Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! - Dub Steps
|
Goto page Previous Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Asterisk-CGY
 Posts: 398 |
|
|||||
Ah sounds about right. The only other tie in was the manga, and that would've sold just as much really. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
|
|||||
What, you'd rather have blood red, poop brown, booger green, puke orange, Pepto pink, or **** white? No doubt the 5th-grader in all of us can come up with some kind of gross association for any color if it has enough time. And strangely enough, fansubs used to use similar yellow colors (yes, even in the digital fansub era), and people still managed to survive watching those subs, which they spent the better part of a day on IRC to obtain. And a lot of fansubs are painful on the eyes. Either they make you strain your eyes with CAPTCHA-text in unreadable fonts and colors too similar to hair/clothes/backgrounds, they're too small, or they have insufficient margins (forcing viewers to look down at the extreme bottom of the screen all the time, and repeatedly scan left-to-right to read lines that span the entire width of the screen). So really, I see the whole "yellow is somehow an ugly color now, even though it wasn't in 2001" business as an excuse to hate on official subs.
Heck, you're almost as likely to get fansubs cracking jokes about Craigslist or Cristina Aguilera.
* And some releases have outsourced the subtitle work to external companies, like JN Productions. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
|
|||||
It wouldn't really require a lot of money or resources to change it. In fact, it would be a pretty easy change to make. However, you have to remember that your preference of color is just that, a preference. For every person who hates yellow subs, there is another that likes them. For everyone who wishes they would switch to white, or whatever color, another wants them to stay with what they have. This particular issue has actually been brought up on TANs forums before and the vast majority of the people who responded wanted them to stay with yellow. In fact, it came out to something like 15 to 2 in favor of keeping yellow subs. Really, the only way to appease everyone would be too offer multiple color choices on every show and every release. That would likely add cost, not to mention it would take up additional space on the discs and could lead to further compression of the audio and video. Of course, that would also raise the question of what colors to include, as obviously they can't include every single color available. The thought that switching their subtitles from yellow would make a dent in pirating is juvenile at best. Funimation uses white subs and people still pirate their shows. CR shows still get fansubbed, despite their white subs. What makes you think TAN's streams would be any different? |
||||||
|
||||||
Kazemon15
 Posts: 400 |
|
|||||
|
About the whole professionalist vs. hobbyist. I would generally agree, but...not all professionalists do a good job when it comes to subbing something and sometimes they just pull stuff out of their ass to make a bad pun.
Taking the CR subs and fansubs of Reborn! for example. The CR subs (as well as the horribly translated manga) call the flames DEATHperation flames...which isn't even a real word... While the fan scanlations and fansubs call them Dying Will Flames...which...makes more sense, since it's the regret of dying and the will to want to do something about it motivates them to stay alive... While it is true that most professionalists are...well, professionals, it doesn't necessarily mean they care about the show as much as a hobbyist or fan does. Sometimes they just zip through it as fast as they can to move on to their next project and be done with it. However, to hobbyist who are fans and love the series would want to make sure it's correctly translated and understandable. And not every Japanese company really has a say to how something is to be translated in English. I mean, how can they know it's not awkward...since...they don't even speak English? Have you seen the Japanese official translations of Digimon Tamers on Funimation's streams? ....just....horrible grammer mistakes everywhere and that is considered "official"? So the whole argument that professionalist are always better because they have the "golden state of approval" really doesn't mean anything to how well or bad something is translated... |
||||||
|
||||||
ShinnFlowen
 Posts: 141 |
|
|||||
|
I always make the statement Answerman makes when a fanboy of subtitles tries to put Fansubs on a pedestal. If you don't understand the language than how do you know what you are reading on subtitles is correct?
On the issue with endings, (looks at Mass Effect 3) I can say perfectly that artistic creativity means nothing when it comes to making a product that is suppose to satisfy the majority of your customers because if your customers are dissatisfied with the product than you need to fix it or else they'll just buy another product from a competitor or spread negative word of mouth. Both actions are the worst outcomes for any business in regards to their relationship with their customers. If I was EA's investors I would be concern over the negative press and responses of the consumers. Luckily for EA this problem is possible to fix so as a recovery strategy it would be wise to address this complaint and make some extra money through dlc. In the end people forget that these are products from business that seek to make money and that means satisfying their customers. |
||||||
|
||||||
Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
|
|||||
|
For minute there I thought this was a necro-posting dug up from 2003.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
mrsticky005
Posts: 114 |
|
|||||
|
Although it's not a fan sub but rather a scanlation (since there is currently no anime of it) I probably would have never even
heard of Vinland Saga were it not for some scanlation sites. I do hope it eventually gets licensed because it's definitely a series that I want to pay for and own. It's some quality goodness. If you haven't read Vinland Saga do so. It's got Vikings. Vikings are awesome. Vinland Saga is SUPREME. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
configspace
Posts: 3717 |
|
|||||
From what I heard, it's not just a bit but rather pretty regular editing, though perhaps not massive (I suppose which is required if you want to be consistent). Anyways, doesn't that go against that whole big preceding paragraph about Disney not being about the sacrosanct kiddy image, and how they're all NYPD blue, Pirates of the Caribean, edgy dark, cool and all what you said? Why would they bother and put in the constant expense of having to go through every second of each episode looking for things that need editing then? |
||||||
|
||||||
TitanXL
 Posts: 4036 |
|
|||||
Usually when you see people who do know the language pointing it out in threads like these. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Mohawk52
Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
|
|||||
|
There's one little underlying thing that weighs very heavily to how anime is handled in the US that is completely missing in Japan. One that so many of the whailers' and gnashers' of teeth to all the editing done to anime in the US, never seem to comprehend, or take into account. It's known by three letters.
