Japanese Fans Look at Quality of Fansubs

Some observations:

Most of the fansub groups started out on IRC, so there was a lot of discussion around every new anime title being fansubbed and a lot of "wars" between groups over speed and quality of video and accuracy of translation.

Well, now, bittorrent means that there are thousands of people who get their series without having to go to the IRC room of the groups that release it... and really, most of them want speed.

This cuts down on the communication about the fansubbers themselves, as most of the talk is on various phpBB forums instead... and that focuses on the anime itself.

For many series, this doesn't matter. I mean, there isn't a lot of nuance in Bleach or Naruto... so even fast subs are fine by many fans. For more involved shows, like Monster, there ARE groups who focus on quality and release slow.

For Monster, it was Anime-Kraze. They aren't known for speed, but their quality is top notch, and they do several rounds of QC and have staff members in Japan. I'm not a member of the group, but I became a fan when they were the only fansub group to give good translations of GITS:SAC.

There was a famous incident a few years back when GITS was first being aired. Killshock of Animejunkies translated a line as "There have been a lot of MASS NAKED CHILD EVENTS" ... where as Anime-Kraze had the more accurate translation of "There has been a wave of child abductions in the area recently"...

The fansub community is also very adaptive. When new formats come out, there are groups who really push the envelope and deliver high quality images and sound. HDTV rips, DVD rips, Matroska wrappers, h264 encoding.

When I first watched anime in college, my friend had Ranma 1/2 episodes in REAL MEDIA format!! So yes, there are speedsubbers, but the community as a whole really responds to "market demands" and some people demand speed an others demand quality... good thing there are usually several groups who do both.

This is probably one of the longest mote points I've read about translations.

The main reason these groups exist is because the publishers(both anime and manga) are unwilling to actually use technology to their or the fans benefit. Every anime on japanese TV can be released with the english dub version the same day. If they did that then they would be cutting out the middle man and only have to deal with a national distrubtor, "Hello Diamond!", instead of the cluster%^&( that they currently have to deal with.

Fan translations are done only with unlincesed anime. Any group that rips US dvds are not fansubs, so what the staff of JP anime distributor said is wrong. The only thing those distributors care is money, so it is only something expected from them to lie whenever they get the chance. Anyway, I think the reason why they are attacking fansubs is because they hope that without fansubs ay least one or two people will buy the original anime in Japanese even though they do not understand a word of it since they would kill only to earn a cent more. Now about licensed titles, if fansubs sub them, then they would be doing something illegal, but for the most part, this does not occur except with a few new groups.

Oh, fandom and the internet: a most deliciously amusing pairing if there ever was one.

It usually is.

due to international copyright and various treaties, even fansubbing unlicensed anime is illegal. However, because most fansubbers will stop distributing a series upon notification of licensing, and discourage others from redistributing, most US anime licensees leave fansub groups alone. The biggest fiasco in my memory, and it's been a while, i've been out of the scene for a couple years, was with Anime Junkies and their sub of ninja scroll tv. They were notified by the company that licensed it to stop distribution and they responded in an incredibly immature way, full of profanities and what not.

:-o
That was quite possibly one of the better articles I have read this year. I was wondering about fandubbing [subbing] because I was noticing that some of the english versions dont match the japanese version. (I try to watch the Japanese first).

I agree that the companies should try to accomodate for bilingual productions though.

~.O

That was the most poorly researched response ever. The whole thing can be summed up as, "Fansubs are illegal. And they're probably bad quality and full of translation mistakes, but I don't know because I don't know anything at all about the fansubbing world." Well, thanks. Obviously there are crappy speedsubs. There are also crappy slowsubs. But there are plenty of high quality groups as well. This whole thing is uneducated propaganda to paint fansubbers as evil. I especially like the line about how they have no consideration for the fans. Whaa? Who do you think they exist for and are composed of?

