(Originally, this post was titled: "You know what grinds my gears? Certain Fansubs")
This might be a short post on certain fansubs and what not to do when making them. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy anime getting subbed by fans like Dr. Slump or Magical Taruruuto (the group is currently slow at subbing Taro).
But there maybe certain groups or unknown groups that don’t do the subs correctly and it irks me or I get a bit nitpicky. And it started with Cat’s Eye Season 2 when the fansubbing group started switching and what made me write this blog post. I’ll still watch the anime with bad subs but if the subs is all a mess, I drop the anime completely until there’s proper or official subs. I'm not hating or being mean to the groups, I get that these subs are old or that the software that they're using isn't that great. It's a post to maybe show what not to do when fansubbing; note: I am not a fansubber.
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I’m gonna take episode 62 of Cat’s Eye. The red underline for some screenshots is the dialogue while the yellow highlight is a translation of a sign, poster, or song.
One of the characters, Rui was speaking her dialogue. But as the camera pans over to the football poster, the translation of the poster gets jumbled up with Rui’s dialogue and I had to go back and pause to read what she’s saying. It made it look like it’s one sentence and it can be confusing. They could at least put the translation of the poster above the screen or on it and have Rui’s dialogue kept below.
It even happens during a song near the episode… put the lyrics at the top of the screen! Or at least color code the subs. >-<
(pink: a guy is talking offscreen
green: Rui's dialogue - this part is where I started noticing this issue and what led me to write this blog post)
(green: Hitomi's dialogue; pink: offscreen guy's dialogue)
(yellow: translation on the newspaper; green: Ai's dialogue)
(I want to point out the different font used in episode 40 for this translation for comparison. At least they used different font but it would be better if they put the translation above the Japanese on the paper; as the camera moves on screen, so does the font)
One episode of Cat’s Eye 2 (episode 57; above screenshots) was bothering me the most with this issue where they make it look like it's one complete sentence even though 2 people are talking at the same time and it happens MULTIPLE times.
But what’s funny is… this part from episode 62… whenever another character is talking, they actually split up the dialogue so it doesn’t look like it’s one sentence… you do something correctly but can’t fix the other issues. The only problem is that there's no dashes to indicate another character is talking. The top is Rui's dialogue while the bottom is Ai's dialogue.
(worst example is episode 65 where there's too much subtitles on screen and at 13:07, some of it disappears super quickly.)
Another nitpick with fansubs is the anime, Ghost Sweeper Mikami. The subtitles got off sync during dialogue when I watched the first episode and I had to switch to Toei’s official subs on YouTube. Problem is, Toei’s subs is also offsync or poorly timed with the dialogue at times. Despite these issues, I still finished GSM.
(It should say Toshi's or Toshi is)
Back to the fansubs in Cat’s Eye 2. Some words shouldn’t be capitalized unless it’s the name of a group or person, missing punctuation or grammar errors, or sometimes not spacing words. If the person is from another country, I get that there might be some errors here and there and that they have a hard time with English.
Title card is inconsistent at times. I guess the group gave up with putting episode numbers at the top as I got further in CE2 - the previous subbers for season 1 put episode numbers at the top and I believe that the font was consistent. Also, sometimes the font will match the title card's but other times it's plain boring. For comparison, I will post examples below.
Episode 1 - Different Subbing group
Episode 37
Episode 38
Episode 41 (up to 45); notice the hashtag before the number 41.
(and then they give up halfway starting around episode 46)
Episode 47
Episodes 62-71 (no episode number :( )
Another thing is, as I got further, they stopped subtitling the ending theme for CE2 but left the opening subtitled! I guess they couldn’t keep it in anymore. They truly gave up.
When I hit episodes 72 and 73, the subbing group switched and while the episodes are low quality, the group at least does everything correct than the previous group. What a relief. Too bad it’s the final two episodes.
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Two final things is with the anime City Hunter. After my binge of all 4 seasons plus all movies last month, when I watched the first movie, I noticed that instead of Ryo's catchphrase "Mokkori", it says "Nookie" during one scene - sure it's fitting, but I'm more used to mokkori; also, don't even look up what nookie or mokkori means 😅. At least the official subs and the fansubbing group Mokkori Fansub kept it in but I'm not sure which group subbed this movie. Just a small nitpick.
Speaking of the fansubbing group, Mokkori Fansub, sometimes their subs will be big and bolded, but only with certain letters. Not sure if this is some formatting error?
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But to conclude this post... I still love subbed anime and fansubs. I usually don't care about translator's notes sometimes since it's distracting to me unless I'm interested in learning what that food is or what that Japanese word means. For example, a recent subbed episode of Dr. Slump (143) mentions the food manjū and the TN explains what a manjū is; at first I nearly misread it as the word manga.
Fansubbers, keep subbing obscure anime or new ones! Keep working hard! As long as it isn't something like "Just according to keikaku - (TN: Keikaku means plan)" for example or if you're subbing for the first time don't make these errors above! I'm not mad or don't like being mad at other people or even arguing/having a debate with others, I still care about the hard work these subbers put into.
I'm fine with some Japanese words over English unless it's something like Pokémon or the above mentioned keikaku; I get that they're being respectful but I'm more used to the English names of the Pokémon than the Japanese ones, but it made me curious about some of the Japanese monster names for some when I watched the English subbed version for the first time, however I stopped watching the subs halfway since people were streaming Journeys episodes on YT and although I didn't understand the dialogue since it was in Japanese, I only cared for the action and Ash's journey so that I wouldn't be spoiled while waiting for the dub.
Again, keep it up and don't make these above mistakes! Sending encouragement! Keep subs consistent!❤️
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Update (8/13): So I visited an anime store in my local area today and turns out, they have complete DVD collections of City Hunter and Cat's Eye! Didn't buy them because I already finished both but man, why didn't I buy the actual official DVD's instead of watching the fansubs! Oh well. 😅
