Onimai avoids feminine terms in English subtitles of Episode 2
Will Onimai cause more to talk about each week? Upon its premiere, fans discovered that the international version of the anime that is on major streaming services around the world is actually an unexpectedly censored version of what is coming out in Japan.
The second episode also features some censored scenes from the version the rest of the world received, but today’s topic is about Crunchyroll’s English translation of the second episode of Onimai.
Onimai is an anime about a boy who ends up getting involved with a girl after drinking something his scientist younger sister made, so the whole anime involves him, who is a man, now transformed into a woman, discovering the whole feminine world.
So the episodes explore that, Mahiro wearing cute clothes, learning how to take care of long hair, learning about menstruation, etc.
Onimai avoids feminine terms in English subtitles of Episode 2
So the anime is focused on that, a man who became a woman, discovering this new universe. And then what happened? In the second episode of Onimai, Mahiro is sitting in a way that is considered feminine, and then his sister notices this and says this:
“you’re sitting like a girl”
“really getting used to being a girl, huh?”
Mahiro’s sister has been teasing him about it these first two episodes, he ends up doing something considered feminine and she starts making fun of him, and he soon settles into “man mode”.
But then, what is the “controversy”? Basically what some people are complaining about is that Crunchyroll’s English translation wanted to avoid mentioning girly stuff, so their caption looked like this:
It is worth noting that this subtitle is only for the English version, I have already shown that the Brazilian version correctly says what Mahiro’s sister is saying and the versions from other countries also mention “sitting like a girl”.
Some comments from otakus out there about this subtitle:
“Friendly reminder that it is morally right to pirate anime”
“The main point of the anime is that HE was turned into SHE and the western localization has to treat the word “girl” as a bad word”
“Crunchyroll is doing what it does best, making meaningless changes to the original work for no reason. Seriously this sounds like a strange change to me, the original is so much better”
“Something I always ask myself when seeing questionable localization decisions about gender and whatnot is “Why English?”. Other languages speak a definite gender, but English localizations, they’re always weirdly ambiguous about it”
“This is why trackers don’t deserve respect”
“What the fuck is this recent trend of localizers being scared to use gendered language. Even in cases like this one it makes more logical sense. So it seems to be a repeating pattern. I hate it.”
“I’m all for dissing Crunchyroll when they deserve it, but Jesus, that’s not a problem. Folks really look for the smallest thing to complain about location.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m stupid, but I don’t see anything wrong with either subtitle, maybe it’s just me”
“I still think you guys are overreacting about nothing, but nevermind”
“They are saying the same thing”
“How is that sitting like a girl?”
“That doesn’t change anything”
This wasn’t the only scene in this episode that the English Crunchyroll subtitles are like this, we have another scene as well. In this scene, Mahiro’s little sister is telling him to take care of her hair, in the official Portuguese subtitle she says this:
“Did you know that hair is a woman’s life?”
But in English:
What will be the bullshit that episode 3 of Onimai will bring us?