Sorry, but I found that "answer" to be very hostile towards the whole fansubbing community...maybe someone less biased would have given a better answer. I like how there was no mention of the legal companies that used to buy anime titles then rip the story to shreds, change names, etc, some of which is still done today. Everyone makes mistakes, even the distribution companies...the difference being, fansubbers will usually admit their mistakes, while the distribution companies will not. And I know plenty of Japanese people that like to help translate fansubs because it is a good way to improve their english, just like translating is a good way for english speakers to improve their japanese.

I've heared the same words coming from the ADV president. Fansub community has played an important role in how anime stands today in the mainstream market. Now that they see them as a threat, they label him as evil wrongdoers who only fansub to compete with each other with no "consideration for the fans". Having to pay 30 bucks for a so-called "high quality DVD" with blatant translation and editing errors while having to wait months between releases is, in my humble opinion, having no consideration for the fans that feed this industry.

I will prolly be flamed for this, but hey! I'm just a evil henchman of the evil fansubbing commnity that's out to conquer Japan and destroy the anime industry.

You put "Fuji" first then "Fushi" second for the Witch Hunter Robin section and you are getting irritated by others for making auditory errors?

One other thing that has not been mentioned is how the fansubs serve as a barometer of success among the Anime community. A lot, if not all of the companies that distribute Anime outside of Japan keep track of what people are downloading to assess the posibility of buying the rights to a certain show.

That is one of the reasons why you don't see companies like Funimation or ADV going after fansubbers with more decisiveness. They know that for better ot worse, fansubbers are a necessary evil.

???For Monster, it was Anime-Kraze. They aren't known for speed, but their quality is top notch, and they do several rounds of QC and have staff members in Japan. I'm not a member of the group, but I became a fan when they were the only fansub group to give good translations of GITS:SAC.???

A year late, but here we go again???

A digisub group who continued to subtitle the Count of Monte Cristo when the Japanese company, Media Factory asked them to stop. That???s support for you!

???due to international copyright and various treaties, even fansubbing unlicensed anime is illegal. However, because most fansubbers will stop distributing a series upon notification of licensing, and discourage others from redistributing, most US anime licensees leave fansub groups alone. The biggest fiasco in my memory, and it's been a while, i've been out of the scene for a couple years, was with Anime Junkies and their sub of ninja scroll tv. They were notified by the company that licensed it to stop distribution and they responded in an incredibly immature way, full of profanities and what not.???

Again, this has been said so many times on legal anime sites, as well as fansubs sites; it should be a crime that no one knows it.

Legit anime sites: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2003-06-08/3
http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html
Recommended reading:
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Academic_edu/CAF/
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

Anime junkies was the start of what the current fansub community has now become; a warez community. ???and no, most of today???s ???fansubbers??? do not stop distributing a series upon notification of licensing. There are 3 digisub groups currently subtitling Bleach, then was Naruto, Ky?? Kara Ma??, Speed Grapher??? I can go on??? They will continue to sub series that???s licensed or not as long as media is free via P2P. Back in the 90???s, there was policing in the fansub community, you still had some that did subbed licensed and there were those who did rips, but were chastised and reported to the companies, however it???s not the case today.
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?s=805fd313248c1c53a345269f837...

???One other thing that has not been mentioned is how the fansubs serve as a barometer of success among the Anime community. A lot, if not all of the companies that distribute Anime outside of Japan keep track of what people are downloading to assess the posibility of buying the rights to a certain show.
That is one of the reasons why you don't see companies like Funimation or ADV going after fansubbers with more decisiveness. They know that for better ot worse, fansubbers are a necessary evil.???

This is the biggest myth among them all. Of course, in the past, traditional VHS fansubs have tremendously help promote Japanese anime in the North, but it is not the case today. Again we will look at Bleach, Naruto were all ready very popular in Japan. Moreover, there is TV, cable and not to mention, there are several series that are licensed before they air in Japan.
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?s=0f37875acb3ea6d53aa8b1b4929...

