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Review of the French version!
Company: Glénat
Price: € 6,50
Release: March 15, 2006
Rhythm: bi-monthly
Before I come to speak of Busou Renkin, allow me to be nostalgic for a little while. Glénat has really come a long way. Their manga used to be flipped, they had atrocious soundwords and really ugly covers. The translations themselves were not particularly awesome either, as far as I can tell. But I did not personally witness the worst times. By the time I got hold of my first Glénat manga - which just so happened to be Rurouni Kenshin, also my first manga ever - the Japanese reading direction had almost established itself as a standard.
As I kept buying their manga, I could witness how the quality gradually improved. It was a great day when Glénat decided to introduce dust jackets and stay closer to the original cover artworks. Or when they started keeping the Japanese soundwords.
My opinion on Glénat got higher and higher, so when they announced Busou Renkin, I had great expectations.
And in a nice turn of fate, I could buy Busou Renkin #1 in the same shop where I had first "met" with Kenshin, the Virgin Megastore in Paris, almost exactly five years after that fateful day. Enough nostalgia, back to Busou Renkin:
In many aspects, my expectations were met. The cover artwork, first of all, looks really pretty. The printing and paper quality are as good as I had hoped and the soundwords were left unchanged for the most part.
However, I do not like the translation half as much.
Of course it is always difficult to judge a translation when you already know the story and/or alternative translations. Especially when it comes to the translation of specific terms, I am simply not unbiased.
This especially applies to the translation of "kakugane" as "nucloton". I don't think it makes sense to drop the term "kakugane" while keeping the terms "busou renkin" and even "renkin" for alchemy in some places. If you choose to preserve the Japanese feel by keeping some terms in their original form, why not also apply this to one of the most frequently used expressions, "kakugane"?
Anyway, this is a matter of taste and could therefore easily be forgiven. However, there is an annoying inconsistency: Kawazui once uses the term "kakugane". This kind of makes it look as if the change to "nucloton" was a last-minute affair and somebody failed to replace all the "kakuganes".
This isn't the only thing tht makes the translation look a bit rushed. For example, the dialogue in the final scene of this volume, a short conversation between Kazuki and Tokiko, makes no sense in its French form.
This is regrettable as it is, especially since it is the final scene of the first volume. It is going to influence a lot of first-time readers' decision whether to continue buying the series. It is just demotivating if you cannot even understand what the main characters are brabbling about.
And there are other instances like this.
There's also no excuse for having Kazuki's cell phone display read "Masafumi Ohama". The character's name is Masashi Daihama, he appears in the first volume, and the translator or the editor ought to be capable of recognizing his name.
I have not been able to get my hands on the later volumes, but from what I have heard, the translation is still regrettably flawed.
All things considered, I cannot quite make myself recommend this version. Sure, apart from the bad translation, it's a good treatment, as usual for Glénat. But is this really worth it if you cannot quite tell what is going on?
by Kaeli, April 2006, edited October 2006