Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Don't Simulcast Subtitles Get Corrected?
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YamiWheeler
Posts: 97 |
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Seems like that's your close-mindedness showing then. What a shame for you. |
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bs3311
Posts: 416 Location: Cincinnati, Ohio |
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More like dropping my own close mindedness and seeing what they're saying instead of how they're saying it. The world doesn't revolve around just Logos, you can have the other branches help you out. |
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Polycell
Posts: 4623 |
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At least Crunchyroll's subs have improved from when Sasameki Koto had up to three separate lines on the screen at once. The series has since been removed from the catalogue, so I can't screencap that fail for you, unfortunately.
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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What I noticed is that there remains a substantial group of people who don't trust any official translations, even if they were formerly done by scanlators. They're the people who like the whole grassroots, amateur nature of fansubbing. Between these guys and the people who want their anime for free AND without ads, those are the two main holdouts I find, and I don't really see them using official means anytime soon. At least, this is what I see with One Piece, the anime/manga I follow the most closely. The One Piece Wikia refuses to use the official names Viz and FUNimation go by, for instance, sticking with "Yonkou" instead of "Four Emperors," "Gomu Gomu no Mi" instead of "Gum-Gum Fruit," etc., and I see a roughly 50/50 divide between One Piece fans who use the scanlator terms and those who use the official Viz terms. Some get along with the others, and some don't.
The thing is that this is an issue of trust more than anything else. The Japanese companies, Hollywood studios, and TV producers trust the DRM on Flash/Animate more than the others, as it has been proven to at least stop some of these people. Not all of them, but definitely at least one. Hence, they trust Flash/Animate, whereas HTML5 is still new and mostly unproven, and no one wants to be the first.
Some of these flaws are not in regards to the translation, but to the usage of English, or as this article's thumbnail shows, garbled characters at the end of a line. I don't know any Japanese, but I know the rules of the English language well enough to identify that side of subtitle errors.
The point is that you are not in a position to criticize someone else's English translations if you create errors in English usage yourself that you didn't identify. For instance, in your very first sentence, you have "payed" instead of "paid." It is also a run-on sentence, with an unnecessary comma near the end and the word "standard" aspart of the wrong sentence. The latter suggests carelessness; the former suggests a lack of knowledge of irregular verbs. Hence, your arguments about perfect or near-perfect English cannot be taken seriously if you don't hold your own English to the same standard. Otherwise, you look like a hypocrite. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar Posts: 16941 |
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Alright everyone lets keep it civil and watch the insults and insinuations about being closed minded or not. Thank you.
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2238 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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It's not as easy as CR just deciding to pay their sub contractors more. Translation and subtitle work is usually "recouped" from the royalties that licensors pay to the Japanese companies. In other words, paying the subcontractors more doesn't cost CR money, it costs the Japanese rights holder's money. After all, the rights to the translations end up with them, not Crunchyroll. In fact, CR having probably the cheapest way of producing simulcast subs is a plus for them when it comes to licensing negotiations. |
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bs3311
Posts: 416 Location: Cincinnati, Ohio |
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I'm in every right to complain since I already argued with professionals on this issue in the past and had nothing to back it up. I was wrong and I had to talk with other scriptwriters or editors to see why. This isn't just my argument, its everyone's argument whether written properly or not since no way am I gonna spend over an hour to post each stinking comment. Nor will I spend over five sentences criticizing you putting a comma over, "hence." When the sentence flows better putting it after, "seriously." Or ask/state why you/I weren't/was taught to add commas before quotations? It's a waste of time. |
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Tajima
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Commas are only added before quotation marks when introducing a quotation with words like "She said," "She whispered," etc., or when splitting the quotation when attributing the person. Furthermore, using a comma after "Hence" is perfectly valid...so, if you'd attempted to "correct" them over their perfect use of the English language, you would've been wrong, once again. I'm beginning to sense a theme. Also, you just implied that it would take you an hour to type a few sentences correctly... |
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Daizo
Posts: 139 |
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Interesting. Though this honestly just makes the situation come off even worse. I find it very likely that the companies in Japan won't really care much for the translation quality for foreigners as it doesn't have any effect on the domestic consumer base and as a result they're going to be highly incentivized to get it done as cheaply as possible with little to no care for the actual quality. At the same time, it doesn't seem like CR would care very much about it either, so with the fixed very low prices translators are also incentivized to rush through translations as quickly as possible for maximized hourly income - after all, if you're going to paid the same regardless of whether you turn in a mediocre script or a good script, and nothing's really going to happen if you turn in mediocre work, the only reason you wouldn't settle for that is pride in your own work. This actually ties to my theory as to why simulcast translations have managed to remain mostly decent on average despite the ridiculously low pay. The vast majority of subbers working in the business come from a fansubbing background, which in turns translates to passion to their craft. It's this passion that makes them go beyond mediocre effort. However, with the low pay it's a fact that you won't really be able to translate anime as your primary job - it's going to be a side job at best. And side jobs rarely tend to remain in your life forever, so as a result you'll end with people quitting. This isn't a problem as long as there's new talent to hire from the fansubbing pool, but said pool is just getting more and more dry as time goes on. So what happens when there's no more ex-fansubbers to work on the scripts? You get people who don't have the same kind of passion for their work and who will without a doubt turn in consistently mediocre or even outright poor work. And at that point, bad simulcast scripts will no longer be an exception - they'll be the default. Worst of all, it's going to be a slow decline so the average person probably wouldn't realize it was happening until it was too late. I really hope things won't turn out as badly as I'm predicting here, but the amount of complaints about shoddy simulcast scripts seem to have only gone up with time... not to mention the fact that this column exists in the first place! |
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bs3311
Posts: 416 Location: Cincinnati, Ohio |
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thanks. However, using air quotes implies something someone said in the first place. How is that any different other than this being used for books following a narrative or to start a new paragraph when someone talks or mentions past dialogue? And their period before starting their new sentence with Hence is enough time for a space to catch a breath. No one naturally says it like, "*space*Hence*space*Queue line". While something like, "However." Is reasonable to me since its 3 syllables. This isn't about correcting people. Hell, they were suggestions. It's about how wasteful it is to judge or mention about grammar when we're supposed to argue about our points within the topic. Not how we write them.
