Doremi-Fansubs = AnimeJunkies v2.0
Here is a note to all fansub groups: Please make sure that your translator actually speaks Japanese! And please make sure that you have at least one other team member on the project who speaks Japanese so that he/she can make sure that the translator isn’t pretending to know Japanese by making random guesses and checking Babelfish!
NEVER TRUST YOUR TRANSLATORS WITHOUT SEEKING A SECOND OPINION!!! (I was one. I know what we do.)
Now here’s a sad, sad example of a “fansub” gone horribly wrong. The following translations are from Doremi-OTOME’s fansub of Mai-Otome DVD Special 8. The torrent can be found here (way at the bottom).
The translator is very cunning. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. But really, I am not certain if he even speaks a single word of Japanese after watching this piece of wombat dung.
Evidence 1
Sounds like reasonable translation? Well here’s what Mai really said in that exact scene:
私、家出同然と学園に来ちゃったんだけど、
I entered the school after running away from home,
運良く援助してくれるお家があって
luckily there was a family who offered to help me
Wow! That sounds like a completely different story now, doesn’t it?!?! How the fuck did the translator miss SO HARD that he nearly landed in a totally whole new continent! Imagine if I didn’t know Japanese and believed in this asshat’s lies. He’s creating a whole new anime with his “translations”.
Evidence 2
Again, this sounds completely reasonable doesn’t it? Well SURPRISE!!!
みんな良い人達だったし、何より条件が破格なくらいよかったのよ。
Everyone was so nice to me and the conditions were just too good.
Wow. Another brilliant translation. I can’t even figure out which word he might have mistaken to produce “trouble”, so I conclude that the translator just made the whole thing up out of thin air. Please also notice that the translator is using present tense. I guess the editor went fishing too, huh?
Evidence 3
最初は逃げようともしたんだけどね、
I tried escaping at first,
その度に捕まっちゃって
but I got caught everytime.
The meaning is changed, but hey, at least he got all the keywords right! CHEERS!!!
Evidence 4
でまぁ、毎日この子とこの谷で過ごしているうちに
So, during the time I spent in this valley together with her, I unknowingly…
うちに？
Unknowingly?
すっかり馴染んでしまいました
I got attached to her completely.
お前という奴は昔から全く変わっていない
You have not changed a bit since then.
I must confess that my translation for the second line isn’t very accurate.
うちに (uchi ni) is used to mean “within a period of time”.
うち (uchi) means “house”.
The translator, in his infinite wisdom, confused the two and just went along with it even though it makes no fucking sense if you stop and think about it for even 1 nanosecond.
The last line is even more hilarious. The translator confused 変わる (kawaru) with かわいい (kawaii) and the meaning of the sentence was TOTALLY RAPED in the most gruesome and inhuman manner possible. For the love of Haruhi and all that is good, what kind of “Japanese translator” confuses “to change” with “cute”!?
Maybe he’s really just a narutard who knows nothing but “NEKO NEKO KAWAII DESU”. Holy shit, I saved the best for the last!
Evidence 5
これは私にの挑戦ですか、氷雪の銀水晶。
Are you challenging me to battle, Silver Crystal of Ice?
あっ、いや・・・あの・・・
Ah, no…I didn’t…
ならばお相手しましょう
Very well, I accept.
Cool. I think this speaks for itself. The translator just had to screw up the funniest part of the video.
EDIT 2
Thanks for informing me that Ladholyman isn’t responsible for the mess up because he only translates from Chinese subs. You can read my follow-up here. But I’ll keep the remarks below for the sake of completeness and preserving history and all that jazz. Just imagine that I’m talking to the Chinese translator instead. :P
END EDIT
Mr. “Translator”: If you can’t figure out what they are saying, please be honest and tell the rest of your team. Your team members do not speak Japanese and trust you enough that they didn’t get a second translator to expose your little lies. You betrayed their trust. If you want to bullshit, at least do it with style like “Mass Naked Child Event” or something. Be creative!
Listen up fansub groups! DON’T let this guy translate anything! Not a single word! Not even if it’s in English!
The rest of those guys are probably cool, but Doremi deserves a good ass-kicking for not having a translation checker. Come on, it’s so fucking basic that it’s not even funny.
This has been a public service announcement brought to you by DarkMirage. I know if you’ve been naughty or good, so don’t even try to %$#%# around with me!
EDIT: I have to add that these are NOT the only mistakes in this 4:32 short video. And also, the first scene is relatively free of mistakes because it was taken from one of the main episodes, meaning the “translator” probably “borrowed” the translation.
August 30th, 2006 at 11:34 am
The words “Lost in Translation” come to mind.
