Forum - View topicAnswerman - Subtitle Hues and Cry
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Banken
Posts: 1281 |
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I am a professional translator, and frankly manga/anime translation companies don't pay enough to get professionals do the work, so that's why simulcast subtitles have terrible translations.
Funimation's Intial D Fourth Stage subs are some of the worst "professional" subs I've seen. Not quite Mass Naked Child Events, but still bad. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1008 |
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Except that the Japanese is not "presented in a way that one sentence is supposed to naturally flow into the next." Even though there was a period there, those are not considered grammatical complete sentences in Japanese according to prescriptive grammar as taught in Japanese schools to Japanese. There are written sentence fragments similar to how one might speak (or write informally, poetically, or classically, since all prescriptive language rules tend to be violated in practice-- note that similar "sentence fragments" are not that unusual in English practice.) I really don't know what you're saying about the translation as performed "coming off as choppy." I actually find the English much less choppy than a translation of "I [am] X. [I] am a soldier from Y," which is apparently what you would prefer. (I will grant that there's actually a case for making the English choppy in this case, since the Japanese is arguably choppy.) The translation as presented is to my mind superior to using two sentences. It succeeds as a translation, and what you are proposing strikes me as choppy and ignorant of either English, Japanese, or both. |
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2407 |
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But as you said, even if that is not how it is taught in schools, it does get used that way informally. The first two lines (those in question) are clearly meant to be informal between classmates. The last line isn't. You should be able to see a clear difference. I don't even see how that is relevant at all. A translator's job is not to fix the grammer in the original japanese so whether or not the first two sentences are technically grammatically correct japanese or not doesn't matter. Grammatically correct or not, those are two distinct and separate sentences with absolutely no indication they should be flowing together fluidly as if it were a single one.
No, I'm saying combining it into one sentence is indeed less choppy. If the japanese was presented in a way that was originally suppose to flow together, you could use choppy english as a reasonable justification to combine the sentences. Here though the japanese is clearly separated and not intended to flow together. So you are not maintaining the original intent by combining them. There is no reasonable justification to do so.
And what you are saying is suggesting ignorance of the difference between a summary and a translation. You're certainly allowed to decide for yourself which one you find superior. However, one is a translation and the other is simply not. |
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Banken
Posts: 1281 |
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An ideal translation should have the same equivalent feeling of the original... but sometimes you have to summarize because subtitles need to be easily read. That's why truly professional subtitles are often much less direct translations than fan subs are. You can't possibly transmit every single linguistic nuance and make it sound natural in the other language.
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leafy sea dragon
![]() Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I can't help but feel that in these cases, the translator is someone who's native to Japan and has studied English rather than the other way around. That is, to get the translations out as quickly as possible, the optimal place for a translator to be is at the Japanese studio where the show is made, and the easiest way to obtain a translator is to get one from nearby. Hence, if the grammatical mistakes really are that bad, perhaps it's due to the translator not having the level of knowledge of English to appear fluent.
I don't know any Japanese whatsoever, but the dialogue comes across as fluid and natural. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Those are the things I think subtitlers should strive for as well: Be easy to read quickly while not being too conspicuous. That being said, my eyes will automatically be drawn to any text so I read it, sometimes repeatedly if it lingers around for too long. Hence, subtitles at the bottom of the screen tends to turn into big distractions for me, and I prefer watching dubs for that reason.
Either possibility can be immersion-breaking in different ways. Hearing what is clearly someone's name but the subtitle reads something different can indeed be jarring, but at the same time, the dialogue could sound unnatural if someone's being called by their family name where in English-speaking cultures they'd use their given name. I know in Japanese culture, family names are used in a far greater variety of settings than given names, though I think that if you're going to make a translation, it should be comprehensible even to someone with absolutely no knowledge of Japanese culture. In cases like these, they may think that everyone winds up being addressed like Cartman, which WAS quite jarring and thus immersion-breaking for me before I got used to it.
Sounds particularly humiliating to be fired from a fansubbing group, as it is essentially a volunteer organization.
Do you know how it's done on a Mac? I never figured it out. I can get – and —, but not the long em-dash.
