Forum - View topicAnswerman - Subtitle Hues and Cry
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Alan45
Village Elder
Posts: 9934 Location: Virginia |
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I get the impression that there is no anime series so reviled that someone won't come out and say it should be relicensed. Whether even that one person would buy it is another story.
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trilaan
Posts: 1064 Location: Texas |
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So, wait, I haven't bought the blu-rays or watched it on Toonami, did they completely change the amazingly creative Kill la Kill intertitles I fell in love with for the foreign market releases?
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2412 |
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I think a lot of the older fansubs really overdid the typesetting. That gif in the article certainly looked really nice, but largely the subs were flashy and needlessly distracting.
I don't think it is fair to expect absolute grammatical perfection for simulcast subs either. They don't really have much time to work on it. That said, I don't find it acceptable when I buy the bluray which does happen. I do get rather annoyed when a subtitle is just completely wrong. Localize it, keep it super literal, reverse the name order, I don't really care. Just completely missing the meaning for an entire line shouldn't be acceptable even if it is a rush. |
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penguintruth
Posts: 8488 Location: Penguinopolis |
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Call me old-fashioned, but I like the old, bold lined, yellow AnimEigo subtitles. I did enjoy that KLK fansub subtitle work, though, so I guess there's room for different styles.
Last edited by penguintruth on Fri Apr 24, 2015 4:59 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2636 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I'll agree with Justin's overall feeling on the idea of license rescues & the like. Just about every "obvious" title has more or less been rescued by now (minus some exceptions like Paranois Agent, as mentioned already), so at this point it comes down to the title that either have some sort of known fanbase to support it again, are simply very good and is worth re-releasing on that merit, or has as least one or two people within the industry that just really like it.
Going off of that, there are still some older anime that I wouldn't mind seeing back in print over here. OVAs like Bastard!!, Getter Robo Armageddon, Wicked City, TV series like Zipang, Virtua Fighter, Eat-Man (both of them), Ayakashi (Toei's horror anthology), movies like Barefoot Gen, etc. None of them are exactly big names among anime fans, but all of them are quality productions that I think could still find an audience over here in some way. In fact, I'm of the mind that there should be more rescues of infamous anime, including "So Bad It's Good" stuff. Discotek has tried that out by rescuing Mad Bull 34, & you can include Violence Jack, but that's really it. In other mediums, especially live-action movies, there's an obvious market for re-releasing older products that weren't exactly "good" but still have some sort of appeal to it, but that's more or less non-existent in anime. I'd love to see stuff like Crystal Triangle, Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned, Angel Cop, or even Garzey's Wing be rescued, as I either know how enjoyable bad they are or I at least know of their infamy & would love to watch them in a way that supports presently-existing companies. Hell, Kazé France even released Gundoh Musashi (one of the all-time worst anime) in Europe years ago, and I'll admit that I would honestly buy that if it had an American release, simply because I think people should know how bad it can truly get. |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5909 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I don't believe they changed the actual Japanese titles, but they didn't go with the equivalent font for the english subtitles, that the fan sub community did use. As shown in Justin's GIF. |
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walw6pK4Alo
Posts: 9322 |
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It's also on BD now, which is reason enough for me. |
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CoffeeFlux
Posts: 7 |
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OK, I do feel the need to defend myself here, because a certain degree of context was left out of the post. My major complaint isn't typesetting (though companies like Funimiation cannot complain about the technical limitations, since they hardsub), it's about basic knowledge of the English language. Certainly not every release, but some have clearly never seen someone that is fluent in English. These aren't typesetting errors, they're basic mistakes in English grammar that simply shouldn't happen. It's not too much to ask that they fix errors that I can find by skimming the script, and can have completely fixed within a few minutes. One big thing on my question was asking how these sorts of releases happen at all. And these happen from Episode 1, so there's no saying "they only had an hour to put this out." If you're wondering what I'm talking about, here's the examples I pointed out in the email: http://pastie.org/private/exai1n9oarzoi8rfncpvvw Please note that I found all this in one watching of the first five minutes of each release. Is my tone a bit caustic? Sure! There's no excuse for making mistakes that a middle-schooler could spot within a minute of looking at the script. I care far more about my simulcast scripts having seen an editor than I do that they're typeset properly. Of course, it goes without saying that I'd expect it on Blu-rays too. As far as nicer typesetting, I would like to see it on Blu-rays. While I understand the technical limitations of softsubbing, the BDs are functionally hardsubbed regardless, and if you're hardsubbing the typesetter could use industry tools like After Effects to accomplish the task. From talking with Justin, I understand the BDs are softsubbed to cater to a minority of customers that rip the original video with a hacked player. While fansubbers may be a minority (though I think the thousands of [torrent site name removed] episode downloads speaks otherwise), that's an even smaller crowd to cater to. Disagree with me? Hop on Rizon IRC, tweet me @coffeeflux2, or reply on here, I'd love to hear more opinions on the matter. edit: i've been told the "seraph of the end" was put in by the studio, apologies for the mistake, though the point still stands Last edited by CoffeeFlux on Fri Apr 24, 2015 6:12 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Kougeru
Posts: 5554 |
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On a streaming site, you can just hardsub the videos with great fonts and such with no issue. Blaming Flash is an excuse IMO. Most only have English anyway. MY biggest issue with a lot of legal subs is how many liberties they take. For example, in Kancolle there was a scene where two girls hugged and one of them said "you're hurting my arm." Except she didn't. She said "mune" which means chest. And she actually only said "My chest hurts". I listened to it as a play on words in Japanese, because spoiler[she was struggling with loss and was on the verge of tears.] By changing it to "arm" they completely destroyed that scene. This happens far more often than it should, I count at least twice per season. Even worse is this kinda crap makes it into official blurays/DVDs.
