Fansubs vs. Commercial Subs, and Common Errors of Fansubbers and Scanslators

...and why commercial distro companies are doing a bad job of competing. To be fair, it's always hard to compete with people who do something for free out of love of the product, which is why Microsoft is so terrified by Linux (frankly, having produced a crapoplex like Vista, they should be terrified). It's also probably a lot of why fansubs/fan scanslations keep circulating long after the commercial subs/scans are out there, even if the commercial ones have been ripped off as well.

Put simply, fansubs are usually better. Here are my comments about it when psygremlin at Mangaforums asked about mangled fansubs. I honestly couldn't think of any I'd seen in recent memory that really butchered the dialog. Scanslations, yes, but not fansubs.

I know a little Japanese. I try to learn a little more every day. One easy way to do this is by osmosis from subbed anime. Here's what I've decided about subs:

1) Commercial subs are, at best, as good as average fansubs. Most of the time, they're worse. If you're really unlucky, they used the dub script for the subs, and so you have mangled meaning both from translation errors and from the dub director's edits to retime to mouth motion. If you're doubleplus-unlucky, you get something like the Disney sub track for Kiki's Delivery Service, which includes lots of annoying patter that doesn't even exist on the Japanese voice track and whose only purpose seems to be to distract from the beautiful pictures on the screen. (insert generic I-hate-Michael-Eisner rant here).

2) Fansubs (and manga scanslations) sometimes suffer because the source material for translation isn't a Japanese soundtrack, but a commercial or pirate Chinese or Korean dub or sub track. Nothing like two layers of translation to ruin your day. The problem, simply put, is that there are a lot more people who can, and choose to, translate Chinese or Korean into English than can translate Japanese.

3) Fansubs, most of the time, are labors of love, and fansubbers take them seriously. This may result in slow release schedules, but usually means good product. Generally speaking, the more widely popular the content, (consider Welcome to the NHK versus Slayers), the more care is taken in translation. Likewise, standards have gone up over the years. I have yet to find good subs of the Captain Harlock series, and the subs of Devil Hunter Yohko are pretty weak as well, but the average sub of last season's stuff is generally pretty good. I'm grateful there are groups out there like Central Anime who are currently doing a great job subbing stuff from my childhood like the Yamato series. (You guys rock!).

Likewise, there's talk now (mostly due to the strong underground fan support) of releasing a licensed R1 DVD set of Simoun. English-speaking Simoun fans are of two minds on this: On the upside, we'd get direct-to-DVD video quality. On the downside, it's unlikely at best that the subs that shipped on the DVD would be as careful, nuanced, and generally good as the ones done by Simoun-Fans (you guys rock, too!). So I guess I'd end up ripping the R1 DVDs to computer, building subs in from the Simoun-Fans subs, and then burning new viewing copies. Please, Simoun DVD people - if you're reading this - just use the Simoun-Fans subs - they'd license them for free I'm certain.

4) Fansubs, at their best are so full of otaku goodness that there's no way that a business would dare release shrink-wrapped DVDs with their content. Consider the detail in the Solar subs of Honey and Clover, where literally any piece of readable text in the frame is translated in a matching font. Sure, it takes three rewinds to read it all, but who cares? It's great, and adds a lot of meaning and depth to the scene. Oh, and yes, I did catch them in one translation error in all 41 (I think?) episodes of H&C they subbed, but it was minor. Careful sub work like this or Oyasumi's work on Welcome to the NHK (which translates the ads on the trains in Tokyo) just doesn't happen if somebody has to make a living from it. (You guys rock, too!)

Frankly, I've read a lot more creaky manga scanslations that creaky anime subs. Some of the chapters of Fruits Basket I have require considerable mental editing before a coherent English sentence emerges. Chobits was another one that I feel like deserves a best-possible scanslation and hasn't had one.

Originally Posted by psygremlin

I agree with the comments above. My intention wasn't to disparage the translators (who do a sterling effort!) but more to see if there are any classic examples of Engrish that crop up from time to time. Funnily enough, I've found the translations in scanlations to be better in some cases than in the licenced mangas - the latter often seem to suffer from mild censorship (*grumble*) that does then lose something in translation.

