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[–] 1 point 2 days ago

Always thought fansubs were the best subs... Are there any teams who translated Chainsmoker cat yet? are there any who at least plan to? it would be useful if there was a DB website purely for anime fansub groups

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  • [–] 28 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (7 children)

    In all seriousness, there might be style guidelines that explicitly say to not translate proper nouns like character names that have literal translations.

    And in most cases this probably makes sense. Frieren is reportedly a bit cringy for people who know German because the series uses on-the-nose German words for basically every character and place. Frieren = freezing, Himmel = heaven, Stark = strong, Fern = far/distant, Heiter = cheerful. There are probably similar examples for Japanese characters in other series, though I can’t think of any at the moment.

    Chainsmoker Cat is an ideal show to bend that rule though. “Thanks for the help, Chainsmoker Cat!” is legit a better line than “Thanks for the help, Yani Neko!”

    It’s like that scene in Coffee and Cigarettes where GZA and RZA from the Wu-tang Clan meet Bill Murray in a cafe and they constantly refer to him by his full name. Never “Bill” or “Mr Murray”, always “Bill Murray”. It’s not always funnier to do that, but sometimes it just is.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    I assumed OP was talking about the white rectangle that says "Penname: Ochinpo Tatsuo (Dick Tatsuo) Real Name: (I have no idea how to read that sorry Japanese names are hard)

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  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago*

    There are probably similar examples for Japanese characters in other series

    yeah for example every name in komi san can't communicate is a japanese pun or a play on words that describes the character and they are also better left untranslated

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  • [–] 15 points 5 days ago (8 children)

    Netflix is notoriously bad at this. CR gets a bad rep, but compared to Netflix they're a godsend.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago (7 children)

    It's annoying when Netflix or Amazon gets exclusive rights to a show. You either need to wait for fansubs (and you'll only get them for the most popular shows after a wait) or deal with this bullshit.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (6 children)

    I used to do fansub work a lifetime ago. Is it still a thing? Might look into it if so. But I remember there was weird issues with copyright, like your hard work was basically illegal and got deleted randomly

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago* (4 children)

    Fansubs are way less common than they used to be, because in the last years Crunchyroll's subs were just good enough. People are not waiting for new fansub releases, but go for what's available right now. There's no point doing something that nobody cares about, so no wonder many fansub groups ceased their work. That said, there still are some groups that make fansubs, but very often they base their work on already existing Crunchyroll subs and mostly just apply different typesetting, provide/improve translations for on-screen text, and fix some awkward dialogues/timing. For example in the last season Commie group was releasing The Ghost in the Shell with improved subs, because Amazon subs did not translate on-screen text. As for legality, they're providing releases via torrents, of course it's illegal. I don't know who and from where is supposed to delete your subs. I guess, nyaa could get taken down...

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    I looked it up and it seems that A.I. stole this old hobby of mine as well lol

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    There are some people who try to provide MTL subs, but they all have abysmal quality and no person with an iota of self-respect watches these

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    There’s no point doing something that nobody cares about, so no wonder many fansub groups ceased their work

    There is another reason: a lot of the people doing official subs used to do fan subs.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    Most official subs are AI these days. Companies are feeding the show's transcript into the machine and it's spitting out translations for all the different markets. If it's not dialogue, it's not getting translated.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    You have any source at all for that? I'm pretty sure the subs would be way worse if that were actually the case.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (3 children)

    I don't have an exact source, I think last I heard on it was over a year ago, but I bet if you search "Crunchyroll" and "ChatGPT Said" it'll come up. Basically, Crunchyroll was so lazy with the AI translation for an episode that it actually left the ChatGPT Said: in the sub. Idk if Netflix is doing AI as well, they haven't been caught so blatantly, but I'd be surprised if they weren't looking into it since I have heard they've been looking into AI recently.

    Also idk if you're just lucky but holy hell I've seen some dogshit subs recently. Like, fucking up the main character's catchphrase levels of bad. idk how much worse that can get.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    So yes, there was one show where this happened, but IIRC Crunchyroll put a statement out that that was the translator they hired being lazy, not Crunchyroll choosing to use AI subs.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (1 child)

    idk maybe that's what they said to cover their asses but when the CEO is doing interviews with variety and talking about how excited they are by AI and machine translations, I find myself not trusting their statement that it was a one-time thing.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    Chainsmoker cat is not a great phrase, it's clumsy and hard to say. Yani Neko is actually her name, why is this a big deal?

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  • [–] [S] 18 points 5 days ago* (2 children)

    I am talking about the untranslated text bubble, not the name. I have noticed that sometimes it is translated, and sometimes it isn't.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Yeah, whether or not on-screen text is translated seems like a total crapshoot. Some translators go the extra mile and format the translated text to look like the original, but far too many just ignore it entirely.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago

    Well in this case it's Netflix, so there was never any chance we'd get on-screen text anyways. I don't think their video player can handle displaying on-screen text while also displaying dialogue.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)
  • [–] 6 points 5 days ago* (4 children)

    Lack of money. I'm sure most translators would be happy to do a better job if they were given the time and money necessary to do so.

    Also I'm not certain Crunchyroll's new player can even render the subtitles while also rendering more English text for the name. There was a lot of concern about that when they switched tooling.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago

    low effort so that the blurays sell for more later probably

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  • [–] 4 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    Here to step on a landmine and say the dub is good.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    they do get subbed properly, on dubs.

    when you watch it dubbed, flip the sub's from English-cc to just English. most the time the text is translated.

    it's dumb, like really dumb, that they can't just include them on one sub.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago

    Ain't no way they named the cat Yoni Neko

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