Bear with me. One of the more irritating ‘controversies in anime/manga/light novel/etc fandom is the localisation versus literal debate about translations and subtitles. There’s a small but loud group of mostly rightwing fans who prefer their translation to be as literal and as much like the original Japanese as possible and who see all other translations as suspect. This usual goes hand in hand with conspiracy theories about Funimation polluting their precious bodily fluids with SJW language in their translations. The idea that there’s an art to translation, that you can’t just go word by word like some robot and expect anything good or even understandable to come out of it just doesn’t land with these people.
This hasn’t stopped professional translator Sarah Moon, here comparing the excellent, slang laden puntastic official subtitles of My Dress-UP Darling/Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi o Suru with an as literal as possible translation of the spoken Japanese. It’s brilliant and hilarious and it shows just how stilted and awkward this insistence on literalness makes things. You end up with sentences that still make some sort of sense but are just never said in English, sentences that sound as if you had a stroke. It also shows just how good the unknown translator/subtitler of the series is, being able to put so much character in such a limited space. I wish Crunchyroll and other parties would actually credit their translators (and other staff) like Hi-Dive does.
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