Dear Messrs. Shaye and Lynne,


We are writing to you to discuss the problematic Japanese subtitles for your film trilogy "The Lord of the Rings".

We belong to 'the movement for proper subtitles on LotR'. Our wish is shared by many. The movement produced a petition and sent it to you in August, and another petition is now ongoing. We hope they were successful in winning your attention, and we sincerely ask for your assistance in this matter.

You may already realize that only in Japan did "The Fellowship of the Ring (FotR)" fare so much worse than "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" at the box office. As CNN reported: "The whole worldwide difference last time was accounted for by Japan."
(2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/10/21/potter.rings/)
We agree to this conclusion, but not to the analysis of its cause.

Many of the Japanese audiences were unsatisfied with FotR because the story and the way the characters were portrayed didn't make sense, and worst of all, many were frustrated by the way it ended.
Nowhere else in the world could you find such reactions to your great epic film. Your distributor in Japan, Nippon Herald Films Inc., did not even provide such basic information as FotR being the first of the three installments: they completely eliminated "trilogy" and "The Fellowship of the Ring" from* the FotR trailer. You can surely imagine how misleading it was to a number of people who had not read Tolkien.

But we are convinced that the failure was mainly due to the terrible translations in Japanese subtitles which totally destroyed the original script. All of the Japanese subtitles on FotR were transcribed by some fans in theaters, then compiled as a single list on the Web and re-checked. We are enclosing it to substantiate our argument, to point out exactly what was wrong by comparing every line with that of the original script.

Our strong protest bore fruit, and Nippon Herald Films Inc. announced in June that they requested Akiko Tanaka, a translator of Tolkien's books, and their publisher Hyoron-sha to become the advisors for the future subtitle-making, although this by no means guaranteed the advisors' authority over the subtitler Natsuko Toda.
As a result, some of the errors were corrected in DVD(2-disk)/VHS released in Japan on September 21st. The evaluation on this revision varies among the fans, but at least the mistranslations we pointed out in "The Most Serious Errors" list, which we sent you in August, were all repaired except for two lines.
In our opinion, there still remain a considerable number of bad translations, so this time we made "A List of Mistranslations in DVD/VHS", though inadequate it may be. The list is attached at the end of this letter.

All the statements made by the subtitler Toda and the Japanese distributor and the way they have been handling this issue so far do nothing but make us very anxious about the quality of subtitles in the coming film "The Two Towers (TTT)". The subtitles in the trailer for TTT released on October 18th in the official Japanese movie website have confirmed our fear. For your information, we enclose an article from TheOneRing.net.

We request that you take some action in this matter. Could you please consider appointing an agent whose knowledge of the Japanese language and whose judgement you can trust, to be involved in the subtitle-making and supervise the whole process? It is also advisable that he/she examines the subtitles on FotR theatrical release (the papers enclosed), and also check on and evaluate the Japanese trailer for TTT available on the Japanese official movie website.

Contemplating the affair in its entirety, we have enough reasons to believe that it is against your interest to leave the issue of subtitle-making to the Japanese distributor and expect them to do their job. They failed you as your business partner last time. And they have not come up with any concrete solutions to the problem, let alone showing any signs of recognizing its magnitude.

------------- ３枚目 --------------------------------
We all dearly hope for a success of the next two installments of the trilogy in Japan, a success they naturally deserve. The quality of subtitles will play a decisive role in bringing this about, as well as your interest in this matter.


Sincerely yours,

（代表者署名）

（連名者住所氏名）

*******************************

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▼関連発言
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　├◆926:失念していました。大反省 [Evenstar] 12/14 06:09
　│├◆928:ありがとうございました [白い都] 12/14 09:17
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