How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

> I have never found this to go too far - I have always wanted more local context.

I really dig for those fansubs that explain the context. Some even go extra mile by adding text frames in the video explaining why the speaker said that and what this line actually means.

We tend to miss a lot if we only have a literal translation of what the speaker have said - like a joke hidden in plain words. I remember one anime where the hero's name if written in another way meant pervert - I would have never understood why other characters used to get horrified(in a comic way) upon hearing his name for the first time if the sub had not explained it.

I found the infamous *TL note: Yuki means Snow very offputting. (It came in the middle of a very deliberately sparse, emotional scene - simple scenery (mostly snow IIRC) and very little dialogue).

Elfen Lied was one of the first fansubs I watched, and it was a good example of translators going too far. The version I watched used different text colors for the alien characters depending on whether their human (mostly sane) or alien(instinct-driven, homicidal) personality was in control. If you remember, there's a character later on who spent most of her life locked up in the basement under a government facility, so more than once I found myself disagreeing with the translator's assessment of whether or not she was supposed to be "sane" in any given scene.

And then there's the notorious scene in Code Geass where two characters are playing chess, and over 50% of the screen is filled with translator's notes about how that's not actually a valid move (when it's clearly an error on the animator's end of things).

Many, many fansub groups are just plain unprofessional in every sense of the word.

related: http://www.phauna.org/papers/anime/anime.pdf

>“Now it’s all about who has the fanciest typesettings and who has the wackiest karaoke lyrics for the opening songs,” Nadelman pointed out. “They just want to have bragging rights to say this is their version of it, even though the same show will be available on Crunchyroll, or Funimation, or a number of other streaming sites.”

It is true that many fansubbing groups now (much like in the old days) compete on who has the flashiest karaoke and typesetting, but I'd say it's unwise to completely fob off fansubbing in 2015.

The article goes into more detail on this, but video quality and encoding is generally still better on fansubs than on streaming sites, largely because anime fansubs tend to be on the cutting edge of video encoding. MKV has been the container of choice for years, 10-bit colour has been around for a few years now, h264 encoding even longer. You could argue whether this justifies the illegal fansub, but there are people who will give this as a justification.

There are still arguments over translation. Crunchyroll and Funimation have their "good" and not-so-"good" translators. The question is - do you keep it literal (perhaps keeping some Japanese idioms and ideas intact, causing confusion for some in your Western audience and possibly breaking immersion somewhat) or go more liberal (translate some concepts into Western concepts, such that it may not literally match the original script word for word, but the idea will be the same). I tend to go for the liberal side because I want to be entertained, not frustrated by concepts I know nothing of, but as you could imagine the arguments are fraught. Comedy is an especially difficult genre to translate successfully.

Also, America is still provided for better than other English-speaking territories in this regard. What's most annoying to me is when a company like Funimation picks up English-speaking streaming rights for a show, then restricts that to US/Canada. UK/Ireland/Australia often gets left out in the cold with legal streaming like this.

I'm kind of happy that fansubs are still around to keep the legal sites on their toes.