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French japanimation enthusiasts over 30 probably remember how official dubbers for Fist of the North Star/Hokuto No Ken in the late 80's actually took pride in providing bogus dubbing (with bad puns, changes in the dialog and purposely egregious voice-overs) because they thought "the show should not have been brought to young French kids" and just didn't care [1] This is precisely why you need enthusiasts providing q…
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Matching the speakers' hair is useful, but too often notes end up as showing off. A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching something in its original language, not explain every reference.
> A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching something in its original language It's my feeling that this should include what would be automatically understood by natives. I have never found this to go too far - I have always wanted more local context.
If you can't explain what you need to in the translation itself, just don't. Or include a TLNote.txt if you really must.
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One example of impressive fansubbing i have seen was where the subs were color matched to the speakers hair, and contained cultural/historic/contextual info.
Matching the speakers' hair is useful, but too often notes end up as showing off. A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching something in its original language, not explain every reference.
I disagree. I prefer to have the literal translation and then have the reference explained. I want the purest, most literall translation possible.
Imagine this situation. A character says "He is like a modern Nobunaga". I want the translation to say exactly that and, is the translator feel the need to, have a quick note explaining who Nobunaga was[0]. It would be unnaceptable to have it 'translated' to "He is like a modern Napoleon".
And I believe most of the hardcore anime fans would prefer it like this.
This fenomenon is called Culturalization[1]. It is as disrespectul for the hardcore fans as it is for the anime's creators.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oda_Nobunaga [1] Page 4 - https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/6...
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> A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching something in its original language It's my feeling that this should include what would be automatically understood by natives. I have never found this to go too far - I have always wanted more local context.
My opinion on this has changed over the years. I now tend to look at any translation which needs to include translation notes on-screen as having failed, usually because they explain something that isn't absolutely necessary to know, which isn't a good enough reason in my book to distract from the dialogue. If you can't explain what you need to in the translation itself, just don't. Or include a TLNote.txt if you rea…
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Perhaps, but sometimes a show is just that much more impressive if you understand more of what's going on. The show 'Ergo Proxy' comes to mind. It's got a mysterious plot and some throw off episodes that will really mess you up, but aside from that it's also got loads of references to history and philosophy that I would just not understand because I haven't studied either. The fansub group had small blobs of explanat…
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,…
The greatest fansub group there ever was in my opinion was dattebayo, mostly famous for their Naruto releases. Their public attitude was as unprofessional as you could get. They would often make fun of their viewers in announcements, and if you'd miss an announcement of a skipped episode due to Japanese holidays of studio co-ops or whatever you'd unsuspectingly download a troll episode. If episodes were filler or had a cheesy storyline they'd make fun of it in the sub of the title frame. But even though their public attitude was unprofessional, their actual subbing was the most professional operation I've ever seen in a sub group. They were always among the fastest, never missing a deadline. Their translations were always top notch, better than Crunchyroll, unlike other speedsubbers that would have frequent imperfections.
They basically held the entire Naruto community hostage with their high quality releases, while making fun of them for being the kinds of person who enjoy Naruto (which wasn't very highly regarded in the community at the time). When they had to quit because crunchyroll took over Naruto it really was a great loss for the community in my opinion.
I enjoy watching various anime but am by no means into Japanese culture, nor the American culture that is into Japanese culture. However, when I was first introduced to anime by a friend (minus Spirited Away) which was Naruto, I was introduced to the English-subbed versions even though English dubs were available. After watching a few episodes of listening to Japanese and reading the subs, I thought it would be a goo…
Piracy has never been about cost as much as it has been about convenience. For a long time the fansubbers simply offered a better product; shows from now rather than five years ago, with better-quality translations, and often better-quality video. Fans wanted to support the industry - I know more than one person with a shelf full of official English DVDs, still in their shrinkwrap - but the quality wasn't there. Even…
Fan-subbing is not as underground as this article would have yo think and it's way more convenient sometime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching something in its original language It's my feeling that this should include what would be automatically understood by natives. I have never found this to go too far - I have always wanted more local context.
My opinion on this has changed over the years. I now tend to look at any translation which needs to include translation notes on-screen as having failed, usually because they explain something that isn't absolutely necessary to know, which isn't a good enough reason in my book to distract from the dialogue. If you can't explain what you need to in the translation itself, just don't. Or include a TLNote.txt if you rea…
I can't speak Japanese, am not embedded within current popular Japanese culture and did not go to a Japanese high school and therefore there are references which I will not understand. These include jokes that rely on wordplay such as puns and malapropisms, and historical notes about Japanese history, geography and society which I am mostly ignorant of.
Without those translation notes, you exclude me from understanding anything but the surface of what's going on.
I enjoy watching various anime but am by no means into Japanese culture, nor the American culture that is into Japanese culture. However, when I was first introduced to anime by a friend (minus Spirited Away) which was Naruto, I was introduced to the English-subbed versions even though English dubs were available. After watching a few episodes of listening to Japanese and reading the subs, I thought it would be a goo…
I agree some of english dubbing in anime is very poor. I normally watch subbed versions of anime. Though, I like the orignal English dubbing and music (Funimation version) of DragonBall Z more than the Japanese version :)
On a slightly different note, whilst trying without success to find the actress's name on IMDB, I just found out that the film's director Satoshi Kon tragically died of cancer 5 years ago. We lost a film making genius.
Why?
* There are specific fansubbing groups that have a well-earned reputation for quality. They consistently do a better job on translation where even major shows will have glaring translation errors on the paid services. Some of these groups even manage to do it quickly.
* The video encoding is superior in both size and quality. (Sometimes video quality issues are down to the original broadcast looking awful, due to how HDTV works these days.)
* I can download an entire season of a series I've paid to watch, and watch it at my leisure on a laptop or tablet. If I wanted to stream it off Crunchyroll I'd need to have a stable network connection at the time and hope I'm not exceeding my 4G cap (on a mobile device). In practice the streaming players will break, too...
* Often the paid services release an episode days or weeks late (to be fair, usually due to negotiated agreements). This is a pain since it's very hard to avoid spoilers from people who watched it day-of in japan or quickly via fansubs.
* The viewing experience is better. Most of the paid services still use a flash plugin, which is pretty much a worst-case for watching 24hz video content - judder, tearing, dropped frames, bad upscaling/downscaling, etc. Worse still, the paid services often butcher the color-space and framerate of the video. When you combine all those small mistakes together, it's REALLY distracting to watch an action scene on these services. Sometimes the color-space issues render entire portions of scenes invisible.
Aside from a discussion of whether the localization is being done 'right' - dubbing vs subbing, 'literal' translation vs natural translation - occasionally the paid services treat content with respect and I have no reason to use a fansubbed version. Those are great moments, but they're extremely rare. The last time I can remember this happening was the (FYI, pretty gross) series Kill la Kill, where the translation was supposedly provided by someone hired by the animation studio. There were no errors in translation, the script felt natural, and the video was good. Those occasional successes are part of why I still pay for the services I rarely use.
FWIW the manga industry has this same problem, but far worse. It's a miracle official English localizations of manga sell at all. Every company in that chain seems to be inept or actively taking steps to hinder their sales. Manga piracy is an actual business online, unfortunately, where anime piracy is more of a casual thing - there are dozens of websites out there that make money running ads on pirated manga. Naturally, the pirated manga usually ranks #1 on Google.