Just post. Not, "correctly post." Each individual can have their own obstacle from pulling what they think out've their minds to place on a page. Time is one of them. And then after that I need to go through my books and word software to correct em? Nah. More anime and skype chats are waiting for me lol |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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If what you say will happen, then I'd say that after that, the quality should go up. Anime has become increasingly reliant on international viewers. This means that good translation work should become increasingly important to the companies making anime. If error-prone translations becomes bad enoguh that it causes drops in viewership, a smart company would catch on and start taking translators more seriously, as doing otherwise would become deleterious to their bottom line. Of course, there are two problems here. The first is that it probably won't be easy to pinpoint the source of declining popularity with translation quality, and the second is that unless they have someone in-house who knows the language they're translating to (the don't have to know it well), they'll have no idea of the quality of the translation.
I think you need a lesson on English punctuation. Whether or not a comma is used before an open quotation mark (that is, a quotation mark that begins a quote or phrase) depends on if it is a full quote or not. If it's a full quote, it's not at the beginning of a sentence, and it is not integrated into the rest of the sentence, you use a comma. Otherwise, there is no comma. Example 1: As his body was about to give up, Groucho Marx said, "Die? Why, that's the last thing I'll do!" The comma is used here because those were two full sentences used as a quote. It comprises a complete thought. Example 2: That "Santa Claus" at the mall had the worst fake beard I ever saw. This is a special type of quote known as a "scare quote." It's not always used for scaring, of course, but it is the kind often use to describe surprise, emphasis, or sarcasm. (The use of quotation marks at the beginning of this paragraph is not a scare quote, but a use-mention distinction, which I'll get to below.) Commas are never used before scare quotes... Example 3: On the other hand, "unbreakable" safes can still be broken into. ...unless there would be a comma right before it, quotation marks or not. Commas are also not required before any sort of title unless, again, there would be a comma before it due to some other grammatical rule. Example 4 (Title of a story): The South Park episode "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy" had an original title of "Nice." Example 5 (Title of a person): Notorious French pirate Olivier "The Buzzard" Levasseur left behind buried treasure estimated at about US$1.6 billion. Here's where things get a bit murkier, and I think this is where you trip up the most. Commas are not used in use-mention distinctions. These are when you're using the word or words inside the quotation marks as an example or if you're using the word or words to refer to the words themselves rather than what they mean. Example 6: You must be careful not to confuse "rogue" with "rouge," for they mean two completely different things. Even murkier is if the quote is complete but very short. In this case, whether to use a comma or not is up to the person writing it. More often than not, they're not used because they break up the flow of the sentence. Example 7 (used): He said, "Okay" and went on his way. Example 8 (not used): Critics are raving about A Dad's Life! They're calling it "Outrageous!" and "Hilarious!" Not murky at all, however, is if the quote is within a sentence structured around the quote. You see this a lot in academic papers. When deciding what punctuation marks to use for these sentences, ignore the quotation marks entirely. Example 9: Charlie told me to "turn right on 5th Street, then left on Maple Avenue" to get to his office. Example 10: Even though Sun Tzu was a top military tactician, he still desired peace, saying that "[t]here is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." That's what I can think of at the moment. The idea remains, however, that if you are not fully aware of the rules of English, or in this case, you have an incorrect idea about the rules of English, you cannot really criticize someone else of making mistakes in English. What you perceive to be a mistake may in fact be totally correct. |
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