Funimation? Funimation is one of the few companies that will actively go after digisubbers or anyone for that matter who violates their property. They used to send Cease & Desist letters but now they contact host companies. See:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2005-12-07/funimation-enforces-inte... and look at the follow up. ADV sends Cease & Desist to number of sites such as Pirate bay and Boxtorrents, and have been very vocal. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2005-01-26/10

???You put "Fuji" first then "Fushi" second for the Witch Hunter Robin section and you are getting irritated by others for making auditory errors????

Humph??? if I???m not mistaken, they copied "Fuji no Ichizoku" (the clan of immortals) from the subtitles. This article is a translation by Japanese who wrote in romaji to help those who do not understand Japanese writing, not to help Japanese. Since it isn't native Japanese characters, telling Japanese how to be Japanese is insulting and is one of the examples of what???s wrong with current anime ???Fans???.

?????? fushi is a adverb that means immortal.
????????? fuji is an noun to mean immortality.

"????????? fuji is an noun to mean immortality."

First of all, it's Fujimi.

Anyway, there are lots of fansub groups who drop series when they get licensed. Please do not stereotype us all.

-Tofusensei (fansubber for 6+ years in a group that has released 700+ fansubs and does not fansub licensed shows)

I believe the person is making a strong observation and not necessarily pointing fingers. I do believe most of what they're trying to convey has a lot of truth behind it.

True: Due to media being freely distributed, support for the industry is nil. There's also a lack of respect toward the creators of the medium. However, this is the industry fault for not being diligent in how to handle its intellectual properties.

True: You have a few amateur subbers like We Suck and Hikari no Kiseki who actually abide by the old school fansub ethics. Then there's everyone else...

My opinion of today's digi-subbers vs. analogue-fansubbers is ego and rampant entitlement. The statement you wrote just proved it. When did fansubbing become about bragging rights? How did it get from a hobby to a job? During the fansub hey-day, a few of the shady groups such as Artic and Shinsen Gumi/Hecto subbed millions of anime. Even though, many appreciated that they did the work, I didn't. To them, it was about recognition not the art itself. I still believe that this should not motivate one who "supposedly" loves the art of animation. Many of today's digi-amateur subbers seem to forget that their "shows" do not belong to them in the first place. This is a not a requiremnet, you doing this on your free time. The creators deserve the recognition.

Mike Kubayashi
A retired amateur subber

The emphasis on speed over quality is largely attributed to the fact that fansubbers nowadays take the number of downloads as their e-peen size; the more downloads they get the more "worth" they fansubs are. This is also caused by the fact that anime fans nowadays want their subs as soon as possible, and download the first file that's released, hence slow quality-sub groups get neglected. Similarly, files that are uploaded to streaming sites also belong to that of the speedsubbers. It may be safe to say that 90% of anime fans watch the first sub that's released.

With the increasing number of fansub groups, there is a shortage of Japanse to English translators, and hence there is an influx of Chinese to English translators to fill the demands. These translators use the chinese subtitled anime (usually released 12hrs after broadcast) to translate to English, resulting in a lower quality translation.

