I wouldn’t say they *all* have a track record of “sub par” translation; rather, I’d say there are a couple companies who are persistent offenders, and a lot of fans who blow any change whatsoever way, way out of proportion. “OMG, OMG, tehy changed a couple of untranslatable Japanese jokes in _Azumanga Daioh_, teh whole thing sux!!!1111″, et cetera. The OVAs of Gunsmith Cats is a good example – the “accurate” translation of the Japanese dialogue, translated into English, would make Mae sound like a bipolar housemaid. (And Holo/Horo is nothing when you learn that female protagonist Rally Vincent’s name should, according to the purists, actually be Larry Vincent!)

There’s nothing inherently sacrosanct about the original material, after all, and minor editing for localization is a common practice in the publishing industry – a lot of American novels published in the UK get “Britishized”, and vice-versa, and those countries theoretically use the same language! Trying to translate a language like Japanese accurately is several orders of magnitude more challenging, and probably more of an art than a science.

For what it’s worth, fansubs and fan translations are rarely any more accurate, on the whole – just look at Toradora!, for example, where no two subbing groups can agree on the lyrics to the OP and ED, or Bakemonogatari, where at least one group’s subs read like they were machine-translated by people who don’t understand the slightest bit of either English *or* Japanese…

Then again, official licensed materials have a good track record of providing sub par subs/translations. If you’ve had original licensed anime you’d know very VERY well. worse if the publisher themselves doesn’t care for the series which is rather obvious in this case for spice and wolf novels D:

as for the cover girl, instead of how much she resembles Horo, its more towards random naked girl ftw

Would be interesting to see the girl ‘uncensored’ as you say, how well does she resemble Horo in reality?

In any case, I’m curious as how they’re handling it, so I’m buying it anyway, and I’ll go on some forums to rant about it if I don’t like it. ^_^

with this im kinda having second thoughts. The cover art to me is actually quite, irrelevant. However, considering the lack of “knowledge”/care towards the series, i am having doubts to its translations. direct translations tend to lose its “true meanings” and/or the emotions/feelings the book is trying to convey (no more animations, all just all of texts) and from the way the cover is showing, its highly probable that it may be heading in that direction.

on another note, i am interested to see that girl “uncensored”. out of curiousity

But my PS3 seems to upscale DVDs in a respectable manner anyway.

I hope when S&WII comes around they release it on Bluray though, it seems quite decent in some respects. And hopefully they fix up the TV releases QUALITY issues. Occassionally Horo looked quite… off.

Also, from what I’ve seen, the Japanese Blu-ray release of season 1 wasn’t considered to have picture quality that was appreciably better than the DVD release, so whether there’s actually anything to be gained by waiting for a release that presumably would use the same master video source is debatable…

But again Yen Press’ cover seems to conflict with the series, as the DVDs have a proper cover and the light novel has an entirely unrelated cover.

Slightly off topic, you wouldn’t know if they’re offering Spice and Wolf on Blu-ray would you?

Also, lol @ furry porn anthology

Interesting though, knowing the measurements.