More often than not, I would say it's not Engrish you get as much as hybrid grammar. For instance, the Japanese equivalent of an indefinite third-person pronoun is "ano hito." This translates literally as "that person." Sure enough, you see "that person" a lot in scanslated manga, and it's often used as an indefinite, rather than a reference to a particular person. English, of course, has a perfectly good indefinite third-person pronoun as well - "one." Example: "One should be neither a debtor nor a lender." It's sexless (remember, words have gender, people have sex, and personal pronouns refer to people), and is therefore a perfect synonym.

Most of the time when 'ano hito' is used in an indefinite sense, 'one' is the only grammatically correct and logically consistent translation. But nobody ever seems to use it.

A lot of times I'll see someone's sentence stretch across two bubbles, and the grammar won't make good sense in English, because predicate phrases and verbs usually need to be switched around. This is a case of translating the bubbles correctly, but not the sentence.

And then there are sound effects. Some, like the 'gacha' a sliding door makes opening or closing are great and should be left alone or just rendered in the roman alphabet. I've actually gotten used to doki doki and dokun for heartbeats (in either katakana or romaji), and never have liked translations to 'ba-dum' or 'thump' because neither is specifically an onomatopoeia that only a heart makes like 'doki doki' is, and it can sometimes confuse the reader instead of explaining something.

Another area of complaint: Japanese uses a number of ritual set phrases. These are always the same, and carry a certain formality simply because they're rituals. Accordingly, they logically should be translated the same, and in a way that makes sense. 'Hajimemashite' generally does OK ('nice to/pleased to meet you'), but 'yoroshiku onegai shimasu' is frankly difficult to literally translate into English, because we don't use such formalisms in English any more. Perhaps the closest real English phrase would be something like "Hail and well met," or "May the sun shine upon the hour of our meeting." but they're both medieval. It'd be nice to see these used in a sword-and-sandals manga, though, since they're usually set in Japan's feudal period - using feudal English would be a good fit. Perhaps something like 'I hope we'll be friends' might not be out of place most of the time.

A common mistake is with 'onegai shimasu' and its variants. This phrase is usually translated as 'please.' But a bunch of different words and phrases can be translated into 'please,' and don't mean the same thing. 'Onegai shimasu' has overtones of humbly beseeching (it's what you say at the shrine when praying for something from a god). Just translating it as 'please' often isn't strong enough.

A lot of times its these ritual phrases that trip up translators who aren't native speakers of Japanese. They get mistakenly literally translated, so unless the reader knows that it's a ritual phrase, he don't understand that there's probably more gravity and formality to the situation than the literal meaning of the words suggests. The phrases used for "lets go steady/let's get engaged" are frequent victims.

A last example is poor modeling of degrees of completeness and politeness. You've probably noticed that girls generally say 'gomen nasai' when they are making heartfelt apologies. Guys, being in a more dominant position in society, generally get by with a bowed head and 'gomen...' A 'gomen...' from a girl means she either is not as worried about appeasing the recipient of the apology or she doesn't take the offense all that seriously. Frequently, the translators will miss one or the other case. A guy actually saying all of 'gomen nasai' while bowing is really profoundly apologizing (sometimes in a comic over-the-top way). A female needing the same degree of apology would probably have to raise her voice, repeat it several times, or abase herself to get the same level of intensity. Insults work the same way...

So that's the sort of thing I see most often wrong with fan translations. All of this said, they're still generally drastically better than some of the evil things that commercial firms have done to manga and anime to supposedly dumb down/broaden appeal to the western market. You know, if you take all the seasoning out of something, it becomes bland, and nobody likes bland. Tokyopop's earlier efforts on Fruits Basket (de-pervifying Shigure, among other things) as pointed out by Sephiroth's Samurai Girl (hard working translator) are a great example why I won't be buying the Tokyopop tanks of Furuba ever.

Anime off the Beaten Path

If you've been watching anime for a while and you're not an otaku (fanboy), you are probably aware that lots of anime seems to be designed to appeal to people that aren't you.

That's certainly true in my case. I haven't been a shounen for several decades now. I have a chibi-me running around the house, a wife, a job...all that stuff. So yet another schoolboy doing derring deeds saving the universe while looking longingly at the fanservice-intensive female lead probably isn't going to get me very interested most of the time.

So I'm always looking out on the margins. What's new and sounds strange? What are older seinen like me in Japan watching? What can I watch that I won't automatically compare to the last five things I saw just like it?

