Forum - View topicWhat are the worst subtitles you have ever witnessed?
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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But I did see a ToraDora! sub that had "Note: Tenori means top of palm" or something to that effect, with "Tenori Taiga" being left in the subtitles. That's about on the same level as "keikaku means plan." See here for more...interesting examples. @dtm42: That doesn't quite count as a real subtitle, though -- you technically aren't supposed to see part inside the {braces}, but it shows up when using VLC or some other player that doesn't parse things correctly. @ikillchicken: According to this, the line's a play on the stock phrase "He wouldn't die even if you killed him," but I can't find anything to support that within the context of the episode. However, "People die if they are killed" does make sense in the context of the series, since Shiro's talking about his "condition" that allowed him to survive what would've normally killed him on several occasions. In giving up the origin of his condition, he's returning things to, as he says in the next line, "the way things should be." Namely, that people die when they're killed. Certainly makes more sense than the official sub, "If people are badly injured, they die." What, no modern medical technology or surgery can save people who are badly injured? And "badly" is pretty vague when talking about degree of injury. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Thankyou for that website, Zalis116. It was a great read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I do think some of those had to have been either joke images or intentionally done in a humourous way by the translators. I mean come on, translating "moo" into "moo"; was the translator smoking pot or something?
Oh, and by the way, I downloaded CCCP, so I don't get those messages anymore. It does make me sad though; what other hilarious lines am I missing? Edit: Whoops, forgot to put Zalis116 in bold. Last edited by dtm42 on Wed Nov 26, 2008 10:35 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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dAngel
 Posts: 23 |
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Yeah, I'm currently watching a series and for some reason words keep showing up without spaces in-between them. The fansub in question has proper punctuation and spelling otherwise, so I find it hard to believe the subbers really made that many obvious typos throughout the series. I'm not sure. It's not terribly difficult to read, but it's still kind of annoying. I have been using VLC so maybe it's not the fansubber's fault. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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As an aside to dAngel, I would advise downloading CCCP. I was using VLC Media Player for files other than avi, and I was frequently frustrated with the poor subtitling (in terms of size, colour and placement, not necessarily translation). CCCP is free, easy to use (even I managed to get it working without tech support or any trouble), and works great. What's more, many fansub groups actually support it, which means they encode with CCCP specifically in mind.
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supersaiyan4elby
 Posts: 10 Location: Mississippi |
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I wasnt saying it was inaccurate  i was meaning either bad subbing on whoevers part or subs that are so literal and good that they sound kind of silly when put straight out in english.
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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Agree with you there that "people die when they are killed" actually makes more sense given the context -- emphasizing the point they should die when someone apparently does not. But as for Tenori Taiga I personally prefer leaving it as is since it's treated more like a nickname and not an actual grammatical phrase. We don't translate people's name even when the names have their own meanings (practically everyone's), just like we don't say "The city of angels" for Los Angeles, so Tenori Taiga makes sense to me. Although I'll admit "Palmtop Tiger" sounds pretty good in this case too
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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In Read Or Die TV, there's a scene where the Joker greets one of the girls on the phone by way of "gokurousama.. " (implying the assignment she had previously completed). The Geneon subs translated that as "Hello" ..
I think the TL simply fell asleep at the wheel here. I can't imagine either fansub or official subber making that mistake.
I bought the official R1 Phoenix DVDs not long ago (man Vol 2. was hard to find) although I haven't watched them yet so I can't compare between the official subs and real fansubs. I say "real" fansubs because I have got to presume you're referring to some HongKong/Chinese Eng subs... Froth-Bite's fansubs might have some nits but it's definitely not like that. I know you're talking about "import dvds" (lol) but I mentioned F-B subs because sometimes overseas bootlegers use fansubs to claim english subtitles on their dvds. |
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IfLi
Posts: 2 |
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Kodomo no Omocha complete series on dvd.
it was a ridiculous bargain price for an entire series and it showed in the subtitles, seemed like every other episode was subtitled by different people with different levels of english >D |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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If it reads like a bootleg and is priced like a bootleg, it probably is a bootleg. |
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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I'd've posted the classic "mass naked children" image, but I see it is in the gallery Zalis linked. Of course, nothing beats Backstroke of the West, but that's getting off topic.
