Apr 09, 2023
To:dmz
There was an early One Piece fansub group that refused to translate "nakama", claiming it had no English equivalent. This has led to a lot of misunderstandings about the word over the years. The word itself just means something like "member of my group", but there are people who, because of the One Piece fansubs, believe it means something way more specific. To make matters more confusing, the official subs, when they came out, translated it to "friend".
If you google "nakama" you'll find a giant talk page on the One Piece wiki where people argue about it.
In this book, whenever I use "nakama", I'm usually playing somewhat on the ambiguity the word has taken on in the English-speaking anime otaku community because of One Piece.