Here's some fun stuff that has come out of this search:

1. Old stuff. Yes, there's more great old stuff around now than there was five years ago. Central Anime in Kansas is doing a great job of fansubbing on the Uchuu Senkan Yamato cycle (see my capsule review of S1 here). They're using the cleaned-up R2 DVDs released to vintage otaku types there. I've run across some of the Harlock series as well, but the subs haven't been very good. I also ran across a nice dual-audio copy of Vampire Hunter D, and a good fansub of Macross from the restored R2 DVDs (I'd never seen the original Macross before - wow is that OP song bad).

I think I ran across Legends of the Galactic Heroes somewhere, and there's likewise the entire Gundam franchise which I've never watched. I should be set for vintage space warfare for quite some time. My one big regret so far is that nobody seems to have English subs on Heidi, girl of the Alps, which apparently never ran in the US. No, I haven't lost my mind - I have a rug rat to entertain, and he digs Yamato and Nurse Angel Ririka SOS down to the ground. What's not to like about a Shoujo show made by Miyazaki and Takahata?

The above points out that not all obscure old stuff is from people you've never heard of. Studio Ghibli, for instance, has an extensive back catalog. You probably haven't seen everything in it. I haven't, yet, and I'm making an effort. Mimi wo Sumaseba (called Whisper of the Heart in the US, but more accurately titled as If you Listen Closely), for instance, is a fine example of a perfectly nice teenage romance you've never seen with all the characteristic Ghibli pretty views and (generally) good soundtrack. I'll warn you, though, that a John Denver song figures prominently in the plot, although the heroine (to my amusement) says the lyrics are trite after translating them literally.

My favorite seldom-seen Ghibli movie is Omohide Poro Poro, which translates as something like "Memories Falling Like Raindrops." It's a more adult story than most Ghibli offerings, and is set in (mostly rural) Japan of the recent past. If you ever wondered what a slice-of-life Ghibli movie would be like, you need wonder no more. So check out the back catalogs of big names you know - you might find a gem or two.

2. Stuff meant for older viewers. The first HD series I downloaded right when I got back into anime after the decade hiatus was Kamichu! It sounded fun and quirky, and I wanted to see how good it looked. Right on all counts. It's set in Onomichi of the 1980s, so has a distinct nostalgic feel for anybody who lived through that time, even if on a different continent. Turns out it's designed to micro-target men my age...

Milady, who is the same age I am less a few months, is an avowed fan of Hataraki Man. The Go-Gos-like OP tune sets the mood perfectly, and it definitely speaks to her. I find it amusing as well, even though several of the characters fall into shoujo/josei stereotypes. I'll say this: the workaday world of Japan doesn't often make it across the pond to be fansubbed, and it's our loss. All of the few work-life comedy anime and manga I've seen were enjoyed, and some are favorites.

I haven't really got it figured out yet, but I think Binchou-tan might fall into this category as well. It's so purposefully sparse verbally (less than 150 words spoken in the first ep), so pretty to look at. So pathetic. In its own way it evokes the Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou manga for me more than the two OVAs did. It's too slow for kids, so I think it's actually seinen as well...

3. Odd fish. The manga/anime industry in Japan is so big that they semi-randomly create wonderful mutations. Somebody takes a silly idea (say tactical cyborg loli-assasins) seriously and creates something sad and wonderful like Gunslinger Girl.

Or a couple of guys get together and do a what-if show about breaking down the barriers between the internet and the physical world which, amazingly enough, is really good, like Serial Experiments Lain.

Or somebody sells Bandai Visual on this great novel idea they've got involving aerial warfare, lolitas, ancient priesthoods, forgotten wisdom of the ancients, teen-age sex changes, and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting. Something like Simoun results.

Or somebody decides to do Thelma and Louise, except with Thelma being kickass at kung-fu, and Louise being deadly with a katana walking around Edo era Japan with lots of slapstick comedy, like Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran.

These mutations are such prizes. And they inevitably have a long shelf life, and are usually well made. I always hope the next thing I discover will be another one.

Senile Seinen episode 00 Start!

Yes, I'm the cranky old man from the future come to fight evil (or at least boring TV) with my Purostaato-beemu. No, I will not do a "shooting the beam" pose in front of any camera ever for any reason (at least not until you buy me a lot of tasty ethanol-enhanced beverages first).

