The shonen manga series written by Yabako Sandrovich, illustrated by Daromeon, Kengan Ashura and licensed (the anime) by Netflix, has surprised all those who like action and martial arts stories that show the progress of the protagonist. And this time it has returned to the center of attention of the fan community of this adventure, as a recent news has brought to light a little unusual detail that has to do with the translation of the manga in the United States made by fans and the quality it has.
Fans of Kengan Ashura translate manga better
There are many times that as fans we start a manga or light novel that catches our attention, or it also happens that after finishing an anime adaptation we want to know more of the story, so we turn to the original work, but often these are not officially licensed by any publisher that publishes them regularly. That is why fans start to make their own translations to make the stories reach a little further, but it seems that Kengan Ashura’s followers have excelled in this aspect, even surpassing the official one.
This happened in the western part of the fans, being that recently Daromeon, who is in charge of illustrating the manga, made known through his Twitter/X a post in which he mentions the difficulties of translation into English that the manga has had, so it has become clearer the destiny that the work will have.
It turns out that the official English translation of Kengan Ashura was entrusted to the company Comikey, and although it can be said that the translation was technically good, the quality left much to be desired, as the reading was complicated, lacking fluency and naturalness, the standards were obviously not met. And this is because the company decided that the translations would be done with the help of Artificial Intelligence, AI from the company Mantra.
It is clear that AI still has a long way to go if it is ever to surpass humanity and that we cannot do without ourselves for various tasks. For this reason, Daromeon decided to show the story editor a translation from a group of Kengan Ashura fans who had been translating and uploading chapters of the manga.
This was a great surprise for both of them, because when comparing both works they could notice a clear and outstanding difference and that the fan translation was, by far, better than the official one. This is why it was finally decided that even though they had been uploading their content illegally, they preferred to use their work rather than the official one, otherwise many would give up the fight.
This did not go unnoticed by the fans and although for the Japanese it may be something unusual and not recurrent, they have accepted that Kengan Ashura will reach the fans in the West in the way that best suits the creators for the good of their work. Let us know what you think of this decision and what other unofficial translations you know that you consider better than the official ones.
In the meantime, we’ll let you know what Kengan Ashura is about in case you don’t know it. Since the Edo periods in Japan, gladiatorial arenas have existed in certain areas. In these arenas, wealthy business owners and merchants hire gladiators to fight in an unarmed winner-take-all match. Tokita Ouma, nicknamed “Ashura,” participates in these arenas and devastates his opponents. His spectacular ability to crush his enemies attracts the attention of big business owners, including the president of the Nogi Group, Nogi Hideki.