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this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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This I don't get. This hardly happens, if at all. I hear more complaints about it (particularly from the anti-woke crowd) than I see it happening
For reference, these "woke changes" include translating a character asking an adult character whether that character is attracted to underage girls as "are you a pedophile?".
Here, 'pedophile' is the translation of the Japanese word "ロリコン", which is a shortened transliteration of "Lolita complex", referring to the literary work Lolita about a pedophile attracted to underage girls and the Freudian term for a sexual obsession. (compare Oedipus complex).
The fact that it happens at all is honestly baffling though. The anti-woke crowd absolutely plays it up (or more likely just gets fed sensationalized headlines and never verifies them) beyond its actual scope, but mostly it's just the crown on top of a lot of general low quality localization. Which isn't even necessarily the localizers fault, as from what I know they were often overworked and had very little time to translate, or were missing the visual context.
The recent scandal with the game yunyun syndrome is the worst I know of, but I vaguely recall some obviously politically motivated changes in meaning in anime subs. It's not made up, but it's really just one particular expression of a wider issue with tl quality.
Yeah, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just rarely. Not nearly enough to be like "I'm happy AI translations are replacing real translations" or drop CR for it. The only few examples I know are from dubs when Funimation was still a thing (Dragon Maid, and even then, those were like 3-4 lines in the entire show, some of which aren't even that bad and also has some backlash from the "wokes" for other things).
The subs every show I'm watching this season have been butchered. Maybe your Japanese just isn't as good to capture the difference but it happens extremely often
I'm not disputing bad subs, but I am disputing changed subs for political reasons
Really? My Japanese is pretty good but I haven't noticed anything like that. Could you give some specific examples?
Just some recent examples, you will find mich more if you search for it. These aren't the shows I've been watching and experiencing butchered subtiles, but just about any show nowadays has terrible sub's full of zoomed brainrot slang and wrong translations.
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2025/04/29/netflix-rewrites-animes-feminine-compliment-into-feminist-virtue-signal/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2025/07/09/localizers-change-virgin-to-incel-in-yofukashi-no-uta-english-subtitles/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/01/03/uma-musume-cinderella-grays-blatant-english-sub-alteration-generates-criticism/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/01/29/oshi-no-kos-english-subtitles-butchered-all-about-political-correctness/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/03/17/crunchyroll-dub-criticized-after-forcing-in-fragile-masculinity/
https://news.sankakucomplex.com/2026/05/02/babanba-banban-vampire-localization-turns-pervert-into-pedophile/
These range from valid but minor complains (Merry Christmas vs Happy Holidays, virgin vs incel) to random nitpickiness. Complaining about translating "hentai" or "lolicon" as "pedophile" in the context of an adult man at a school is just silly. It's not like Japanese words and their commonly-used English counterparts match 1:1 in meaning anyways; that's simply not how languages work.
Some of the examples also make me question how well they really know their Japanese - specifically the Oshi no Ko one. コンプライアンス may have come from the English word "compliance" but just translating it as "compliance" would be silly and incorrect; it means more than that in Japanese. Far too much to fit in the subtitles here without it sounding unnatural. See this document for some details. Honestly I think "political correctness", while not quite the same thing, fits the spirit way better than the English word "compliance" would and I'm not sure how better to put it.
I assure you the teenagers in Japan also use slang, as do their manga counterparts.
In not even the first 5 minutes of watching a new Episode today it happened again 🤡
So change it so that characters who use slang don't use slang anymore? That's ridiculous. And by the way, most anime viewers aren't going to know enough Japanese to know what is and isn't slang just by listening.
Welllll in the example provided it sure looks like "lolicon" is what you call someone when they've broken into a school and you think they want to sexually assault the students so maybe they're not as different as you suggest.
I would assume every time you hear complaints flare up again it's because there has been a new case.
It's something I oft see cited, but I can't remember the last time I saw a reasonable example that wasn't at least 5 years old.
It's not per se that I hear it flare up, I just hear about it every so often as a complaint in general with CR or when LLM translations get brought up, but rarely with any examples.