04/06/2019
Since I covered Part 4's original fan translation and how it's so bad it's good, here's my thoughts on the original Part 5 fan translations. There are no spoilers for Part 5 since the anime adaptation for this part is still ongoing
They were fu***ng horses**t. Yeah, Part 4's infamous Duwang translations were awful too but in a funny way that still made it readable, but the translation for Part 5 will give you fu***ng headaches over how bad it is. The Duwang translation still managed to give personality to the characters, but the Part 5 translation made the characters personalities feel so robotic since everything was translated literally, but not in a good way. Didn't help that the translation scans were from the Chinese release of the manga, so it was a translation of a translation, so plenty of s**t got lost in translation. Then again, Part 4's translation was done like that too, but at least they tried there instead of just doing a literal translation and calling it a day. Not only that, but they had the fu***ng gall to chose Comic Sans as the typesetting for the translation. What were they thinking?! Yeah, I know what your thinking: "it's a manga and manga are comics so therefore Comic Sans would be a great pick for it" and that's where you'd be wrong because it looks fu***ng ugly on anything, even comics. No actual self-respecting artist or writer would even use that on their own work. Even the Duwang translator didn't use that putrid font. Also it doesn't help that it was edited on MS Paint, and it shows since you can tell the lack of anti-aliasing in the text. This just makes the ugly font look jagged and even uglier, so it really cranks up the diarrhea dial.
Because of how fu***ng awful the translation was, the later parts of Part 5 are confusing as hell since the way the main antagonist's stand works is badly explained, hence the infamous "it just works" meme about said villain's Stand.
I have a personal vendetta with this translation mostly because back in the day, this was the only way that JoJo fans in the west could check out Part 5. Unfortunately because of how fu***ng bad it is, it made people think this is the worst part ever, and I am guilty of thinking that too at one point in my life. It kinda reminds me of how the North American release of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest had an awful translation that made people hate it.
But now that better translations were finished, including a fully colored one, I reread it a year back and Part 5 turned out to be one of my favorite JoJo parts ever.