One of my first anime purchases was the complete CCS on what I later ralised was bootlegs and the one thing I remember from the subs (other than the language in general being quite quaint) was that at one point Touya says thank you (sankyuu) in English, and it was reverse rendered as "arigatou" in the subs. I think the worst professional subtitles I have are those on the R2J version of Brave Story which read like a dubtitle - I thought it odd at the time as no dub existed and now that I have a copy of the dub they are nothing alike anyway - I posted an example here:
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FLMikeATT
 Posts: 58 |
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The worst fansubs I've ever seen are my old bootleg Yu Yu Hakusho dvds. It was quite some years back before anime exploded and fansubs were free on the internet. I originally got some kickass fansubs from a company named "Kodocha", but I believe they went out of business around episode 40 or so, so I ordered the complete series subbed from a sketchy website. They turned out to be really badly subbed from China or Hong Kong.
I don't have any picture examples, but the sentences were really badly worded and they would always call Hiei 'Kurama' and Kurama 'Hiei'. I could get the gist of what was being said, but it was pretty painful. I didn't care too much as I was still pretty young, but I tried watching them again about a year ago and I couldn't get into it, even though YYH is easily one of my top 5 favorite anime series. |
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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Another 'legit' example comes to mind - I have the R3 version of Gatekeepers 21 and the English subs are truly dire. They seem to have translated from Japanese > Chinese > English via the scripts without once actually listening to the dialog - you know there's something wrong when the characters are speaking Engrish and the subs say something completely different (how hard can "open the gate" be? They seemed to use something different every time it came up, like "open the door to the alien world" or something).
I know some fansubbers similarly for some reason rely on Chinese speedsubs for their English speedsubs. I believe Ch***ro do and if they don't, they really need some other good excuse for making errors even I can spot.  
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abunai
Old Regular
 Posts: 5463 Location: 露命 |
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It's an excellent example of a less-than-sufficiently competent translator, making the amateurish mistake of a too-literal translation. The original Japanese is 未来人 (miraijin, "future person/people"), which is generally used in the sense of "time traveller" -- because when else are you going to get people from the future, except through time travel, yes? The word for "esper" used in SHnY / TMoHS is also idiomatic, with an odd literal meaning: 超能力者 (chounouryokusha, "person with super mental abilities"). Direct translation of terms often produces nonsensical results. Recently, Harvard Prof. Laurence Tribe, speaking about the military tribunals at Guantanamo, called them "kangaroo courts". When this English idiom was translated by the wire services here in Denmark for use by the Danish press, the phrase was translated literally, kængururet ("a court of kangaroos", alternately "a dish made from kangaroo") not by meaning, skueproces (= a phony court where the legal process is a façade, and the verdict is predetermined). Of course, the newspapers didn't bother to read the wires carefully enough, and even if they had seen the mistake, they probably wouldn't have been skilled enough to recognise that it was a mistake. Amateurish. - abunai |
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AndrewIsAzn
 Posts: 19 Location: Tokyo, CA |
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I remember when I was watching Persona Trinity Soul someone had subbed it as a joke. I had no idea what was going on when they started talking about sex changes and what not. I didn't realize that it was a joke sub until i was like 5 minutes into the episode
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Zalis116
Moderator
Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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 To get an idea of what I'm talking about...my Haruhi DVDs are out on loan right now so I can't take any screenshots. But take a look at this shot from Kannazuki no Miko, which uses the same subtitle style used in Haruhi:
(Btw, guess who wrote that brilliantly Engrish line in KnM? I'll give you a hint, he also wrote subtitles about future men and divine men.) Now take a look at this shot from Scrapped Princess, also from Bandai / Bang Zoom! : 
Much more reasonable size, and I'd wager that if that style were used for Haruhi, there wouldn't be as many unfavorable comparisons made to the fansubs. |
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