Forum - View topicThoughts on bootleg DVD's
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Ramen
 Posts: 346 Location: San Jose |
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I really wanted to see One Piece, but since it is not even licensed yet I don't have any hope of seeing it domestically anytime soon. So, I decided to go down to my local shop and rent it (yes, I got a bootleg <sigh>). My gawd, I cannot believe how much the translation sucks. There are whole portions of dialog missing from the translation. Anyone with rudimentary Japanese skill could notice that certain lines were just way off the mark. Its obvious that many people (who don't know much English) worked on the translation without any standards in place. They probably didn't even talk to each other. How many ways can you translate the main characters names anyway?!? I think my favorite was when the character "Usop" was translated as "Swindler Bu!" I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Anyway, just another reason to avoid bootlegs!
Actually, since bootlegs are not going to go away, I'm glad that they are so bad. It gives people incentive to get the real thing. Anyone else have a bad bootleg experience? |
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nagash
Posts: 280 |
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Actually, most of the bootlegs I have are pretty good on translation. I know that this site doesn't like to mention bootlegs but anime opened up only in the last few years where I live, so the only way to get it in the past was to find bootlegs.
There was a problem with one of the tapes from Inu-Yuusha. It really stunk because the guy had really been paying attention right up until that tape. An entire discussion was left untranslated. There was only one other problem. I'm not fluent in Japanese but I have rudimentary skills, so when I listen to Maison Ikkoku I can pick out certain things and the translations, although they do get the general meaning across, rarely match the actual content. This was not done by the same guy as above. |
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Ramen
Posts: 346 Location: San Jose |
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Oh, and when I am talking about bootlegs, I am talking about Hong Kong DVDs, not fansubs. Although fansubs are bootlegs as well, I at least have respect for fansubbers to a degree.
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adsfan00
Posts: 21 Location: Virginia Beach |
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The one and only bootleg DVD set I own is the Maison Ikkoku 10 disc one (If Viz ever gets off their keisters and releases it on DVD I will run right out and get it). The translation on this one isn't bad, but that's because they used the old arctic animation fansubs. I generally like to avoid bootlegs because it's illegal and one doesn't know where that money is going. However, I am NOT above borrowing the ones some of my buddies acquire and the Inuyasha DVD sets fall into that category. That particular set looks as though it was taken right off of TV. It even includes Kappei Yamaguchi touting the sponsors of the show near the end of the opening and closing credits. |
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nagash
Posts: 280 |
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Mine doesn't have any ads on it whatsoever. If it came off of television then they had crystal clear reception. Like I said, the translation was good enough to get the meaning across, but if you were looking for actual word for word then they came nowhere close.
For instance, so des, to me, is an emphatic YES! depending on the tone in which it is said. In the DVD set, so des was translated as yeah, true, yes, so it is, etc. If anything they translated it to everyday English so everyone could understand it. There were a couple of spots in those DVD's where the translation was not placed. The one that really ticked me off was when Godai is in Kyoko's parents apartment (he's in a suit) and he's describing the woman he loves to her parents without trying to give away that it's Kyoko. Whatever her father said in response, I did not get it as it is not translated on the DVD. |
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Slim Shinji
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 263 |
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The worst bootleg translation I've ever seen was for Giant Robo. Oh wait, I'm sorry, that's "Gaint Bobo".
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Ataru
 Posts: 2329 Location: Missouri (Strikeman) |
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*LOL* Silly fansubers. Well, I guilty of this crime as well by getting fansub of Inu Yasha, but once Viz start releasing it, it's going in my deep dark part of my collection that I won't watch anymore (Kimera is the main one in that collection.) 
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Cassandra
 Posts: 1356 Location: Birdsboro, PA |
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ROTFL!! My husband and his friends go around making fun of that all the time. That's always one of those things that I think no one else knows about then it turns out that everyone knows about it 
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Gai Super Napalm
 Posts: 148 Location: Hoboken, NJ |
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Stupid bootleg sucking =[ I saw that bootleg too, sooo terrible. Manga please hurry up and release Giant Bob.. Robo. |
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Case
Posts: 1016 |
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I've had either a 20% or 50% sucess rate with bootlegs, depending on how you want to look at it. I actually only own two bootleg DVD titles: The Cowboy Bebop movie (Knocking On Heaven's Door) and a boxset of the Noir TV series. (4 discs) The quality of the Cowboy Bebop translation actually surprised me. I have no formal education in Japanese, so I can't say exactly how accurate it is, but I can at least say that the subtitles make almost-perfect sense throught the film. The timing was a wee bit off in places, and a few lines of dialogue were skipped in a half dozen places due to the delay. Overall a decent job, though. Noir, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of thing that anti-piracy advocates warn you about. That is why I created the "Noir scripts" thread a while back. The subtitles (what I've seen of them so far) make absolutely no sense. One long line of dialogue in the first episode is subbed as "moreover", and another long line in the next episode is translated as "shift". The rest of the subbing follows in that same general pattern and doesn't unite into anything logical. It actually seems rather odd to me, because Noir mimics the French film noir style, and has very little dialogue as a result. Even though there are only... maybe 40 lines of dialogue in the first episode (for example), the bootlegger still managed to botch the translation. But I digress. 
