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!
Do you have a list of groups who do subs like these? Or at least a few group names to look out for, after watching Bleach with subs like these I’ve become spoiled 😂
Sorry, I don’t have a list like this but I think this particular subs were made by the FFFansub group.
I always appreciate good subs but I never went into the rabbit hole of subbing groups. I only know a few names that make sure that subs aren’t terrible.
Maybe it would be a good idea to make a dedicated post for that?
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).
My MAL profile says I joined the community in 2019 but I did watch a few shows before that. I did a little time travel to the 2000s when I only watched shows from those years and I honestly felt back then like I was in 2006. I couldn’t yet appreciate everything though. There were so many things I missed. When I go back now to watch some of those older shows I have this warm feeling of nostalgia. I dream about waking up to those days with all the appreciation and understanding I have now… But still I think I can’t say all the passion went away. Sure subs are terrible, but scanlations are awesome, sure there are a lot of trash shows but there are also shows like Frieren that are products of passion. Akihabara is still alive and well. Comiket also is as big as ever.
What I want to say is that I don’t think there’s no passion anymore, just that certain parts of industry become soulless husks of themselves.Akihabara is still alive and well. Comiket also is as big as ever.
Some of the people I follow have been complaining in the past as well about changes in Akihabara. Granted, they were complaining about electronic stores dying out there and not anime-related stuff, so I’m not sure how that translates. I think I also read or heard complaints about Comiket being just a big corporate event instead of the place where people go to sell their doujins. I remember something about winter Comiket now being the new main event for those non-corporate exhibitions.
What I want to say is that I don’t think there’s no passion anymore, just that certain parts of industry become soulless husks of themselves.
You are right, the passion is not lost entirely, but looking at the fandom as a whole, I feel like it has become so large and commercialized that the passionate people are just small individual clusters in an ocean of indifferent people and ads. I base this only on my own views and how it feels to me, and I certainly have changed as well over the years.
You’re definitely right that so many things become too large and commercialized but I’d disagree that passionate people become insignificant drop in the ocean. I might be wrong since I always follow and interact with fans of the medium and try to distance myself from anyone that brings nothing but negativity but I feel like passion still has a very strong presence and it won’t fall this easily!
Akiba is constantly changing but it’s still a heart of otaku culture. If you ever have a chance to visit please do so. It’s a truly magical place for both electronics and anime.
Comiket story is funny because it was created to give the middle finger to corporations. Now that corporate came back crawling and started to feel too comfortable fans pushed back. We’ll see how it goes but if Comiket becomes what is swore to destroy then I guess a new challenger will appear.
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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
<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.
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
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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.
I’ve never finished bleach because dattebayo stopped subbing it and the official subs are just trash to me in comaprison
Go to nyaa.si and search for “bleach v2”, it should be 320 GB adjacent in size and contains all eps, but be warned it uses JP BluRay as the source so filler eps (e.g. Bount arc, entire S09) are in DVD quality.
I’m doing a rewatch before starting TYBW and I replaced the DVD eps with official subs from another source but I’m just skipping them in this rewatch.
Those subs are as good as the old Dattebayo subs, trust.
Thanks for the tip!
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.
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 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.In 2002 when Naruto first aired? Yeah, a lot of dubs were pretty bad back then, they cut a lot of corners and didn’t always hire the best talent. But today, voice acting is taken so much more seriously now, and there is a lot of equally fantastic talent in the west. Hell, there are some shows I’ve watched just because a VA I like is in them.
I feel like this kind of elitism towards dubs comes from people who grew up in that era when dubs sucked, but haven’t noticed that times have changed since then.
I stopped watching dubs many years ago. At first it was only because there weren’t any dubs for new releases but then it just sounded a little bit better. Now whenever I see someone post some clip in dub I’m amazed how bad it sounds compared to the original. I’m not saying it’s bad overall. I saw a YouTube video where two youtubers were recording a few lines for some game, it was so terrible compared to professional voice actors, so yeah I know how good pro VAs are but I also compared this to Japanese VAs it was still way better.
No matter how bad or insignificant the show is I have yet to hear bad japanese voice acting. Animation and the plot can be worse than PowerPoint presentation for school project, it can be a shitty mobile game ad, voice acting is always top notch.
Voice acting in Japan is way bigger industry than it is anywhere else in the world. The amount of effort they put into it is just unreal.Another thing is that dubs are changing what the character says and it’s by design! Aside from some outrageous examples like Kobayashi Dragon Maid where they changed the whole meaning of the dialog for no real reason all dubs need to add or cut some stuff from each sentence to match lip movements. Depending on translator abilities it can be barely noticeable to completely change character personality.
I explained this with more details when I was complaining about dub-subs (audio description from dub put as subtitles). If you want you can read it here.I don’t think it’s elitism. I don’t shame anyone for watching dubs. You can do whatever the hell you want! I don’t judge. I’m just saying that the original is always better than dub.
I’m just saying that the original is always better than dub.
To say that as if it’s universal is exactly what I’m trying to say is wrong. Especially if your justification is “it’s not 1:1 so it’s bad” - SungWon Cho, who IMO is one of the most talented English VAs out there, has a response to that that’s way better than I can ever put it.
I mean this dude from the video is right. Just because the character sounds different doesn’t make the dub bad. But I never claimed it does. My argument boils down to two points:
- Japanese VAs are usually more skilled artists due to various reasons,
- Translations are often sloppy and change meaning
What makes dub bad is the combination of those factors.
He also mentioned dub being transformative. He’s not exactly wrong but it’s not a good thing. Be too transformative and it stops being original work and it becomes a thing of its own. It doesn’t make dub automatically bad but it’s also a thing that should be kept in mind.
Also I really recommend watching some comparison videos between dubs in different languages. Some suck some are pretty good. Very entertaining.
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!
Only a few people can devote the time and effort to make those fansubs, for free.
