Name Variants
- Main article: Name Variants
In order to avoid lawsuits, some of the character's names were changed in the localization, mainly either being carried over from, or to All-Star Battle, Eyes of Heaven and/or Crunchyroll subtitles of their Anime series after 2014. Some by alternating part of their names while others were completely changed. In 2013, a Facebook post was made from VIZ briefly talking about JoJo with how the media Araki references within the story is from either fashion, music or real people. The problematic ones of the two are fashion and music, as licensing for just even the namesakes can be hard to afford/acquire, VIZ referred to it being a "lawyer's nightmare". So instead VIZ uses "copyright free" names as an official English substitute.[1]
Line Changes
There are a few lines in Japanese that can't be translated into other languages due to the nature of the language, so instead translators often change lines to resemble the effect of the line.
- During his initial encounter with Polnareff, Hol Horse states that a is unable to win against a . To mock Hol Horse, Polnareff claims that he heard the former say , referring to a traditional Japanese game similar to marbles, commonly played by young girls in Japan. In Crunchyroll's official subtitles and the English Dub, the line is localized as Polnareff calling Hol Horse's gun a peashooter. In VIZ Media's manga translation, Polnareff jokingly pretends to have misheard Hol Horse saying "buns" instead of "guns".
- One of Ghiaccio's rants includes his annoyance at the Japanese phrase, , meaning "thoroughly". The phrase is defined by its first half, , which translates literally to "root digging", the implication being that something is not done "thoroughly" until the roots are pulled out. The nonsensical second half of the phrase, , meaning "leaf digging," is added to create a euphonious Japanese wordplay (i.e. "digging up the roots and leaves") and is generally not taken literally like Ghiaccio is doing.
- In Crunchyroll's official subtitles for the anime, Ghiacchio's rant is instead directed towards the phrase "taking a leaf out of someone's book", in which "leaf" refers to a sheet of paper, rather than an actual plant leaf. Similarly to the Japanese version of his rant, Ghiacchio's anger still stems from him taking a piece of figurative language literally, while preserving the reference to leaves. Finally, in the English dub of Golden Wind, Ghiaccio instead rants about the expression "think outside of the box".
- The French dub has Ghiaccio rant about the expression "remuer ciel et terre", which literally translates to "(to) move heaven and earth", and is an idiom for "making every effort" or "using all sorts of means to achieve the goal one has in mind."
- In the VIZ media release, Ghiaccio instead rants about the phrase "elbow grease", much like the other localizations, Ghiaccio is taking the idiom literally, and finds it to be nonsensical.