“She alludes to the unspoken shadow at the heart of modern anime translation, that whatever some companies may claim, English is still sometimes used as an unacknowledged ‘pivot’ between Japanese and the target language. I remember this vividly myself, not only because of my discovery that a script I’d translated for Plastic Little was being swiftly rendered into Dutch as part of a movie-business horse-trade, but that a well-known (and still operating subtitle company) once told me that their Japanese ‘translation’ service would require me to first provide them with a spotting list for a Japanese film in English. So, not translation at all, then.”

Over at All the Anime, I review Tessa Dwyer’s Speaking in Subtitles.