Two literary masterpieces together at last
In case you hadn’t already noticed, the published Haruhi novel reads almost exactly like a.f.k.’s old translation, to the point where it seems like he’s gone off and gotten a real job. Most of this can be dismissed – there’s only so many ways to write this, and it’s been through another editing pass (but probably not two, it’s still a little rough) – but I thought one part of the prologue was interesting. The original uses a strange idiom 最大公約数敵 (greatest-common-denominator-esque, referring to what society thinks about something on average); most translations missed this, including the DVD subtitles (which somehow turned it into “I’ve grown to where I think about things like the greatest common factor”), but the novel has the same loose-but-accurate translation as the old fansubs did.
Also it still explains “moe” as “turn-ons”, what’s with that.