[MTBB] Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na! – Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! - 05 (BD 1080p)

One of the lines in this episode took me back to when I was editing this script back in 2020—I spent enough time and brainpower trying to think of the exact way to phrase something that I still remember it two years later, and now that I look at it, it's a total throwaway line that isn't even that interesting. Scriptwork is full of stuff like this, where some aspect of a translation strikes the wrong chord with you and you spin your wheels trying to get it just right.

To somewhat change topics, one of the reasons translators are often so irritable when it comes to feedback from the enlightened internet masses is that stuff like this is invisible to the public eye. You spend 15 minutes and 3 revisions on a single line only for no one to ever notice your efforts, and some other line that you thought was totally unremarkable becomes the center of a Twitter firestorm somehow. Translators have been complaining about this shit for nearly 500 years. From a writing by Martin Luther in 1530 about the German version of the Bible that he wrote/translated:

Now that [the Holy Bible] has been translated into German and completed, all can read and criticize it. The reader can now run his eyes over three or four pages without stumbling once, never knowing what rocks and clods had once lain where he now travels as over a smoothly-planed board. We had to sweat and toil there before we got those boulders and clods out of the way, so that one could go along so nicely. The plowing goes well in a field that has been cleared. But nobody wants the task of digging out the rocks and stumps. There is no such thing as earning the world's thanks.

This excerpt is from a response to complaints about a particular bible verse that Luther translated. The verse was about whether one's soul can be saved by "works" (good deeds?), by faith in Christ, or both. Luther spends 90% of his response complaining about various irrelevant things like the fact that his critics wouldn't know proper German if it slapped them in the face; that if his critics don't like his translation, why don't they go do a better job; that his idiot detractors think that he should have translated more literally; and so on. It tracks so closely to modern translation discourse that it's hilarious. Of course, Luther is both right and wrong—his critics should understand that the Bible is a big book and that one should expect there to be one or two bad translations in there, but Luther also needs to understand this and just say, "ah, yeah, my b" and not write a long-ass letter that ends up surviving for 500 years defending a questionable translation. The punch line is that, per Wikipedia, the translation at issue was probably somewhat bogus and an effort to further Luther's own opinion as to proper Christian theology (or if not meant to further it, at least reflective of it), meaning that he was miseducating Germans about what it takes for one's soul to be saved. So if you think some translator out there is pushing their own librul agenda, at least they're not pushing an agenda that could land an entire country in Hell.