Subbing peeves

I'd like to see the translator's notes that take up half the screen that you guys are talking about, because I've never seen anything like that. The most translator's notes I've ever seen is a sentence or two.

edited 9th Mar '11 9:43:10 PM by DonZabu

Not literally half the screen...but it's still pretty needless

A lot of these complaints are really incredibly rare issues.

Really, the only group that does any of this egregiously now is TV-Nihon, and most people never encounter their stuff, since they tend to be really niche, or the slowest group doing some other show (have they even finshed Heartcatch yet?)

The only time you'll see a half-screen TL note nowadays is if some group is being "Ironic", or attempting to be funny.

Dammnit to hell, can't hotlink in TV Tropes.

Click this.◊

edited 9th Mar '11 9:50:11 PM by Signed

That falls under the "attempting to be funny" I mentioned earlier.

Anyway, this is why Aegisub is free to download. Its not hard to fix stuff like that.

Those attempting to be funny in that way should be shot.

edited 9th Mar '11 9:56:13 PM by Aondeug

Before or after the demise of the kitten?

After. I want them to see it and know what horrible people they truly are.

edited 9th Mar '11 10:07:41 PM by Aondeug

Depends on the joke really. I mean if its Trans-Graham I can tolerate sometimes even like. But that above yes shoot them.

I generally prefer that fansub groups avoid trying to be clever to begin with. Far too many think they are hot shit *cough*gg*cough*, and have gathered a large number of fanboys who will defend whatever bullshit moves they pull.

Speaking of which, aren't we about due for a gg Rage Quit? Its been a year or so since the last one, and there's not enough fansub drama right now.

Ggsubs are the guys translating Madoka Magica, right? I have no complains at all for those guys.

And while there certainly are bad fansubs, it is not as if they are all bad, or that their faults are intolerable. Please keep in mind that for these people, it's a hobby. They are providing us with a means to enjoy our favourite series without having to actually learn Japanese ourselves. For free.

Now, I don't actually know anything about it, but I'm pretty sure that for each episode you watch, several people have been working for hours. If you don't like the result, find a different fansubber, or post some constructive criticism on their forum. But I do not think you (plural) have the right to complain like this.

edited 9th Mar '11 10:54:00 PM by Kayeka

I have plenty right to complain. Being something free that someone made because they have a hobby doesn't exempt you from criticism or whiny bitchery. Nothing in this world does. Is it useless from a practical perspective? Certainly. It's damn cathartic though and I will indulge happily in my bitching.

Especially if it's Nozomi's Mari Mite subs. Seriously. Yamayuri lily. Yamayuri council. You people should know better. I love the fuck out of that job, but god damn. YAMAYURI LILY.

A yamayuri lily in all its redundant glory.

edited 9th Mar '11 11:02:33 PM by Aondeug

^ Having not seen Mari Mite and out of curiosity, can you elaborate? I don't really get what's redundant about the term "Yamayuri lily"...?

I can assume you mean Maria-sama Ga Miteru? and isnt Yamayurikai used everywhere? (Its used everywhere on the works page too)

edited 9th Mar '11 11:12:51 PM by Raso

Yamayuri lily if translated completely means mountain lily lily. The sensible solution used by the fansubbers and fan translators of the manga and light novels is mountain lily. The job is otherwise very damn well done. Probably my favorite sub job. There's odd little things like this that bug me. Yamayuri Council bothers me because I think it sounds funny. Yamayurikai or Mountain Lily Council tend to be what the fans used.

The big question is really "What makes a good or bad translation?" I've come to suspect that an ideal translation would treat the work's original form as a translation itself — a translation of abstract concepts into the writer's native language. I don't know if I know enough about semiotics to express myself clearly here, but I hope you get the idea. I haven't done that much fiction writing, but it does seem like I'm translating what's in my head into English prose and dialogue.