I've been watching fansubs since near 1990 back when they were only rarely availabe on re-re-re-copied vhs tapes that a few fans traded around. If it weren't for fansubbing I would have never been into anime. If it weren't for downloading fansubs now I still wouldn't buy licensed material. I remember when companies like ADV were a couple of geeks working out of a broom closet and as far as I'm concerned, that's where they should have stayed. When you American distributors start getting licenses earlier, faster, and have better and more accurate subs then I'll start buying more. When you stop hiring commercial radio wash-ups and second-rate hacks to do your crappy dubs, I'll buy more. When you start pushing to get subs on cable and satellite TV stations, then I'll buy more. When you stop charging ridiculous prices for a just a few episodes at a time of a large TV series, I'll buy more. Until then, no. I download fansubs and I DO buy the licensed products afterward IF I feel that it's a series I want to purchase. Usually if I manage to watch more than a couple of episodes and find it to be worth-while, I go buy it, that is, if it has been released yet... usually there's a wait. I buy. With the exception of ADV because their snotty anti-fan tactics have pissed me off and they along with their little anti-fansub poster boy Greg Ayres can burn in hell. The fact of the matter is I don't owe any of you a god**** thing and I WILL NOT PAY FOR CRAP. No one ever asked these companies to license or sell anime in this country to begin with. I sure wasn't worried about it. Fansubbers harm the fans? They are the fans. They selflesly and freely bring something TO the fans. The distributors have done plenty of that on their own in this country. They disrespect the fans and they could care less about properly distributing the anime. It makes me so angry I could curse a whole lot, but I'll just leave it at that. Plain and simple the fans don't owe the industry SQUAT but the industry had better start respecting it's fans or they'll find themselves with alot of unsold stock and out of business. They had better be glad that most fans push people who know little about soon-to-be released titles toward purchasing them and giving them initial sales and offering info and insight to those who are less inclined to downloading such material from the internet. I'd like to see what their sales would be like otherwise. Ugh... Some American companies make me sick. It should be painful to be that greedy and arrogant. Everyone has to make profit and running a business is all about making MONEY! Yes, we ALL know that. I have money. I give money. I'm all about some democracy and capitalism. Just not ignorance, greed and backstabbing. Fansubbing has made this industry what it is even now and we as the fans can make sure that is taken away. Seems like some of you distros out there forget that we don't live in communist Russia and that we DO have a choice as to how, when and where we buy your material. When you attack fansubbing groups, you're attacking YOUR OWN FANS.
Some of these companies, I do believe, STARTED as fansubbers back in the day. If any of you have learned anything from the ignorant and shock trooper-like reactions of the likes of the RIAA and the MPAA, all of you should know by now that it just makes you look like petty third-world dictators trying to wave your authority around and lord it over people and it just ends up making fans feel angry distanced and causes them to boycott labels and material. That is exactly why to this day I WILL NOT EVER purchase anything ADV sells. I won't even watch something I even find out they are planning to purchase the rights to. If they change their current mentality and policy, then I might reconsider, but that's about as likely as the RIAA changing it's policy on P2P. There are some good and respectful companies out there, and to them I say good job! Keep it up and I will keep buying your material. Start acting like ADV and your might as well throw your material in a burn-pile. Stop letting companies use out own legal system to make you feel like slaves and start to realize that you have the power to shut them down when they start acting like spoiled children.

Fansubbers in the 80s and 90s mainly subtitled to promote the media so that companies can take notice and show it in their language of a specific region. Groups such as Tomodachi, Silverwynd and others have accomplished this feat.

I won't reply because it's not worth responding. However, I'll put up an Answerman article. It's rough and cliche, but it's right on point.

"The people who like arguing in this fashion are a new breed of "fan" (although I hesitate to call them that) out there right now, created mostly by the proliferation of anime via bittorrent. They make a number of wacky claims, like anime companies are all evil behemoths who exist solely to drain your wallet, that all commercial translations are incorrect, that dubs "butcher" the spirit of the original Japanese version and that anime is created under some bizarre bohemian ideal that it should be totally free and readily available to anyone who wants it. Their general attitude is that anyone trying to make a buck off of anime is an evil capitalist pig-dog who disrespect and mutilate their untouchable sacred artwork.
These people live in a fantasy world that does not exist outside the internet. Basically, what they're arguing is a fairly ridiculous set of ideals that justify the fact that they steal anime rather than pay for it. It's the ultimate excuse to not have to pay for anything; everything the companies do is wrong, anime should be free for everyone, fan translations are always better, etcetera. All of these "beliefs" point to one thing: not paying for anime. It's way past simply "dub versus sub", an argument that should have gone the way of the dinosaur when DVDs first started becoming popular, since 99 percent of DVDs released present the show in both languages. Those people claiming to understand the "pure emotion and feeling" of anime in Japanese probably don't even speak the language; if they're taking it in college, even a few semesters of Japanese isn't enough to really understand the full range of emotion since you're only going to be speaking at a 2nd or 3rd grade level, and even then, there's no guarantee your listening comprehension will be up to par. The whole "pure emotion and feeling" argument is just another excuse to not pay for anime.

