All the cool effects, honorifics, translator notes that explain references that you might miss as non-japanese viewer… Whoever put this much effort for free more than 10 years ago, thank you! It was so refreshing seeing this in the era of corporate sloppy subtitles!
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Counterpoint: They are not commercial products, and there is nothing stopping groups from just abandoning series mid-season. For example, Komi Can’t Communicate got a sub that translated all her written text in place and then just dropped it after a couple of episodes.
I’ve seen two arguments during that time.
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as fan subs, those are entirely done voluntarily and the people behind it owe nothing to the community
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they shouldn’t have started the series if they weren’t committed to completing the season. Other groups sat out on the series because of that.
I’m not really saying that all fansubs were perfect or that the “do for free” model is good. I only miss the passion that nowadays is just less common now than it was back in the day.
That’s a very good way to put it. I’m pushing 50 and have watched anime since my earliest childhood. When thinking back on how the community has changed over the years, it’s not recognizable anymore. And the passion and energy the community has lost is probably the biggest contributor why it feels so empty now. The second biggest contributor is how commercialized it has become. Third would be that it reached the mainstream (though I personally group this together with #2).
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I once watched an anime where the translator added a “fun facts about this ep” part at the end of each ep (and it was always a list with at least 10 points), that was great
I love this kind of thing! When I was reading Kaguya-sama I discovered that each chapter had a blog post from the translation team about all the fun stuff included in the chapter that the average reader might not know. Even though I own paper books it made me reread everything in digital just to appreciate what I missed.
Yeah, so many scanlators do this, it’s amazing.
I’ve seen this in licensed titles too. Bocchi the Rock had several pages of notes at the end of each volume explaining references that went way over my head.
As someone who grew up on fan-subbed copies of Top Gear, having some culturally-specific things explained was a very nice touch
The commie fansubs for monogatari series second are so peak.
For the koimonogatari arc the opening switches between modern/classic art styles. During the classic style portions, the fansubs change to that hideous yellow with black outline font prevalent during the VHS era.
And it’s glorious.
Little touches like that <3
<3
Just according to kekkaku.
TL Note: keikaku means plan
Why is this everywhere? lmfao
It’s from death note and one of the sub groups put just as keikaku or something along those lines with that translator note and it stuck and has been directly used or referenced ever since. Kinda goes along with people die if they are killed levels of stupidity but we love that kind of shit apparently.
Sometimes a stupid gag hits juuuuuust right.
I’ve never finished bleach because dattebayo stopped subbing it and the official subs are just trash to me in comaprison
brings me back to yakitate! japan, where every goddamn sentence had a pun in it and the subtitler had gone through the effort of explaining all of them in little fact boxes.
like, they literally had to subtitle a horse eating bread because it makes the sound “horse”, which is a homonym for “delicious”. a fact i learned from those very subs.
This is one of the best reasons to really learn a language. Nowadays many translators just give up on puns. Hard to blame them, some things you just can’t translate but at the same time official translations ban TL Notes.
Just by learning a little bit of Japanese you can catch so many jokes that got lost in translation.
There’s far too little fun in fansubs these days
Well clearly the problem is you’re getting fansubs and not funsubs like OP said!
Yup, the best “funsubs” right now are just remixes of official subtitles that for example add honorifics. I still appreciate this work but it’s a far from the golden days.
I have a release of the demon slayer infinity train movie that puts all the subs in speech bubbles as if they were manga panels, it was pretty cool
Definitely sounds fun!
yeah back in the 90’s anime clubs had people doing their own subbing. Many folks learned japanese just to do subbing and they would meet and discuss how best to translate and such.
Absolute chads! Learning is one thing but spending countless hours actually translating, proofing reading, adjusting subtitles is a whole another level!
Fun to see this while messing with subtitle translation!
I picked the three seasons of Nights with a Cat to watch. Thought “my mum would love this”, so I’m translating subtitles into Portuguese. (She loved the first two seasons, by the way.) And wow, it made me see the effort the group (pspspsps) poured into it — replicating the cat and Moon logo, animating everything, a thousand gradients, so goes on. I had to sacrifice a wee bit of the aesthetics (not much though) for the sake of making the translation viable, plus because I was merging the files, but it was clear the group did that as a work of love, I’ve seen plenty professional translators (incl. myself) doing a sloppier job.
I watched the first 100 or so episodes of naruto with funsubs. I was so disappointed when I went back and watched the official sub. (The dub is absolutely terrible and if you like it i do not trust your opinion on any piece of media at all)
To be fair dub is usually terrible, regardless of the show. Even the best dubs are not as good as the original. I have a huge amount of respect for jp voice actors that can portray so many emotions with just their voice.
I’m not saying that dub shouldn’t exist, people with visual impairment don’t really have much choice, many kids can’t read fast enough etc
I will never force anyone to watch with subs but I always tell them what they are missing.
Not a fansub, but the pop-up references on the Excel Saga DVDs were great. It’s like reading two rapid fire shows at once!
I didn’t know the official sub had references! Well to be fair older releases had less money involved so there were less strict guidelines and more people with passion so I guess it’s not impossible.
A lot of the people who get hired to do subs are the people who used to do fansubs back in the day. There’s a lot of passion, but they aren’t usually given the time to go above and beyond. It’s kind of a shame; these days I’m noticing Crunchyroll doesn’t even bother paying someone to proofread.
These days? Did they ever?
No idea. I’m definitely noticing more obvious errors when watching new shows than old shows though. Sometimes they’re even errors that aren’t issues with translation but could just be typos or bad English grammar for example. Things any native English speaker should be able to catch. Since Sony took over and put the geniuses who ran Funimation into the ground in charge of Crunchyroll I’m guessing they’ve been having their employees do the classic “do more work for no additional pay” thing corporations love to do.
Yup, they always were low quality but right now it’s so bad it’s hard to even watch.
From AI translations, through weird localized translations, rushed scripts to just putting dub audio description as subtitles… It’s depressing.Yup, they always were low quality
I’m honestly not so sure about that. I really like the subs for Yakitate! Japan for example.
right now it’s so bad it’s hard to even watch.
That’s definitely an exaggeration. I’ll notice something is off maybe once an episode, and even then it’s usually pretty clear what was meant. It’s really not that big of a deal.
Crunchyroll started as low quality speedsubs, their strategy was being the first to release the latest episodes of shows airing at the time. Alongside speedsubs you had quality subbers which would release a couple days later with higher quality translations and using better RAWs. Crunchyroll quickly became the dominant speedsubs, always being first, so eventually you had CR subs too. These would improve CRs shoddy subtitles a bit, maybe add character colors and formatting and such, and then release shortly after.
Yakitate Japan only started streaming on Crunchyroll after having been officially licensed by Nozomi Entertainment. They almost certainly used the official subs rather than doing their own.
I was watching Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity and the subs would get blurry when the character wasn’t paying attention/zoning out, I was amazed
So good! I started watching on TV and finished on Netflix and they obviously had only those boring subs I need to download fansubs right now.
It was so refreshing seeing this in the era of corporate sloppy subtitles!
That never went away. But fansubbers who do it as a hobby are a great addition to the community.
It’s sooo rare though!
My introduction to fan subs was the made in abyss movie. It is probably also the reason it was the last time…
Made in Abyss is fairly recent, didn’t know it has proper funsubs. I’ll check it out. It’s been almost 10 years since the TV show aired, might be the good time to rewatch.
Season 1 is a different beast compared to the movie and season 2. Good luck