Taking this approach to translation, you're not translating the words of the original dialogue so much as you're translating the content they express. A new set of signifiers for the signified, as opposed to signifiers representing the original signifiers. Take the name of the cardboard robot from Yotsuba&! — the key to the joke, which any Japanese reader would see at the first glance, is that it was made up on the spot out of the words that describe it. In the Japanese, this comes out as "Danbo." In the first commercial English translation, it became "Cardbo," to preserve the important thing — the joke, not the consonants and vowels of the name. (I would've gone even further and called it "Cardbot.") In one language, "very rude insult regarding a bowl of soup's taste" translates to something that can be represented in English as "This soup tastes like water;" in another, it translates to "This soup tastes like donkey piss." "Name of a bird that swims and quacks" can become "Ente," "Ahiru," or "Duck."

"The killer is THAT PERSON!"

It's almost like a Cargo Cult sometimes.

Hey, what can you expect from a 1995 format? (Actually, is Blu-ray really much better? I've got basically no experience with it.)

Probably the same problem as manga — poorly paid low-skill translators recruited to compete with volunteer amateur translations that many viewers have come to prefer. (Not always a whole lot of proofreading, either.) Actually, in the case of Fractale, I prefer the UTW translation to Funimation's in at least one respect: "love" and "hate" work better than "like/liking" and "dislike/disliking." Thus, Nessa hates hate and loves love, whereas Phryne hates love and all too many people on the Internet seem to love hate.

There's a good point there. If you want to know what the Japanese meant, the best way is to learn Japanese. If you want the "authentic experience," then you're out of luck, because Japanese viewers grew up in a cultural background you don't have, and they all have their own individual readings anyway. "Just adding water," as Hofstadter might say.

When I watch a translated anime, I want a translation with well-written dialogue (by the same standards one would judge native-English dialogue by) that accurately portrays the characters and the story. That's what's important.

I like that suffix, actually. Fills a nice little grammatical niche. Under the right circumstances, I could even see it being adopted by English as a loanword. (Though admittedly, nouns are absorbed much easier than suffixes.)

Huh? How does that come from excessive rewriting? Was the dialogue in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door stilted?

The only translation group I can think of doing that is a.f.k. And while my preferred style leans more toward the liberal end than a lot of anime fans', I see no reason to change the word "pachinko" as long as it's presented in a way that wouldn't confuse someone unfamiliar with it. (For instance, an average American watching the Funimation dub of Summer Wars doesn't need to know anything about {H|h}anafuda that isn't in there.)

We may not be watching the same fansubs.

To make the script work better, just like everything the original writer did while tinkering with the dialogue.

Uh...what?

FLCL is still itself regardless of the specific soft drinks and rock bands referenced. It doesn't stop being Japanese in origin or lose the qualities that make it worth watching, or even lose the markers of its nation of origin.

Seriously, I'm lost on this point. I didn't go to see Summer Wars because it was Japanese (it was kinda Hollywood really), but because it was reportedly really good. And it didn't become any less so due to liberties taken with the dialogue. (One altered line, "Please tell me you didn't break the Internet," probably got more laughs that night than any other.) Ghost in the Shell doesn't lose some magical quality of Japanese-ness by not being called Kokaku Kidotai, and...well, I honestly can't see how any such dialogue changes compromise the fundamental strengths of the medium.

Tell me, how would changes to the jokes and references in Reborn! (done for the purpose of making the viewer laugh when the Japanese viewer would laugh) make it "the exact same show" as Generator Rex? The differences between American and Japanese cartoons, or even individual works in the same category, are far too large to be eliminated by changes on the level we're talking.

...

Matt Thorn was right when he said "They cannot see the forest for the trees." No TV show worth watching is nothing more than a blob of jokes and pop-culture references, not even Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. Consider even the most extreme case imaginable, Samurai Pizza Cats. It was still different from the American cartoons around it, even with the entire original set of scripts thrown out. If you watched Black Lagoon muted with no subtitles, it would still be different from any American cartoon or live-action TV show or movie.

So...what, every work of fiction with a 1930s USA setting is interchangeable? Despite, oh, everything else that makes Baccano! what it is? Characters, Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, alchemy, immortals?

Speak for yourself. Besides, that particular category has some specific complaints regarding the means of selling the audience on characters.

'Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.'

Wait a sec, I distinctly remember the translations I downloaded translated the robot's name as Danbo rather than Carbo...