My apologies if you have not yet experienced the amusement of Suzumiya Haruhi yet. The anime is funny, if a little talky. It's good if you have a limited imagination and need to see the pretty pictures. If you can read faster than most NBA athletes, you might try the hilarious translations of the light novels available over at http://www.baka-tsuki.net/. They're much funnier than the anime, in my opinion, though that may be because the narrator Kyon is probably more like me than any other fictional character I've ever read/seen, with the possible exception of Randy Waterhouse in Cryptonomicon.

So, why am I spreading my egoism around the web, he asked rhetorically? Mostly because I get into interesting conversations involving anime and manga in different places around the web and kept thinking I should centralize the content somewhere. If I'm going to do that, I might as well also publish it, which starts to sound suspiciously like a blog. So I, the crufty old web curmudgeon (when I was your age, we did our HTML in a text editor in a shell on the server and we were grateful for it!) have finally bowed to this whole blogosphere thing. Ugh.

Well, let's get rolling. Here's some of the content of an email I sent today to a guy who used to be a coworker and is still a good friend, and manages to have geek cred and a life just like I try to have. He was asking if I'd bothered to catch up on the end of BSG S3. Here was my reply:

No, my holiday was not especially nice. I came down with something communicable from "my little disease vector," as I so often call him. Also found myself dismantling and cleaning the burner on the furnace on Easter morning. 25 degrees, snow, and no heat was not a popular combination. While I smelled like home heating oil for the rest of the day, we had a cozy warm house, and milady had the warm glow of affection she gets when I do something manly and resolve a household predicament.

E-chan and I finished up Space Battleship Yamato last night. I'd forgotten how sketchy the last ep is. I have the feeling they were going to do an hour-long show and cut the script in half (Yamato actually had pretty disappointing ratings in its first run in Japan, as I understand it - not unlike Star Trek TOS here). It was really fun pointing out to milady how much descends from this show - it was the first significant (1974) ship-based SF series to run anywhere after Star Trek finished in 1969. Apparently it got wide distribution via videotapes: Star Wars (1976) borrows from it freely (if you've ever seen the Wave Motion Gun, you know where the Death Star's main weapon came from, and R2D2 bears more than a passing resemblance to Analyzer), Glen Larson rips it off almost completely for Battlestar Galactica (1977). Several Star Trek movies and Star Trek Voyager have more than a little of that Yamato aroma as well.

I've got to say the show mostly hangs together pretty well - not bad for a "kids show" from 1974. All the Leiji Matsumoto themes are there - individual nobility, striving against unconquerable odds, personal loyalties cementing the group, etc, and there's a level of character development that shames nearly anything SF (current BSG excepted) done in the US before or since. Example: Sanada - the second officer and ship's engineer (the degreed kind, not the holds a wrench kind - they have one of those with a back-story too) and science officer gets his own back-story show and saves the ship with a surprise (but logically defensible) deus ex machina in the last ep.

Other stuff we watched over the weekend since the weather was so lame:

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (love the Joe Hisashi score, hated the Disney dub job, was grateful for a good subtitle track, added "ohmu" to e-chan's vocabulary).

a couple of showings of Kiki's Delivery Service for e-chan's benefit (added "airship" to his vocabulary)

Several episodes of Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, which is a magical girl show from the early 90s downloaded specifically for toddler entertainment and to explain what magical girl shows are to milady (if you have to watch one of the blasted things, this is one of the better ones). Now she gets the cosplay jokes, otaku jokes, and various fake magical girl characters in Welcome to NHK, Densha Otoko, Midori no Hibi, and Suzumiya Haruhi, among others. Notable item: The bad guy in this show actually took advantage of the long time required by the protagonist's power-up-and-change-clothes sequence as shown by intercuts of him chanting and gesticulating while she did her turn from fourth-grader to Nurse Angel thing.

Two episodes of Jigoku Shoujo (Hell Girl). Wow is this beautiful. Wow is this dark. I'd watch lots more horror movies if they were this pretty. Milady doesn't like it - too cruel and gruesome. I'll be watching the rest because I can't stand not to--it's just too pretty. The Shinto references are thick in this one - glad I watched Kamichu! first.