The people who argue this way are, frankly, pretty despicable and hypocritical. They tout themselves as being the world's biggest anime fans, stalwart chosen protectors of the creator's original vision, and yet they are also the least likely to actually support the shows they claim to love so much by paying for the legit DVD release. They behave as though the ultimate show of affection and support for someone's art is to steal it, slap your lame fansub group name all over the title sequence (Like #ANIME-SOX PRESENTS Chrono Crusade), use gaudy fonts and half-assed translations to subtitle the show and then give it to as many people as possible for free. This attitude makes absolutely ZERO sense and I await the day when some of these people start using even an ounce of common sense, climb down off whatever self-righteous pedestal they've built for themselves and maybe ditch the bullcrap communist nonsense they spew about how anime should be free for everyone.

Real anime fans support the shows they love by buying the legitimate DVD release. Period.

To add to this, I'd change that last line to "real anime fans support the shows they love by buying the DVD, watching it through sanctioned streaming services, buying merchandise, or watching it on television". It's no longer just about buying DVDs anymore, especially if the market is going to pull out of the tailspin it appears to be in.

That said, I think we need a term for "anime fans" who never ever support anything at all, even by watching short ads; there's got to be a catchier name for these folks than simply "annoying leech". Maybe we can coin a new term to describe these people!"

Witch Hunter Robin:
"Fuji no Ichizoku" (the clan of immortals) was translated to "Ushi no Ichizoku" (the clan of cows).
- They missed "fushi" and "ushi." If it was checked by a Japanese, this kind of mistake would have never happened.

-> hey bitch, maybe u were watching the dumbsubs

Macros Plus:
The chief said to his staff: "Souka, Gokurousama" (Is that so? Thanks for the work), it was translated to "Is that so, Gokuro?"
- Mistook the Japanese word as someone's name because it came with -sama.

-> again, fucktard, u were watching dumbsubs

Gundam Seed:
Ark Angel has a cannon nicknamed "Lohengrin", it was translated to "Long Grin."
- How did it become the name of the cannon? This is one of the oddest English translations that appeared in Gundam.

-> dumbshit.

I'm jp and I translate for subbers. We do not PUBLISH it. WE SHARE IT. Now go cry to ur mommies cuz ur gettin beaten by us, when we were the ones to rule in the firsty place.

I hate this whole entitlement mentality that anime fans have when it comes to anime. I agree with Greg Ayres on a lot of things concerning fansubs, however, I DO NOT agree with him when he says that 50% of the anime industry's problems financially are due to fansubs, I think it's more the bootlegs from Hong Kong. There are plenty of fans who watch the fansubs who want to buy the legitimate DVDs but get tricked into buying bootlegs that look like they're real. I don't think fansubs are the ONLY THING hurting the industry, although that is a a major factor in it, due to the lazy fake "fans" who will never buy the DVD or the digital download that they can buy for $1.99 on itunes or Amazon.

I like anime, not enough to dump all my money into it though. I download fansubbed shows because I'm bored and it's something to watch. I'm not stealing anything from the production companies.. there are very few shows I would pay for in the first place. Japanese people can watch the shows free with advertising, why should I not be able to do the same? The problem is that the production companies are not making an effort to do that (And it could be done, set up a membership-type site with high quality, well subbed, streaming anime, for example), and instead charge painfully high amounts of money for their shows, so the foreign market for their shows is rounded out by the free fansubbers. If I had paid for all the episodes of anime I'd seen at DVD price, It would have cost me many thousands of dollars. Get real, that money was never potentially leaving my pocket in the first place.

-> hey bitch, maybe u were watching the dumbsubs

Yes. She was watching the 'dumbsubs'--subs that were done too quickly, with no quality control or finesse. Jesus, your English is so poor that you don't even know that you just agreed with them. You basically objected, "Well maybe those subs just sucked!" Yes, that's the point they're making. You just helped their case, not your own.

-> I'm jp and I translate for subbers.
Oh please. If you're a native Japanese, then I am Marie of Roumania.