I wonder if some fansubbers might be Japanese themselves...

I was watching a fansub last night and noticed some silly gramatical errors in the subtitles. Somebody was able to compose a high-tech computer program, but missed a simple past/present/future clause mistake. The thought occured to me, maybe some of the people creating fansubs might be Japanese themselves. I had assumed fansubbers tended to be westerners who lived and worked in Japan, but perhaps some are actually Japanese; people who take pride in the shows Japan is producing, and are all too happy to make them available to the rest of the world. Just a thought...

Typically they are from the Phillipines or Singapore. While they do speak English there, they are not required to have good spelling.
And sometimes it is the encoder (The guy who takes the script and puts it in) who makes those mistakes.

BTW Stretch, what is wrong with Episode 9? The episode where She takes the love potion?

Stretch was having problems find the torrent for episode #9 .. so I churned it up and sent it to him as an attachment.

Well, there are plenty of native English speakers who regularly make silly/strange grammatical errors, especially if they don't edit. Given that fansub culture seems to give a lot of weight to speed, I can see how this might happen. (For instance, if I'm typing quickly I'll often fail to conjugate verbs/adverbify things-- eg, dropping "ing", "ed" and "ly". Mind you, I notice as soon as I look at it, so this normally only shows up in IM conversations, but still, I can see how it could happen.)

The only fansub process that I've seen inside is that behind the recent Simoun fansubs, but I gather they're unusual. They're doing it as a large group process with everyone involved acting as editors, focusing on having as high a quality translation as possible.

OUCH!! Rebecca!! Your poignant example of my last posting is arrow to my artistic heart!! Spell check .. spell check.. and when done... spell check again....

You can consider yourself happy that you're talking about English fansubs... whose language level I consider very high compared to the ones done by schoolkids who just learned a bit of English and then translate English fansubs to their own native language... seems like learning Japanese is a bit more difficult, and those who mastered it do at least have a sense of quality in respect to the English version. I do remember a small number of EngSubs with "mysterious" use of English language but most of these are several years old, I didn't have to complain about any EngSub for quite a while.

And then there are the SpeedSubs, meaning those groups who prefer a fast release cycle (only a few days after the Japanese TV airing) to serious quality checking... if I really like a series I usually compare one episode of different EngSubs before I decide which version to collect and burn on DVD (while it may well be the SpeedSub that I'm watching first).

By the way, the Encoder isn't supposed to change anything in the script - his job is to know about codecs, container formats and similar stuff. So it's the Editor and the Quality checker who failed to do their job properly. (BTW it's difficult to find really good QC people as this isn't a job where you can "shine".)

Stretch -- an old fansub group name Anime Junkies used to have the idea that speed was prefered to quallity. So thier releases weren't the best-translated (even if they did use Japanese honorifics) and showed to be of lesser quallity.

The worst I've seen are DVD-RIPS of bootlegs from Asia. I think this is what Forbin was refering to in their earlier post. Today, I gather bootleggers are a little better and that they'll sometimes use fansubs for sale. However, some bootlegs are still pretty bad...as in awful bad.

But Rebecca is right in that English-speakers can make mistakes. And if a fansub group is in a hurry, they may skip quallity control in favor of a quick release. Further, their translations may not be the best.

The Japanese do play a part in fansubs though. After all, it is Japanese fans who DVR anime episodes, encode them, then post them for downloading. ^_^

If the fansub doesn't need to be close in time to the TV airing then it may be anyone ordering the DVDs from Japan (or eBay or whereever) and ripping them, as TV rips may not be the best quality available. But in general you're right - there's a network named "Share" mostly used by Japanese fans to share raw files (of TV airings and even DVD ISOs - Japanese DSL speeds seem to be extraordinarily high, 10 MByte/sec isn't uncommon there), that's where non-Japanese usually can get good raw files to base their fansubs on.

I learn something every time I correspond here. Yes, my problem with episode 9 of Zero no Tsukaima was that the torrent was missing altogether from Kuroneko fansubs. Thanks for the E-mail, Jan-chan! Jeez, it's already 10% complete (a minute or two after I opened the file) and moving at 158 kB/s--I don't think I've ever seen something download so fast!

I think it was episode two of the very same Zero no Tsukaima that started me thinking, with lines like these:


"Hurry and pull back the chair... is discourteously of you"


"Hey, you probably just grab a commoner that was just walking by, didn't you?"


"Hey wait, what's with you all the sudden?"


"You got dump, guiche!"


"Unfortunately, I came from a world where those etiquettes don't exists"


Somehow, these didn't particularly seem like typos to me.

With three groups at episodes 10-11 when the Japanese TV will air episode 13 tomorrow you're free to choose your personal favourite.

According to aniDB, Froth-Bite and KuroNeko are about the same level in respect to people watching their release; both have about 20 comments as to which one of these subs may be the better choice. Static-Subs&Ayu are behind in releases (1 episode) and numbers, but I remember that I liked the Ayu sub of REC quite a lot, so this might actually be my first candidate.