Edit: So, I was thinking, and I've come to the realization that the main reason why I prefer the Formal Equivalence Translation Style is that I have a strong aversion to allowing others to mediate my understanding of things, and when it's absolutely necessary, prefer it be kept to a minimum. This is probably just me, but I'd actually prefer to seek out the necessary context on my own than have someone else's interpretation of it spoon fed to me.

edited 10th Mar '11 1:10:30 AM by Taelor

It was either a fan translation or the second official one, then. (ADV had it first, now Yen Press does.)

I disagree that translations should necessarily be 100% accessible to anyone who's never encountered anime before. Thats fine for some things, but goddammit, I don't want to be talked down to. I enjoy my niche Japanese Cartoons, and I don't want people changing things because other people are too lazy to learn something about the culture.

I'm with you there. If there's one thing I don't like, it's someone else deciding for me what the appropriate meaning is supposed to be. If someone's using a foreign idiom, I want to hear that idiom and learn it, rather than hear a native idiom that some guy somewhere thought was kind of close to the same meaning.

Frankly, I couldn't care less whether or not the dialog "flows naturally" unless it's supposed to be a point in the show that it doesn't. I guess I'm stuck in an "interpretation" mindset. I know that it must make some kind of sense, so I'm gonna find that sense buried in there somewhere, translation be damned.

That said, the only thing I find annoying in fansubs is when they include honorifics but use the wrong honorifics, which happens surprisingly often. I mean, when the character clearly says "-san" but the subs say "-chan", usually because every other character calls that person -chan. That makes me want to throttle someone.

edited 10th Mar '11 1:31:48 AM by Clarste

@Eternal September: I disagree - I thought that professionalism implies that you will be straight to the point. Notice how you never submit your thesis papers with weird fonts? It's the same idea. While I do agree that he has no sliding scale, at least he offers good points that sadly subbers nowadays fail.

I'm of the side that puns should be translated and given TL notes, but if the notes become too long, package them in a pdf along with the mkv.

Uh...isn't that what a translator does? Never mind that, what are the "things" in this context? Stories? Characters? Words?

This, of course, depends on the material. A lot of Americans who saw Spirited Away weren't at all familiar with anime, and it would've been irresponsible for the translator not to take that into account. Hayate The Combat Butler or Excel Saga, on the other hand, are almost exclusively watched by people who watch anime as a hobby.

On the other foot, think about a window that you're looking out through. Sure, stained-glass windows are pretty, but if you want to see what's beyond the window, decreasing its transparency just gets in the way.

Nobody said anything about talking down to anyone.

Ah, yes. Of course the social hierarchy where you just have to make sure you're above "Those Stupid People" comes into play, and if you're not in a position to sneer at the masses, then someone else must be sneering at you.

That's called a "writer."

If you want to learn the foreign idioms, learn the foreign language. They're not part of this language, by definition. And by the way, if you don't want anything to be filtered through anything "some guy somewhere thought"...why are you even consuming fiction?

And again, you're missing the point of dynamic equivalence. It's not about looking at the idiom in isolation and thinking "okay, what's something sort of like this?" It's about looking at everything going on — the person speaking, the person being spoken to, the circumstances, the information meant to be transmitted — and figuring out how to do with the target language what the original writer did with the source language. (If you're lucky, you might be able to consult said writer.)

It'd help a lot if we could get a professional translator in here. Otherwise, these arguments tend to lead to fighting strawmen.

So you actually don't know or care about any difference between good writing and bad writing? That's a shame.

It doesn't have to be buried as deep as it often is. A bad translation makes the reader expend more mental effort than necessary to process dialogue, which negatively impacts the rest of the experience, plus it becomes less enjoyable to read/watch, just like clunky writing in native-language works.

Ah, yes. Of course the social hierarchy where you just have to make sure you're above "Those Stupid People" comes into play, and if you're not in a position to sneer at the masses, then someone else must be sneering at you.

Its more like 99% of people do not give a flying fuck about anime. Of those of us in the 1% that do care enough to download and watch fansubs as the shows air in Japan, the vast majority either have, or are probably willing to obtain, some knowledge of the larger cultural context.

I don't see any reason why we should make these accessible to a class of people who by and large don't know they exist, and even if they do, don't care.

Is this elitest? Eh, maybe. But then again, they all have interests that I don't give a crap about, and I wouldn't expect them to go out of their way to make them accessible to me.