After bringing it up it in the end of year wrap up, Ethan decided to do some investigating into what happened to the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga after the dust settled on its machine translation controversy. Join them as they share what they found.
As with any tokusatsu property brought to the English speaking world, fans were supremely excited when it was announced that the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga was being brought to the West with an official translation. That excitement quickly turned to anger, though, as copies of volumes 1 and 2 were released and fans realised that the product they were receiving was subpar, at best. After being reminded of the controversy while compiling the End of Year Wrap Up, I was left asking the question What happened to the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga after the controversy?
Before I continue, please note that any views expressed in this article belong to those making them and do not necessarily represent the views of The Toku Source or its partners.
In January of last year, Kaylyn Saucedo aka MarzGurl a professional anime subtitle and close caption video editor, posted the following tweet:
This sparked off a thread showing multiple instances of, what is clearly, machine translated text in volume one and two of Stonebot and Titan’s English translation of the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga. The thread then took a turn when it’s discovered that, when promoting and previewing the first two volumes, the publishers used a different notably better translation to the one that was in the final release.
This thread quickly spread around the Kamen Rider fandom, with everyone in agreement that this seemed wrong. A number of translators did come forward to clarify that it is common for preview pages to get translated by different people. This, if I had to guess, is to get a quicker turnaround on pages they want to show off to people. Still, even with that in mind, the community was not happy to see this manga. With one of the very few official products to be brought to the West (and I don’t just mean America when I say that) being handled like this, something that could have helped to introduce new people to the franchise and spread the joy of tokusatsu media to more people, the release was instead something that was being used as a warning for fans.
Five days later, Stonebot and Titan released statements regarding the manga:
Something that is worth noting, Stonebot’s statement makes it very clear that Titan were the ones publishing and distributing the book and, at most, they were guilty of not having a very thorough vetting process for product quality to let these slip though like they did. Which means the translation and resulting promises to do better were on Stonebot’s shoulders.
So, what happened after all of that? Did Stonebot keep their word? Well with volume four of the manga set to release later this month and this all fresh on my mind I thought it prudent to investigate.
After all the articles about it had updated to include the two statements a lot of attention on this died down. Volumes of the manga had been delayed seemingly to implement these changes. As you might have guessed from my comment about volume four releasing this month, volume three eventually released, so how about we look at the reactions to volume three?
Reactions to Volume Three
Looking for posts on the subject on X, you mainly get a few non English speaking accounts talking about it, a few manga deal posting accounts, a couple of people saying that it does seem better one of them even claiming to have an improved copy of volume two, and a thread on it Marzgurl made on it that concludes with her thoughts that it does seem improved but still machine translated. All seemed somewhat positive until freelance writer and reviewer for Anime News Network, Chris (@BeeDubsProwl on X) replied to her confirming that Volume Three, the two month delayed released version, is identical to the review preview he received months prior.
So far, this does not look good. Stonebot seemingly delayed the release of Volume Three, not to rework the translation as fans hoped or to have a human clean up the machine translation as Marzgurl theorised, but to let the heat die down and people to lose interest which, for the most part, they did. This all happened in May of last year, relatively near the start of the month.
No Lessons Learned
In December last year, the Japanese account for The Ancient Magus’ Bride tweeted the following:
I’m aware that this isn’t exactly the best place to unpack how this is a spit in the face to the hard working people that have been localising the series in official manga volumes or how it will do less than nothing to combat piracy, but I’m bringing them up to show that this is not the one off actions of a small seemingly shady company, its an industry issue. Companies are turning to AI translations to pump out translations by cutting out hard working translators, reducing overhead and increasing profit. To quote Hbomberguy’s amazing plagiarism video, “It turns out it’s the same twist it always is. Why did this stupid sh*t happen? Oh, it’s money!”
Has Improvement Been Made?
To drag this to some kind of conclusion, let’s go back to the question I asked earlier: What happened to the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga after the controversy? Well, other than some delays… nothing really.
When first writing this, I had hoped that this would be a positive story, one about the redemption of a company that had been caught doing something bad but… this is not that. No one deserves to have their love treated with the disrespect that’s being shown to these works. Talented people work tirelessly to create something that will impact people’s lives for the better and them being put through a content grinder like this is disappointing, at best, and insulting, at worst. It is up to creators and fans of these works to come together and demand better of the people that want our money and treat their work with the respect they deserve.
Would it be reasonable to acknowledge the possibility that future volumes of Kamen Rider Kuuga are changed to accurately reflect the hard work that the companies are putting into them? Will the translation be meaningfully improved? Given the clear, intentional distancing of themselves from the Kamen Rider IP, I have my doubts.
Will you be buying future volumes of the Kamen Rider Kuuga manga? What are your thoughts on this situation? Let us know in the comment section below.
can’t say I’m too surprised. being a western KR fan has always been rough when looking for official outlets. but i can safely say I wont be buying any volumes or any releases from Stonebot, Alien Books, etc. I’ll just leave translating it to the people that actually care: the fans.