Fans demand the translator change.
Summary:
- The official Jujutsu Kaisen translation has been criticized before.
- Fans want the manga translator to be replaced.
- Chapter 256 has a significant translation error.
It’s so much fun to be in the Jujutsu Kaisen fandom, but perhaps not for the reasons you think. First there was a major animation controversy, then fans weren’t satisfied with where things were going in the manga, and now they’re back to criticizing the series’ official translation.
Bad Quality
The Jujutsu Kaisen manga is translated by John Werry, and this is not the first time that fans have spoken out about the poor quality of the translation. There have been multiple complaints about weird wording and incomprehensible sentences that readers have found in the manga.
A number of fans prefer to treat this with a sense of humor and make memes about it. For example, when one of the official manga pages included a weird suggestion of Sukuna to “compete with feet,” a lot of foot fetish jokes appeared, so in a way we’d like to thank the translator for our good laugh.
But memes are not the only reaction. Some fans are genuinely upset by John Werry’s translations and want him replaced. There’s even a Change.org petition, dated April 2023. Which means it’s not a new complaint, readers have been unsatisfied for years.
Chapter 256
This time, it is the most recent Jujutsu Kaisen chapter that triggered the fans again. A big part of the chapter was dedicated to the use of Black Flash, and we finally got more details about this phenomenon.
It’s Gojo who explains how Black Flash works. When he’s asked why he can’t use it whenever he wants, he’s surprised that people would even think that he could. Gojo asks “Why’d you think I could in the first place? ‘Cuz of the Six Eyes?”
It emphasizes the fact that even the Six Eyes users cannot unleash Black Flash at their own will, even if other sorcerers think they can. Black Flash doesn’t work like that, and it doesn’t depend on a user’s power.
But the translation changes the meaning of the phrase completely. In the official manga issue, Gojo says he cannot use Black Flash because of the Six Eyes, which is factually incorrect.
First of all, he can use it, just not whenever he wants to, and second of all, it has nothing to do with the Six Eyes, so such a translation is nothing else but misinformation.
Chapter 256 made fans even more furious with the translator and they stopped seeing the point in the official translation whatsoever. Why bother reading something like that when fan translations are much more accurate?