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Lynx Amali
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Zeo's on BD now? Daaaaaaamn. I might need to see if I can find it then. When did it come out? |
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Barbobot
Posts: 460 |
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If that was on the original stream from Crunchyroll when it first aired then it was just an error. You can go watch that scene right now streaming and it says chest and not arm. |
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jabashque
Posts: 7 |
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For what it's worth, "typesetting" in anime fansub groups now refers exclusively to just sign translation rendering. Dialogue "typesetting" is called "dialogue styling," and nowadays, groups go for readability (as in no stupid attack effects) because attack effects are now regarded as dumb. There are still certain groups where the timer (the one who times the sub) may screw around with the dialogue just for fun, but that rarely happens. Anime fansub groups nowadays tend to be very conservative with the dialogue subtitles. Like, for the Kill la Kill example posted in the article, the dialogue subtitles are all very normal and very professional-looking, not like a middle-schooler's PowerPoint presentation. The sign rendering, however, is on a very different level. Same thing with group logos. Grab a release nowadays and you'll no longer see a group logo anymore; those have been done away with a few years ago. Also, another thing to mention, thanks to recent technology, groups can now take less time to release fansubs of quality that would have required a week in the past. Sign translation rendering can be done separately from everything else, so often, if the show has an average number of signs, groups can still push subs out within a day because as I've said, they no longer do stupid attack fx. (for example, a certain group whose name starts with a "V" that did Amagi Brilliant Park usually took around 8-12 hours. The only time it took around 5 days for a release was when the translator was busy for that period of time. If you plan to check that out to see the product quality though, then be aware that there is another group whose names starts with an "A" that took "V"'s subs and claimed to fix the "numerous massive translation errors" when in reality, they made the subs worse. (think 2005 fansub quality)) Last edited by jabashque on Fri Apr 24, 2015 6:48 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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poonk
Posts: 1490 Location: In the Library with Philip |
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2412 |
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I see your point about the grammar, especially on a disc release, but I think it is within acceptable margins for a simulcast. I subscribe to watch simulcast anime because of the speed of release and convenience. Because of that speed, they can't really have much time to proof read the script so I think you need to let it slide. Now for a bluray, I'm paying for quality and therefore expect some one to not only check grammar and spelling but look for places to alter the wording to flow better. Your other points are really about translation and half of those are pointless. Some of those images clearly have some awkward wording that could be fixed. That said, actually going from the meaning to fluid sounding English without leaving anything out is the hard and time consuming part of translating. I think that you need to just ignore it to some degree when you're watching a speedsub. However, a lot of what you complain about is just different approaches to translation. Do you leave the XXX-onichan or XXX-senpai in there? Do you just pretend it was never there at all? Do you actually translate it? You're pretty much screwed either way. You do the first one and you get crap from those who rage if even the slightest japanese remains in their english release of a japanese show. You do the second one and you're leaving information out of your translation which is something you shouldn't do. You do the last one and now you have successfully removed all the japanese and you didn't leave out information contained in the original dialogue but are stuck with sentences that would never come out of the mouth of a native english speaker. Also, on your otherwise hidden gems, what is wrong about the translations for Shinoa's written note? Honestly, I can't see any better way to do that. The translation is spot on. In the first one you could argue that they could have put the subs under their respective lines, but that would clearly fall apart seconds later when the next lines show up without the space to keep doing that. |
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CoffeeFlux
Posts: 7 |
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Some of the releases are acceptable, some aren't. The two releases I highlighted cross the line in my opinion, since they have numerous blatant grammar mistakes, though most are within acceptable bounds.
Oh, I have no intention of wading into the honorifics debate. However, translating it as Upperclassman is silly, either nuke the honorifics or leave them in.
I don't understand, but if there's any confusion as to whether or not you can sub this nicely, Vivid made it very clear in their release (please note that this is very quick easy to do): http://a.pomf.se/gpfwok.webm Your point on giving speedsubs more leeway is largely valid, though. Thanks for the polite reply |
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