I found English scripts for the first four episodes in Scriptclub.org's database, and they turned out to be totally different from the text included on the disc. Comparing the two, it seems like the bootlegger may not have done any actual translating at all. The subtitles are similar to the script's dialogue in a handful of places, but in many cases those could have been obtained by observing context clues, without going over the original dialogue at all. 
Indeed, the experience has only reinforced my stance against the darn things. ~_~
Absolutely. 
I usually have a hardline policy against them anyway. The only reason why I have the ones I do is because I couldn't handle the temptation. I was on vacation, I had all kinds of cash to blow, I had travelled halfway across a state by automobile to get to the shop that sold them, and with so many on the shelves I just couldn't seem to restrain myself. 
Never again, though. After this experience, I don't trust bootlegs enough to even be tempted by them. I'm going to save my money for the commercial translations that I know will at least be readable.
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GATSU
Posts: 15624 |
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On a side note, wtf is up with fans who tell industry people that they view fansubs?! One girl at the AX Ikuhara panel told him she saw fansubs, before asking her question, as if somehow she deserved respect for it because she said it was "non-profit". And someone on the I.G. forum was asking for a Memories fansub. It's sad that the next generation of fans is just a bunch of spoiled thieves, but I guess that's the way it has to go...
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nagash
Posts: 280 |
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Are those titles licensed, though? I don't know about you guys but all of the fansubs I've got were not received after they were licensed. The guy I go through is very good with keeping track of who owns what and will not release something that has been picked up by an American company.
As such I was watching Nadeisco 6 months before it came over here. I have the first 4 episodes of Houeshin, which I don't think will make the trip over here. Apocalypse of Devilman is another that won't make the trip over here (I don't even think Manga will touch that one with a 10 foot pole, so to speak). Love Hina 2 recently made the rounds, and while Pioneer owns Love Hina, they did not own LH2 at the time I found it. On the same note, when Bandai released Gundam on video, he pulled all of his copies of Gundam (all series that he had at the time). Same with DBZ and Sailor Moon. His fansubs, as a whole, are excellent. Only a couple of screw-ups here and there. The meaning comes through crystal clear. The quality of the picture is never bad. You can't ask for better. He does run into trouble on occassion, however. Furi Kuri made the rounds for a few months prior to being purchased by an American company. The only problem with those tapes are the point where there are more than one person speaking. There are 2 such points where 4 people are talking at the same time, very fast, and although he does show all 4 speakers words in different colors, they go by so fast that you have to pause it to read it. Not really his fault, though, as you can only show so much on a screen at any one time. |
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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The only bootleg I have is Cowboy Bebop. The video quality was perfect but the subtitles were terrible. They always said 'indeed' too much and they had horrible grammar. Instead of saying 'kill him' they would say 'killing him'. I watched most of the dub on Adult Swim and it was good. I've been meaning to buy the real DVDs but the limited edition box set sold out before I could afford it.
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ashram12
Posts: 86 |
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As many of you out there, I own fansubs. I usually don't like buying fansubs because it's so easy to get ripped off in the process. Besides, lately at the rate companies here have been licensing shows I'm starting to see it as a waste of money. Anyway...
Bad translations in fansubs were the least of my worries until I came across bootleg DVDs from Hong Kong. Of these DVDs, I've seen Yu yu Hakusho, Angel Sanctuary and Saint Seiya. All of the subtitles in these DVDs made no sense AT ALL. I mean, sure a couple of times you can decipher a meaning, but some sentences are just out of this world. So now, I make sure not to get these DVDs...unless I'm very desperate, like in the case of Saint Seiya (I'm SO surprised ADV picked it up, now I can end my suffering  )
What bothers me the most is that these DVDs are sold on ebay. It's pretty annoying to dig through 25 DVD listings and find only one legit copy. |
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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I know what you mean. There's some good deals on eBay but if you don't know what you're doing you'll get suckered into buying a bootleg. I wish eBay would do something about it. |
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