Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do Credits Only Sometimes Get Translated?
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belvadeer
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It's amazing how fans come up with some of the most petty and inane reasons for not buying U.S. releases of shows. Last edited by belvadeer on Mon Jun 11, 2018 11:29 am; edited 1 time in total |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5522 |
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It's one of those things where overall I don't think makes a difference, if you are watching the credits, then it is most likely for the song and/or animation. And if it is for the credits then it is easier to scroll down the white on black text.
A few years ago I went back and watched the ED for Pokemon, and i was surprised to learn that they only credited the English staff and then at the end gave a single staff credit to the director and OLM. |
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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I'm guessing an extra reason is that the best you can really do is as good as the original typesetting while the worst is closed-captions-box laziness, such that some fans have been burned by unsuccessful attempts. |
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DmonHiro
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I can't really imagine that translating credits does anything to sales numbers. I doubt many people even care. I know I don't. The director, the writer, the voices.... that's all I care about.
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belvadeer
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Personally, I have never heard any complaints aimed toward keeping the end credits "authentic" to the original. Is it possible these particular fans are just being ultra sensitive? As for the closed captions box, what releases have credit translations like that? I've never seen end credits translated that way. |
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Morry
Posts: 756 |
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Take this with a grain of salt, but I'm somehow not convinced anyone using translated credits as an excuse not to buy something wasn't planning on buying it anyway. Just a hunch.
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4660 |
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Personally, I prefer translated OP/ED since I think it looks nicer than just a bland credit roll afterwards. Although, that is at least preferable to what some do with saving the English credits until the end of the disc.
There seem to be a few factors that go into whether Funimation does it lately. If it's a Crunchyroll series from a while ago, then Funimation is mostly just a distributor. Timing and whether they even get materials is another. Episode 14 of Miss Kobayshi's Dragon Maid was licensed fairly close to the disc release, and it ended up being sub-only without translated credits. Three Leaves, Three Colors didn't have them, but it also didn't even have clean OP/ED in the extras, so I don't think Funi got the materials at all. Then again, Show By Rock 2 didn't have it, and they recorded English versions for all the songs. I think time and cost are the big factors of late. They are dubbing a bunch of content quickly, and as others have said, it's one of those things that probably doesn't make much difference regarding a purchase, so putting resources to something like that probably isn't as much of a priority now. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6902 Location: Kazune City |
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I can definitely see the case for leaving the original credits unaltered and adding a translated black-screen roll afterwards. That at least guarantees that we get video no worse than what Japanese TV/disc viewers got, and provides a fallback for Japanese readers in case the translated credits have omissions. Want to know who played Antarcticite in Land of the Lustrous? You'd better be able to recognize the voice, read Japanese, or look it up elsewhere! Some releases manage to veeerrryy slooooowly list out every English VA, director, writer, sound engineer, and production intern involved, while having little or no time to credit any Japanese VAs or production staff. Though I suppose those could be "licensor didn't provide the info" situations.
