Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-4271790-20141016102132/@comment-25349026-20141017071411

Mrlmm0605 wrote: The thing is, Viz is the be-all, end-all of the manga. The publishing company has full rights to the manga, superceding the author in certain respects. Therefore, if Kishi wants his manga published by Viz then he accepts that what Viz says goes.

Mrlmm0605, do you speak any Japanese at all? Do you have even basic understanding of nihon-go? Did you know their sentence structure is subject - object - verb? Do you know the difference between Tokyo-ben and Kansai-ben? My understanding of Japanese is very small. I speak it on the level of about a 3rd grader, and read on the level of a 2nd grader. I am terrible with my kanji radicals, atrocious even according to my former professor. However, its not that hard a language to learn, and much of what is "lost in translation" can be culturally understood by spending some time there, or having a few friends that were raised there. There are many things in the Viz translation that are lost because they are often times trying to americanize something that is inherently Japanese. Because of this, they can translate things literally and still give a completely different sense from the source material just in the words they choose to use. Occasionally, I painstakingly take the time to read a raw manga (usually with a native speaking friend so I don't want to kill myself). I must say after then reading translations, so much is not only lost but desecrated from what's understood by someone that knows the culture.

So, Viz may be "official" and "own the rights" to the source material; however they are not necessarily the best translation of it.