Postmortem: Attack on Titan’s Netflix Debut Hit by Translation Woes

Original Title: Attack on Titan’s Netflix Debut Hit by Translation Woes 

Author: Mike Ferreira

Date of Publication: 1/14/2014

Before I begin, I'd like to say that this was one of the more fun articles I had the pleasure of writing in Anime Herald's earlier days. This was written at a time when the anime industry was starting to really "kick" again. We had the big shows, we had the cash rebound, and streaming services like Crunchyroll and Funimation.com were basically the de-facto places for anime. Netflix was starting to dip their toes into anime as they began hosting content from entities like Funimation and Aniplex of America.

At the same time, this was at the very height of the Attack on Titan fervor, when literally every show was described as "It's like Attack on Titan, but..." Con were swarming with those brown jackets, omni-directional maneuver gear rigs, and fans were scooping up pretty much anything with a shot of Eren, Mikasa, or the Colossal Titan emblazoned on it.

In short, it was a good time to be an anime fan.

So, with that in mind, Attack on Titan going to Netflix after its simulcast run on Crunchyroll was pretty huge. It was a paradigm shift, as this was a massive title, moving to possibly the most influential media platform in our day (OK, fine, aside from YouTube!). Some were angry, some were incredibly eager, but pretty much everyone generally saw this as a good thing.

Honestly, I had watched Attack on Titan during the simulcast run, so I hadn't given it much thought. That changed, though, about a day after the show went live on Netflix. A good friend of mine pointed out that I should take a look at the #AttackOnTitan hashtag on Tumblr. She noted that people were pretty pissed off about things.

There was some genuine anger in that hashtag. People were pointing out every single change to the dialogue, to grammatical errors that weren't in Crunchyroll's feeds, to even genuine subtitle weirdness. Jean Kirstein was inexplicably renamed "John", while Hange Zoë became "Hanzi Zoe." Names that were ingrained in fans' minds like "3D Maneuver Gear" and "Survey Corps" were changed to "Omni-Directional Maneuverability Gear" and "the Scouting Regiment."

The reactions, well, they spoke for themselves.

For many, the whole translation felt, for lack of a better term, hollow.

All the while, Netflix and Funimation said pretty much nothing about it, allowing that anger to just boil over. While the changes did eventually roll out, they were fairly quiet about doing so, and pretty much avoided confronting the issue whenever they could.

If I remember correctly, the initial info-gathering, and filtering through the baseless hysteria took a good day or two. Verifying the subtitle changes took time, as you're basically jumping through episodes to get specific lines. To make matters worse, there was a lot of noise in the furor, with people screaming about cut content (there wasn't), censorship (there was none), and the like. Much like Tumblr, researching this case was an exercise in dealing with the loud, misinformed, and generally unreliable to find those nuggets of truth.

(That said, I still love the "God Dammit, Marco, learn your boyfriend's name" caption!)

For my personal comments, I cracked open one of my old marketing books - the radio silence reeked of a case I had come across in 2008... one I'm incredibly familiar with, nowadays.

Many marketers know it simply as "Motrin Moms." 

I'm going to diverge a bit here with some background, because I just like telling this story:

In 2008, Motrin released an ad aimed at young mothers, which was intended to celebrate International Baby Wearing Week. Unfortunately, whoever produced this thing clearly never had a child, and probably had no clue on how to deal with women. The entire 50-second advert was this passive-aggressive drivel, which basically touted children as fashion statements. Seriously - the ad literally stated that wearable baby slings "totally make[s a mother] look like an official mom." 

The ad ended with the tagline "We feel your pain."

Yeah, this went over about as well as you'd expect. Within a day of its airing, mommy bloggers and pissed off parents swarmed Twitter with the hashtag #motrinmoms, threatening boycotts and pledging to throw out their Motrin.

Motrin makers Johnson & Johnson, meanwhile, remained dead silent, just allowing the anger to fester. The apology that was inevitably issued - something like a week later - just fell flat, leading to derision from the public.

And, really, in this particular instance, I couldn't help but draw the connection between the two cases, because, well... come on! This was, like, textbook! The radio silence! The rage! The calls to boycott! It was all there! I was stunned to see it play out in our little niche, because I thought this was the huge "how not to do things" case study for social media and messaging management! But here we were, in 2014, watching the whole damn thing play out with Funimation. I had to make that connection!

OK, I'll stop my marketing fangirling now.

The entire article took about the course of a weekend, once you consider info-gathering, verification, writing, and editing. Shortly after publication, the piece became one of the Herald's cornerstone articles. Even today, we get stacks of people flooding in to read it, despite the content being both ancient and outdated by internet standards.

-MF