Forum - View topicAnswerman - What's Wrong With Fan Translations?
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Saffire
 Posts: 1256 Location: Iowa, USA |
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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That is right, he retired last year. Also he was not a translator so he was not really relevant here. |
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Kamon
 Posts: 70 Location: Procrastinating |
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animenewsnetwork.com/bbs/phpBB2/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=10 *cough* Last edited by Kamon on Wed Dec 02, 2015 2:35 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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BassKuroi
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Poor companies, getting hate-mail...
If the company tranlation policy and guides are wrong (like it's Crunchyroll's case), a good translator will be fired because it's not his/her translator quality what determines if he/her will have or maintain the job, but his/her adequacy to the policy. |
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Videogamep
 Posts: 564 Location: CA |
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Since we're talking about fan translations, I'll just leave this here. http://onepiece.wikia.com/wiki/User%3AKaido_King_of_the_Beasts/Hall_of_Mangapanda
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Brand
 Posts: 1028 |
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From what I understand (they said in a Facebook response) "Mazinger Edition Z: The Impact! " ended up as the title because Dynamic Pro told them that was the title and that was the end of it. |
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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TV-Nihon's Zeta Gundam movies are what you're looking for. Be prepared for a huge helping of kisama-yatsus. Not like I'm blowing over official translations, but there's always something about fan translations that hold certain charms. For one, the people don't treat it as a job (for the most part) and are more than willing to go above and beyond to show their skills beyond the bare minimum. Typesetting is a good example of this. It's also good practice if you"re looking into doing video tech or pro translation along the line. Gotta start somewhere. Even if you end up leaving the scene, you at least got some productive work out of adding lines in a foreign cartoon. |
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treatment
Posts: 149 |
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and then you get official english-subs from the japanese licensors like these:
(these are from the official japan-only Macross Plus Blu-Ray edition from Bandai Visual) 
other samples, including comparisons to MangaEnt's original english-subs (Neil Nadelman) here: https://picasaweb.google.com/111078130676326961372/MacrossPlusSubsStuff?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCOW0jJ74lN-rTQ&feat=directlink Makes you wonder how/who they hire as translators (professionals???) over there in japan for these... 
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pikabot
Posts: 168 |
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Actually, as a Japanese language learner, that would be extremely useful to me (moreso if it was hiragana though). Anyway, there's another factor which isn't really discussed in the article, which is that licensor input can be as much curse as blessing. There's the obvious issues, like Togashi's frankly insane official name romanizations for Hunter X Hunter, but there are other issues which are regularly hidden from the audience. One of my close friends is a professional Japanese -> English translator who does a lot of freelance manga work. She has many times been required by the licensor to make changes to her translation that don't make sense, that are flagrantly worse, or that otherwise damaged the final product. Sometimes this is because Japanese executives are sure that they know what's best for the American market and feel like they need to micromanage, sometimes it's to be consistent with a previous translator's work, but she's on multiple occasions expressed frustration to me that she may never be able to ship a translated manga volume that she can point to with pride as being her work, because her hard work is constantly being interfered with. On one memorable occasion, she really fought the client over some changes they wanted, and they agreed with her that her version was better, but still didn't change their mind about wanting the changes. Of course, this is all the more reason to not send hate mail to the translators; for all you know, they may very well agree with you. |
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Penguin_Factory
 Posts: 732 Location: Ireland |
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Do fansubbers still do that thing where they fill the subtitles with F-bombs and swearing, even if they're translating a kid's show? That used to annoy the hell out of me.
The quality issues in fan translations is what eventually made me give up on fansubs completely. It wasn't so much poor translation (although there's plenty of that-- in particular they've got a bad habit of mangling made up names and western-sounding terms due to hearing them filtered through Japanese accents) as certain stylistic conventions, such as not translating attack names or keeping words like "ne" or "baka" in Japanese for no apparent reason. Then there's the issue of jokes. I much prefer the usual professional approach (if you can't translate it, just replace it with something that gets the same idea across) to having to pause to read translator's notes on the screen. My thinking on this has always been that if you care so much about purity that the puns can't be altered and you want your subtitles randomly peppered with Japanese phrases, just learn Japanese and cut out the middleman entirely. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11418 |
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I remember the confusion around the name of one character in Monster. The anime fansubbers started off with Schubert (no idea how the manga fans handled it), then eventually changed it to the intended Schuwald. It didn't help that the anime showed a poster with it written as Schubert.
The source of this problem was that the katakana (シューバルト) was sourced off the German pronunciation, (roughly, Shoovalt) which then ran into trouble with both the interchangeable Japanese b-v and l-r pairs. So Schubert was not at all an unreasonable translation (and it was supported by the damn poster). The anime also showed Braun's name as Brown spoiler[(on his gravemarker)], probably because they were more familiar with that spelling. And then there's that whole Alucard/Arucard controversy. To this day, there are people who insist on the latter as being the One True Name. |
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TBY
Posts: 3 |
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Uh, how long has it been since you watched any subbed anime at all? These days, it's the professional subs that keep the random Japanese, whereas fansubs are more willing to localize. |
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DuelGundam2099
 Posts: 533 |
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I see this with official Gundam subs when Build Fighters was on YouTube, all it does is confuse casual and entry level viewers. Then there are mistakes which blatantly contradict what was on screen, my favorite being that infamous rape line in ep 23 of Cross Ange, oh boy did Anime Suki called and pointed that out what should have been translated to "took" or "steal", especially since the scene in question was clearly consensual. 
Hey, I remember those! I never knew making kids sit in one place for a long time was considered a punishment. It is translator notes like that which gives fansubs a certain charm. I learned quite a bit about cultural snippets from those. |
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Flah
Posts: 25 |
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Back in the day when I used to read scanlations all the time (I was younger, I didn't know better), I came across one of Fushigi Yuugi. The first few chapters were passable. And then, right about the same time a new character was introduced, things went downhill.
For the first few pages, it was only the new character talking, with horrible broken English. I was sure that the translator was being clever and trying to carry over the mangaka's intent of the character not knowing proper Japanese. And then the other more established characters started talking, with the same bad English. Now that I think about it, that's about the same time I stopped reading scanlations. |
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Just-another-face
Posts: 324 |
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That's really cute, especially when said execs generally don't know a lick of English themselves. XD |
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