That was the only thing Shinoa wrote on that page, and it doesn't seem like she's going to write anything more on that page. Having two halves of a sentence on separate lines looks just fine to me in that kind of context, considering when I use a sheet of paper in a notebook to write one statement to show to someone else, I just flat-out ignore those horizontal lines altogether. There's no rule about a statement having to go from one side of the paper to the other. (Again, I have no knowledge of the Japanese language, so I'm saying this strictly from a "Does this sound natural?" stance.) |
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doc-watson42
Encyclopedia Editor
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So "bumblebee subs" are subtitles that are yellow with black outlines? |
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jymmy
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... which isn't many: entirely manga, and in the past few years, since learning what a dash actually was, increasingly unofficial English-translated releases and the original Japanese versions. I'll sure notice it now, although, as my next paragraph elaborates, I don't think it's the same thing in comics.
I originally stared this sentence with "I believe", but I removed it in respect of your including no qualifier: You're conflating typesetting, specifically, it seems, American (probably other countries' as well) comic book lettering, with written English. Anime subtitles are this, not a visual art form. Avenir Black has the correct character, so unless there's a technical limitation somewhere along the line – and, as I've pointed out, Crunchyroll has no problem with this despite not burning their subtitles into the video – I see no reason not to use the correct punctuation mark. I've done some light research in between getting food and writing this post, and I've found no reference to this being an alternate style whatsoever. The Wikipedia article on the dash observes that two hyphens were used to represent an em-dash with typewriters, as this was not possible at the time. It's referred me to these two articles, which observe that it is a hangover in comic book lettering, likely resulting from lack of knowledge on the part of the letters themselves and/or typewriter limitations in the early days. From what I understand, it is practice in comic book lettering alone, which I can accept as I understand the text in comic book panels is stylised. The sheer quantity of bolded text has always bugged me, but I've made my peace with that, as you seem to have with your Q example. I'd be interested to see a citation that "broken-line dash" is a legitimate variation – looking it up with that word combination's given me no love, sadly – but beyond that I'm not sure there's much point continuing this conversation. |
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enurtsol
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It's also a matter of time and resource management.
There are now a lot more shows, but still few companies to work on them. Professional subbers only have a limited time to work on a project, then they have to move on to another project given by the company - they can't focus too much on a project to the detriment of another project; sometimes the decision is not up to them. A company can only put so much resources on a project that they have to move on to something else, or risk money loss and consumer wrath for not doing enough projects in a timely manner. Fansubbers can take as much time as they want; they don't have to worry about other projects if they don't want to (there are other fansub groups to do those); it's up to them how much time and resources to dedicate on a project (they don't have to answer to a boss or even to the "consumers"); they generally only choose work on titles they prefer or quite familiar with. Some particular workers working on a project may only be doing that project or just a few, so they can dedicate their life only for that project; they don't have to move on to something else. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1008 |
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I'm sorry, but the translation maintains the original intent and meaning. The Japanese given is a natural way of speaking, and the English is also natural and conveys the meaning precisely. Both are idiomatic expressions of precisely the same meaning in a similar amount of space; the English is neither a summary nor a paraphrase. Not intended to flow together? How much Japanese do you know? There are cases in Japanese where, for example, からだ appears at the end of a sentence and not only refers to a previous sentence, but refers to the previous paragraph in a way that you would absolutely never do it in English. "Never trust Japanese paragraphing (or punctuation) to work as it does in English." (Rubin, Jay. Making Sense of Japanese. New York: Kodansha, 1998. p. 79) You are ignorant of what translation is. You have already indicated that you understand that when Japanese prefers a very long sentence with many clauses that would sound unidiomatic you would split it up into multiple sentences. There is no difference in finding the most idiomatic and natural English expression here. You are free to prefer whatever you like, and there's many tastes out there, but it's absurd to call it anything other than a natural translation. If it were translated with a semicolon and two independent clauses (I'm X; I'm a solider from Y) would you also complain, even though Japanese doesn't have semicolons (outside of 5pb.)