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Answerman - What's Wrong With Fan Translations?

Honorifics, once you learned what they means and all the subtle cultural stuff behind them, add a lot to the relationships between characters and how you perceive them.

I'd prefer the subtitles to match the dialogue in these cases.

Shiroi Hane wrote:

Ignoring honourifics completely is a bad thing, since they do have meaning - even often in western settings if the writer is Japanese.

If by "ignoring" you mean not in the subtitles, then I disagree.

Shiroi Hane wrote:

Can you cite specific examples?

I know he gave at least one which was Thorn Bind Hostage being wrong in Log Horizon.

Were those worse than the subs that Sentai used on the DVD?
Those were pretty bad, with a lot of grammar errors and quite a few things that were probably just typos but were rather distracting, such as switching between "three" and "tree" twice..

Reminds me of my newbie translator days when a friend asked me to translate a doujinshi about a series I had absolutely zero knowledge of. I was baffled at the what the character name "Tsuvai" was supposed to mean. It wasn't until years later when I started to study German (because I'm a fan of "Kommisar Rex") that I realised it was meant to be "Zwei".

I've not seen the DVDs, but from what I understand they used the same subtitles, or at least with minimal correction. Certainly the "tree-day plant" thing was there in CR's subs since I actually included it as an example in my post before trimming it down.

Were "shinning ball" and "who is the attacker and who is the receiver?" supposed to be something different?
If so what?

In general I've held the philosophy that "If you have the means to watch legally, and you don't you're not a real fan" Now obviously I know there are exceptions, like if you live in a country without legal means, but if you live in NA you at the very least have CR and Funimation.com which are free.
I'm in High school so I know a ton of people who use fansubs. for a couple of them I've learned to stop trying to convince them, most are even friends of mine. I'm actually vice president of our school's anime club and I always tell our members about how important it is to support the industry. We don't have access to streaming sites because of our's school's firewall so we use rips of official subs, but I always give links to legal places.

Then there is self-censorship. In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, they had a lot of problems with using band names and the names of rock stars. It feels really dumb when the characters say "Oingo Boingo" and the subs say some other name.

YotaruVegeta wrote:

Then there is self-censorship. In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, they had a lot of problems with using band names and the names of rock stars. It feels really dumb when the characters say "Oingo Boingo" and the subs say some other name.

The music industry is notorious for pursuing its rights in other media. Perhaps the licensor for Jojo would have been required to pay a licensing fee to use "Oingo Boingo" in the subtitles.

The licensor may check your work. Not all licensors do this, but most will check over your translation to make sure nothing is significantly off. This step often has to get skipped during simulcasts for deadline reasons, but most will go back and check everything again before it gets used on a DVD or Blu-ray. Sometimes they may flag things because they know something that's coming up later in the show, that you have no idea about. Other times, they'll ask you to clarify an English figure of speech to make sure it fits with its intended Japanese meaning. This step can be frustrating, but it also catches lots of mistakes.

Not just "perhaps", we know the reason so many names in the official JoJo subs had to be changed is for copyright reasons.

Doesn't make them any less annoying to watch, though.

That's not how copyright law works. Especially when the name's Oingo and Boingo were never used together right after one another.

Drunk Samurai wrote:

That's not how copyright law works. Especially when the name's Oingo and Boingo were never used together right after one another.

All of these usages would likely fall under fair use as parodies. Even so, the record labels only need threaten a suit, whether they have a leg to stand on or not. Licensees aren't going to want to spend a dime defending themselves over a trivial issue that's easily avoidable, so they just don't take the risk in the first place.

It's like that whole Avatar mess. You can't copyright a title. But nobody wanted to waste time and money to get Cameron off their backs, so they just changed it and moved on.