And sometimes, translated credits do create damage to the viewing experience, in ways more tangible than "loss of authenticity/Japaneseness." Releases that swap out the "paged" (as in "one group of text appears, then disappears to be replaced by another") kanji credits for an English credit scroll alter can cover more of the image and alter the artistic intent of ending videos. On the technical side, sometimes credit scrolls would run at a different framerate than the underlying animation, which introduces more video issues. Plus, hardcoding new text into images, whether paged or scrolled, runs the risk of adding compression artifacts. Especially when cramming 7 episodes on to DVDs. For awhile back in 2010-12, Funimation was going waaaay overboard to shoehorn translated credits in, even when they didn't have the proper creditless assets to do so. So we'd get releases that squeezed the video/JP credits to one side, (Ragnarok: The Animation), or freeze-framed an image (My Bride is a Mermaid), or added clumsy overlays (Sekirei), or shrunk the whole original video to the upper-left corner (Birdy the Mighty: Decode) to add English paged or scrolling credits. Birdy was an especially atrocious case, since the last episodes of each season had actual action/dialogue going on during the credits, instead of just the standard ED videos. I've never based a purchasing decision on whether credits are translated or not, but I sure as heck didn't buy any of the aforementioned releases that outright mangled the video in the name of adding translated credits. Fortunately, Funi has learned their lesson, and now uses black-screen scrolls when they don't have the right materials available. |
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Triltaison
 Posts: 798 |
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If you mean the general practice of putting a giant black square box over all sections of Japanese text on the credits or title cards and then putting English text over it, it doesn't happen very much anymore. I remember thar mostly being a thing with VHS releases of children's anime, particularly if the ending was just a slideshow of key art with text on the side. The ugly box would also often block out whatever art was being shown. If you mean more standard closed captioning at the bottom of the screen, they also aren't very common anymore. I'm not 100% certain on examples without double-checking, but I know I own a few of both kinds. They're both more of a thing in the VHS/LD era. |
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LostTL
Posts: 15 |
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Funi's Dragon Ball and DBZ releases are pretty bad for this*, not crediting any of the Japanese cast and leaving any non-localisation credits to the last two or three captions. Probably a lack of materials thing (they didn't even have all the ops/eds in the first pace), but as they listed the Japanese VAs in the booklet they could have listed the main cast at least. They squeeze the video (with JP credits) into the corner for a few of the movies too, and the video track shows the alternate English episode/movie name while the subs translate the Japanese narrator. I suspect this is an artefact of the original discs using multi-angle (or a totally different OP/ED depending on the language), where ignoring the Japanese side makes a but more sense.
GT's credits have all the JP info, and I assumed this was because they had the in-episode GT credits to translate, but I guess that's not the case. They supposedly even went to the trouble of painting out the Japanese text for the EDs where they weren't given a textless version, which left a few 'seams' in the final product. One Piece has everything translated, but uses an unfinished variant of the OP (when the official stream has the finished animation) on at least one occasion, and covers the animation with their alternate gold version of the logo for some reason. That kind of thing is annoying. * The Dragon Boxes, being the unaltered Japanese DVD transfer, were an exception |
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mrsatan
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 915 |
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I'd rather they just leave the credits alone.
It's a real drag when the 2-bit licensors try to do it themselves. Just yesterday I was trying to find more info for the encyclopedia for the obscure title Psychic Wars. Well, Manga video did their own credits for this one, and they are just riddled with mistakes. People and Companies' names are misromanized, misspelled, and job titles mistranslated. It's kind of useless. I don't know if this has stopped or not, but there were certain companies that would credit absolutely every one of their employees that may have looked in the direction of the anime.... and if there was a little room left, maybe credit one or two Japanese people. |
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K.o.R
 Posts: 224 |
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Remember when Funimation used to do multi-angle on their DVDs, with the JP or EN credits showing depending on which audio track you had selected? ADV also did that with the Happy Lesson OAV, as the cast was included in the intro credits.
Or what about Animeigo's You're Under Arrest DVDs, where both sets of credits (and in fact the series logo) were actually DVD subtitles? Yeah, the atrocious resolution didn't work so well there but, if you don't need fancy fades or scrolling, you could totally do an acceptable job with BD subs. |
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MoonPhase1
Posts: 501 |
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Some don’t get translated at all like the recent Sailor Moon Blu-rays. Not even just English Credits for the English Dub.
Sometimes I will like see English Credits in the OP/ED songs like on Toonami but Japanese text for the credits on the Blu-ray and DVD like Hunter x Hunter, Akame ga Kill and Parasyte. JoJo On Toonami just has that 3 seconds English Credits that comes after the Closing song. I’ve been a fan of Anime for many years, so i’m still not used to seeing all of these shows with their unreadable credits that I don’t understand for not being able to read Japanese and a English credit scroller after the Japanese one just seems tacky. Some releases put the English credits as an Extra. |
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horseradish
 SubscriberPosts: 574 Location: Bay Area |
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Last edited by horseradish on Wed Apr 28, 2021 1:19 am; edited 1 time in total |
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SnowWarren
Posts: 277 |
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I agree with this. It's an English release so put it in English. Kanji tells me nothing. |
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