Two episodes of Simoun. I'm trying to define this one and I just can't really. Take Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, stir in some...Powerpuff Girls, maybe? until the colors go Studio Ghibli bright, add a heaping cup of Black Sheep Squadron/Baa Baa Black Sheep (or Band of Brothers if you don't know that one), but stop before the powerpuff girls start chain smoking, add some essence of the setting from either The Name of the Rose or the Brother Cadfael mysteries (believe it or not - there's even a bunch of Latin), put in a half-cup of Steamboy, dump it all in a pressure cooker, put an anvil on top of the vent hole, turn the stove on high, and walk quickly away. Yes, it's that hard to define. And more amazingly, it seems to have come from nowhere - there's no preceding manga or novel, just the anime. It's interesting, and a number of reviewers have gone drooling-nutso about it. I'm only up to ep 4, so I can't say I'm riveted yet, but i'm certainly interested in seeing how it turns out.

Two episodes of Hataraki Man (translates roughly as something like hard-working man). Slice of life show about the life of a woman (mid 20s) who is an editor and star reporter at a weekly magazine not dissimilar from "People." Definitely more adult in tone than most anime we get on this continent. Amusing note: the giant publishing company where she works is a verbal pun on Kodansha, which is Japan's largest publishing house, and which publishes the real-world Hataraki Man manga in Weekly Morning, which is its leading seinen manga magazine. Milady digs this one down to the ground because the lead is so much like her at that age. I've got to say that j-pop again works perfectly - the opening credit music couldn't set the tone of the show any better. It's a girl band doing kind of a punk/go-gos style with lyrics about working life.

Two episodes of Welcome to the NHK. We're well into the plot now with this one, and Milady is really enjoying it. I carefully waited to show her this until I knew she had enough understanding of the otaku stereotype in Japan thanks to watching Maid in Akihabara and Densha Otoko. Studio Gonzo has truly elevated my opinion of themselves with this one. It's thankfully a little lighter in tone than the (frankly often bleak) manga, but still is pretty true to the setting, characters, and themes. The fansub is spectacularly good - and another great example of why fansubs are better than commercial subs.

Two episodes of Gokusen (live action. Title translates roughly as "Mob Teach"). If you know what Great Teacher Onizuka is, you know what Gokusen is. If you don't, I'll describe Gokusen as Welcome Back Kotter mixed with The Sopranos except everything is Japanese. Good acting, a cast and scriptwriters who obviously read and liked the manga, and Japanese not-overpolished production values make a fun show.

One episode of Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran. This was actually run as an antidote to the showing of ep 2 of Jigoku Shoujo, but backfired - we got the only really sad-toned show in the series so far, where Meow meets her childhood friend who has gone down a bad path in life. Ended up reading three chapters of Fruits Basket to get everybody calmed down for bedtime.

And The Yakuza (1975 Robert Mitchum, Takakura Ken, dir: Sydney Pollack). This was because the lead (yakuza princess) in Gokusen made the comment that Takakura Ken was necessary for a good yakuza movie. I see why. Others have called him the Japanese Clint Eastwood, but that's not fair to him - for one thing he's incredibly buff, for another, he obviously really worked out at kendo every day, and for a third, his acting isn't all of the strong-silent-type mold. Not a bad movie for a '70s organized crime drama. Mitchum makes a surprisingly acceptable effort at the little Japanese he speaks, there aren't any glaring cultural gaffes, and the soundtrack isn't painfully '70s bad, just a little too soupy-strings for my taste. The only miscast was the supposedly-Japanese 20-something daughter, whose actress was a Nisei (American of Japanese family), and spoke English like a Californian and Japanese like one, too.

Oh, and no - I feel no urgency to watch the BSG shows I've not yet seen. I've got the first six shows of Space Battleship Yamato season 2 ready to go, and I remember even less about that one than I did about the first season.

So there you go. A typical sample of my "light-informal" style. Only the names have been removed to protect the innocent and guilty. Vocabulary: E-chan is my offspring currently age two. Milady is my significant other. I deliberately did a lot of series name-dropping here because my correspondent isn't as up on this stuff as I am, and I wanted to help him out. I posted this specifically because the effort required to come up with a good description of Simoun got me thinking that this wasn't bad reading. I was really nice here and tried to link everything out to a relevant wikipedia entry (because they're more stable links than ANN Encyclopedia entries, Nausicaa.net entries, or IMDB entries).

I'll also be posting stuff I've written for various forums around the web. It'll generally be on the subject of anime and manga. Likewise, I'll probably put some original content here as well (I feel a rant coming on about Disney dub tracks and general treatment of Ghibli movies, for instance). I am certainly not unwilling to review stuff, but don't expect to get a review every time, and I definitely don't plan on doing show-by-show blogging like some people do. More than that? You tell me. That's what the comments section is for.