with this translation) Conan: I'm gonna send that joker flying...
Conan: I'm gonna kick your behind so hard your ponytail goes neigh, you fake casanova...!
I'm pretty curious about this, so I bought the German version of vol. 5:
Almost same as the Norwegian version, and this print is from 2017, but the image quality is the same as the older Norwegian ones (nothing like the new Japanese ones), so I'm still not sure if one of the translators were creative (and other translators translated from there instead of from the Jp. versions), or the Jp. versions were changed.
EDIT: The German version mistranslates Hattori's name as Hatsutori through several volumes, while the Norwegian version only does it in his first volume. So still a bit clueless there.
Well, that's a common mistake to happen due to the inconsistent size of the furigana for "Hattori", with the "tsu" looking like a "big" (tsu) instead of a "small" (tsu) which can mistake people into that the name it's Hatsutori.
I managed to overlook that right above the year of printing in the German version, it actually says it was translated from the Japanese version. So then I just need to find out if the German translators were creative or if the Japanese versions were changed.
No, no. Like I said, it's probably a reading mistake on part of the translator due to the size of the furigana making it hard to tell whether the "tsu" kana was big or small.
Spimer wrote:No, no. Like I said, it's probably a reading mistake on part of the translator due to the size of the furigana making it hard to tell whether the "tsu" kana was big or small.
Yeah, I'm not talking about the mistranslation. I'm talking about the other translations that were so different. The info about the mistranslation was added in case someone were gonna suggest using that to see which versions were translated from which (although it's still not 100%, since as you mentioned, the furigana "tsu" is sometimes easily misread). I wouldn't be surprised if the Norwegian version was translated from the German version, but since the mistranslation was corrected much sooner than in the German version, that makes it a bit less likely, though of course, the Norwegian translator could have done some research or gotten comments from fans.
But now I also have the Swedish vol 5. This one from 2004. Conan says " "Cute Ran" yourself, you bloody don Juan!". So I'm starting to think more and more that the Japanese versions were changed a lot, which is disappointing.
Spimer wrote:Well, yeah, because "neechan" and "kun" and the whole Japanese suffixes system doesn't really translate to any other languages.
I said those are obvious so noone would think those were what I was asking about.
Like I said, it's that Conan gives useful info like "It numbs my tongue", and funny quotes like "make your ponytail go neigh" that I'm wondering about.