? It is obvious from the Japanese that the second sentence, containing only the noun phase and the copula, flows back and refers to the first sentence. In Japanese a subject or topic is not always necessary, and is omitted in the second sentence, but if you make it two separate sentences in English, you must add an explicit subject (to fulfill standard grammatical requirements). From an equally arbitrary way of looking at is as your "number of sentences" viewpoint, the original Japanese contains only one instance of the word "I" and only one instance of the copula; the translation with the appositive actually matches the number and presence of grammatical elements in the Japanese perfectly if that's all you're looking at, whereas any two sentence translation does not. I would not suggest analyzing the translation from that point of view (not least because subjects and topics are not necessary when understood in Japanese, pronouns are used much more rarely, and some linguists argue that Japanese does not properly speaking have pronouns at all), but neither would I suggest using the "number of sentences" point of view. You argue that it's jarring to hear a family name when the subtitles a given name is spoken, and argue that it's jarring to see two sentences translated as one; I understand that (though in the former case, nothing is perfect since using the family name in English would give a very different connotation in many situations), but why is it not jarring for you to see that a linking verb is omitted but not have the verb omitted in the translation? Why is it not jarring for you to see the subject or topic omitted but not in the translation? The answer is because they are different languages, so the natural syntax and semantics is different. The answer for many is also because the name issue and the number of sentences is apparent to listeners with little or indeed no Japanese knowledge, whereas other inevitable compromises require more Japanese to notice. While beginning learners of Japanese start with the complaints you mention when seeing subtitled shows, they quickly find more and more things to complain about. For example, there are quite a lot of Japanese sentences where the word order is nearly reversed from what it would be in English; sometimes these can work in that order in English, but other times it sounds too affected. (Sometimes the confusion of not knowing what verb is coming is intentional in Japanese, and difficult to translate.) The responses to negative questions are generally reversed as compared to English. Et cetera. |
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Kadmos1
![]() Posts: 13586 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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I think that when Funi has all these recent licenses, that does push back the expected release date of a certain show they licensed a year ago longer than need be.
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nargun
Posts: 929 |
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The second one is the em dash [as wide as an M, see; in old-school fonts, the width of the capital em was pretty much the same as the point size of the type]. From memory there are unicode code points for two- and three-em dashes, but real-world you just put down multiple em dashes next to each other, in most fonts they'll be designed to join together pretty seamlessly. [this is what they did in the metal-type days] [/quote] |
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leafy sea dragon
![]() Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Ah, okay. I thought the em-dash was longer than that one. (And for the record, I got that character by holding down Shift and Alt, then pressing the hyphen key.)
There is a Special Characters menu, but it's cumbersome. It takes a few seconds to load (even on my computer, which I got in 2014). You then have to type the name of the symbol you want, then drag it into the text where you want it. Hence, knowing that there's a keyboard shortcut is quite valuable. By the way, I use the double-hyphen all the time--no one's ever given me any heat about it. I've always considered the double-hyphen and the em-dash functionally the same, and this is the first time I've heard anybody feel bugged about it. |
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Polycell
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The only subtitles I remember bogging down my computer(quadcore Phenom II from 2011) were Ro-Kyu-bu! subs that felt the need to edit out the Japanese text on signs and replace it with the English instead of just subbing it(that truly made me appreciate the fact that ASS is frickin' powerful). I've never seen anything as crazy before or since, though.
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MorwenLaicoriel
![]() Posts: 1617 Location: Colorado |
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Speaking about license rescues, I recently rewatched Star Driver (along with my husband, who was seeing it for the first time) and we both LOVE that series. I actually looked around online to see if it had ever come back out after we finished, because I never had a chance to buy it before Bandai Visual went down and I really, really want to own that series. I'm majorly disappointed it still isn't picked up, although I guess it probably didn't do as well as people were hoping (although I can't help but wonder if Bandai's closing around the time they released the blu-rays had something to do with it).
Still, Star Driver's continued lack of license isn't nearly as egregious as stuff like Paranoia Agent, Azumanga Daioh, or Wolf's Rain. ESPECIALLY Paranoia Agent, I'm so thankful I bought that series before Geneon went away. |
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CeruleanDragon
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I actually wasn't aware that RahXephon hadn't been re-released. I never bought the show but noticed that it was up for streaming on Hulu the other day. I always enjoyed that one and would buy it if it ever got another release. A nice Blu-ray release would be good.
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