F.C.C. Simply knowing a language is no guarantee that the free lance fansubbing interpreter/translator will not take the liberty to spice up the translation to what they believe the original script writters should have wrote, but didn't, eg. adding foul language where none was ever there, or was not as foul in origin. Still completely unauthorised and unacceptable by the licensing Japanese owners, completely forbidden under contract. 
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
configspace
Posts: 3717 |
|
|||||
|
The FCC only covers free/OTA broadcast TV though. No cable, satellite or pay station is bound by the FCC at all otherwise there wouldn't be such big differences in content. I think it really comes down to the demographics or advertisers they're targeting. I think they still want to play it safe; they pay lip service, but they don't want to be like Adult Swim (at least like with anime before)
|
||||||
|
||||||
Mr. sickVisionz
 Posts: 2173 |
|
|||||
They stand out against the video of the show and they can be quickly read at a glance. The white subtitles that people crave usually blend in to the background multiple times per episodes and require concentration and focus to read. I've never had that experience with your standard generic yellow DVD subtitles. Readability should always take precedence over beauty when it comes to subtitles imo. It's a lot better than Funimation's subtitles that blend into the background and are unreadable multiple times per episode. The last Funi product I watched was Trigun BR and those subs were so hard to read on such a regular basis that they might as well as not even had them. Truth be told, Funi is so adamant about subtitles not being legible that I think it's a purposeful thing done to push people to watching the dub.
They simulcast guy mentioned that he used AegisSub to do professional BD subtitles. Changing the color of subtitles in that takes like an extra 30 seconds to 1 minute. As far as compression, you're talking about adding maybe 20 mb to discs hold 4.7-50gb. You're not going to notice a difference due to that. As far as colors and giving people options, I think there should be two that stay identical for every series: 1) A standard big yellow text with a black border. Every release from a company should have one track like this that is built to maximize readability. 2) Whatever other one you want that's not designed to be easy to read. For funimation, that would be those terrible thing white subtitles that blend into the background on a regular basis and are hard to read at a quick glance. |
||||||
|
||||||
sainta
 Posts: 989 |
|
|||||
Nailed it!
|
||||||
|
||||||
Melanchthon
 Posts: 550 Location: Northwest from Here |
|
|||||
I am shocked to say this, but I think I completely agree with Mr. Answerman. I have seen fansubs as good as offical subs, but I have never seen fansubs better than official subs. The one thing that official subs have that fansubs don't grammar and sentence structure. official subs read better. And official subs talk to the original creators and get a deeper understanding of the source material. Of course, sometimes the original creators insist on stupid things, but these tend to be exceptions to the rule. I remember when Spice and Wolf came out, the fansubs spelled her name as 'Horo'. When FUni licensed the show and announced the character's name as 'Holo', people freaked out (and there are still a number that insist on calling her that). BUT in the show itself Holo signs a piece of paper, spelling her name as H-O-L-O. And the figure I imported from Japan is spelled Holo. Yeah, the fansubs had it wrong.
I agree again. First of all, fansubs of Crunchyroll et al. shows are pointless, see above about offical translations. And nearly all shows today are streamed. The few that aren't (see PenguinDrum) still have need for subbers, but I believe these cases will no longer happen, probably by the end of 2013. There is however, a catalog of old shows that never got picked up that could use a good subbing. And for the answerfan question, I could never narrow it down to one. One of my hobbies is finding the most obscure shows out there and watching them just because. A list of favorites: Toukan Gettan Hanbun ni Tsuki ga Noboru Sora Elf 17 Licca-chan Fushigi na Fushigi na Yunia Monogatari Majokko Tsukune-chan Oniisama e... Ryofuko-chan REC Demon Hunter Makaryuudo Iketeru Futari Alice Cosmo Police Justy Tenshi Nanka ja Nai and... (drumroll please) Butt Attack Punisher Girl Guataman (yeah, I went there) |
||||||
|
||||||
|
configspace
Posts: 3717 |
|
|||||
|
@Mr. sickVisionz
Totally agree about Funi's terribad subs. Even if they changed it to white, the biggest problem is just how small they are. I'm not sure about recent versions of Aegisub, but from what I recall it had to be converted. (BDs can't take ssa/ass directly, you need to create XML and a stream of bitmaps for the fonts) Crunchyroll subs and most fansubs use vector, embedded fonts, whereas DVD and BD subs use non-scaleable bitmaps, with no anti-aliasing, programmable border, shadow size, etc like soft-subs with real fonts. It's interesting that CR is still the only one to do this |
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group