Hey, folks. I'm new to this site (and still getting used to the interface - hopefully I don't accidentally post this to a cooking subforum and cause years-long drama or something). I'm just some random artist (and occasional translator) from Poland (granted, I'm extremely out of touch with my local fandom space and mainly drift from one place to another on English-speaking sites...). One Big Thing to know about me is that I enjoy a lot of weird and obscure series (so much so that I dedicated a whole licentiate and then an even longer masters' thesis to KEYMAN, Dorohedoro and Ninja Slayer, along with some other miscellaneous works).
Hopefully I either make a pal or two here, or add some random stuff I found out about different series/characters/authors to the site once I find my bearings with the site's info submission system. I always found it fun to do that on other sites, so.
Welcome to aniSearch, now also in the forums after our nice DMs earlier :)
I'm not sure you're going to get that much action in the English forums. I, for one, love talking in English more than I speak German really, but our English speaking user base is not as high (yet). As you have experience with other databases and such, any ideas on that front how to promote in the English market more?
Other than that, I hope you'll like our website. I've always thought that our extensive character database (which could use some English translations of their descriptions - easy area for some cookies, if you'd so like), the advantage of screenshots on site and our overall quite timeless website design make for a nice user experience. I think we've nailed a good middle ground of being modern and being oldschool (I can think of one other DB for each of these terms quite easily).
I would also like to point out that I'm personally working very hard to extensify and complete our anime staff/credits part of the database haha, kind of my little passion project. I think there's other good english sources on the webs for that but none of the actual big DBs that people use most does it even remotely well imo.
For starters: how did you end up deciding on writing a masters thesis on anime/manga and what exactly DID you study? lol
Haha, well, action aside, it's kinda just an attempt at putting myself out there, honestly - really just wanna leave some semblance of "a person who liked this obscure series existed!" on more sites as of late. Who knows, maybe there's a person out there who had similar experiences to me, where they kinda just scour the internet for that one other person who matches their vibe and enjoyed similar stuff. So for that theoretical person's sake I'd like to make myself slightly more visible. Whatever amount of other action I get will be a nice bonus, lol.
Though I do have to note, I find it really funny how this site seems to have way more detailed character data for one particular obscure series I love, Furyou Taimashi Reina, than any other I ever used, to the point I saw pages for three different forms of one of the MCs (probably due to it having an official German release. I also still find it funny how it kinda got an official English title thanks to the German version; very similar to how Yasuraka Monsters got the English title "The Chilling Dead" in France, lol).
Frankly, can't say I have any solid idea in mind beyond the semi-obvious "alternative to AL/MAL" approach, although the respective sites' userbases are so used to their respective interfaces and ways of doing things that it might be a hard sell. I strongly agree that this site's distinct enough in its approach and design to warrant being separate, though.
As for my field of study and eventual theses...it's a long story, honestly. But the gist of it is, anime/manga have been uniquely obscure in my little backwater when I was growing up, so it always had some mysticism to it. Back in the late 2000s I often watched shows in a weird state of "some episodes were easy to find subtitled in English, some in Polish" and that probably contributed to me being interested in how each translation differs. And I always liked English-language media in general, so going with English Philology seemed reasonable.
Since I ended up specializing in translation, my masters' thesis was all about the differences in English and Polish translations of KEYMAN, Dorohedoro and Ninja Slayer. Initially, I planned to write about difficulties in getting Japanese cultural concepts across to English and Polish speaking audiences, but my promoter suggested I narrow it down, and thus, the manga-centric scope became a thing.
Since only Dorohedoro actually has official translations in both, in the case of KEYMAN I mostly focused on all the little popular culture references (as well as linguistic conundrums like how the main heroine's name can be written as "Debonair", but is clearly meant to be read as "Devonea") that a potential Polish translator would have to keep in mind. As for Ninja Slayer - it's a whole hilarious can of worms; TLDR, the original novels are marketed as being allegedly translated from English, which results in a lot of humour like referring to every fighting technique as a form of karate, even when the character in question just wields two pistols. So there was plenty to break down there, down to a whole paragraph about why it's hilarious that one of the totally real American authors is described as being "known as the Joseph Campbell of ninja and Nordic mythology, as he was the first to draw parallels between the two".
– Lanceur du sujet#1