August 30th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Wow, I never was a fan of Mai-Otome (Mary-Sue is not my cup of tea) but thank you for the heads up! But this leads me to a doubt:
Are they screwing up Strawberry Panic? It’s one of their projects and after checking out the Mandarin sub summaries and theirs and Doremi’s are almost exactly the same! It’s either they think somewhat alike or Doremi is strictly Chinese ._.;
August 30th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Of course this is why some of us actually bother to buy our anime on DVD in addition to watching fansubs… companies actually hire professional translators who translate from Japanese to English. ^_^;;
August 30th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Hi, those who recognize my name, you know I’m the translator of Static-Subs, and you know why I’m here.
A member of SS brought this site to my attention, and wow did I get a good gag out of this. The nonsense translations and how this site reveals the sloppy works that Doremi has been releasing, contaminating innocent non-Japanese speaking people’s mind is priceless.
Here’s some inside story that I can share. Those who followed the specials know that there were SS-Doremi joints for specials 2 and 3, and ended after that. Why? Because Doremi was rude enough to ignore the agreed release date/time and make a jump forward. So I stopped providing them with the TL. And anyone noticed how they got the color sub in the later specials when they didn’t for TV and Special 1?
Speed sub is good, but without quality, it’s worthless. I think this group did a great job in proving that. I’d like to give them a hand for being the example of what happens to inaccurate translation. If there is a history book for fansub, they’re name deserves to be in there for the above reason.
Oh, and “Doremi does things that others don’t do?” Must say, “Check again, ” because with the recent stuff, Strawberry Panic is done by over 5 group, and Binbou Shimai got 3 others. So there are plenty of other choices out there.
Lastly, lesson to be learned: Have someone who knows Japanese and English well enough to check the script at some stage, and don’t be lazy about it.
August 30th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
It sucks for us fans who know nothing about Japanese. How can we tell which is or isn’t a good translation? *sigh* Just one more year until I can take actual Japanese classes…
Or do like nooneofconsequence says and buy the DVDs. XD
August 30th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
Pity nobody’s licensed OR that nobody else has picked up Keroro yet, however. It’s a great show, but it’s been ignored because it’s very ‘kiddy’ in its animation style.
Again, however, NOTHING beats AnimeJunkies for the Mass Naked Child Events. Nobody. :D
August 30th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
HarHar for trashing a fansub group’s rep.
HarHar fansubs.
HarHar Internets dorama.
Call the the 4chan party van.
August 30th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
As DarkMirage points out, a person that does Translation Quality Control and someone that does Translation have different roles. A Translator does all of the primary work translating from one language to another while a TQC makes sure the lines are actually what is being said or to point out if something sounds/translated wrong. It’s a lot less work and arguably a lot less taxing on a person’s Japanese capabilities to do TQC since you only have to spot what’s wrong and not make it right.
August 30th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
I have been enjoying Doremi sub’s (Strawberry Panic and Otome Spcials) for a while now, and compared to a lot of other groups out there.. well, it’s not bad at all, and unlike these new groups I’ve seen, they don’t fuck up the typesetting (which matters to me cuz I do that, but obviously not others).. and I haven’t seen many mistakes in the whole TL department.. but then I only know simple Japanese.. (three semesters in college really wasn’t worth jack.)
The whole hype on people making a new fansub group just so they can do something they think is better than some other group, or so they can do it faster… is all a crock of shit, and educated leecher out there will download the group they feel does the best overall job. There have also been the few groups out there a friend or two of mine tried to start, and they always make the same fatal flaw… finding people for all positions EXCEPT the J-E TL .. why is that? because it’s hard as fuck to find someone that has so little of a life outside of college/work/relationships. All three of these groups that friends tried to start failed, and I’m sure more like it happen all the time.
I’ve heard plenty of stories about fake TL’s that can get away with stuff, hell I could prolly do it if I felt like being a total asshole to the fansub community, but this is why all groups need TL Checkers and QC’ers, prevent the whole fucking v2, v3 crap in the first place. Is it really that hard to put in the extra 30 minutes to write down all the massive shit that’s wrong with an ep, pass it along, they fix it, have someone else check it, and once it passes, release? Seems to be that way lately, and barring speed subs, there are really not that many good groups out there any more.. they’re either really fast cuz they want leecher count and nothing more, or really slow cuz they take too much time on stuff (I know slow, I’m in Nanashi and Bakakozou after all, we are the epitome of slow, and guess where all the eps are stuck at in both groups?! –You guessed it, QC… why the hell can’t people spend 30 minutes of their day to watch an anime.. they’d do it anyhow later…
nooneofconsequence mentions that you go buy DVD’s of the anime’s you like, that’s all fine and good if a good company does the anime (just like how there are only a few truely good fansub groups, only a few licensing companies exist too)… I bought the Girls Bravo DVD’s at the last AX, and as I sat there watching them on my laptop, I could just start to count errors (and silverfire in the same hotel room was also correcting stuff and he knows infinitly more japanese than I) Not even companies that supposedly spend time and money on this stuff bother to give it their all!!! It is becomming more and more apparent that everyone would be better off learning Japanese themselves if they want to get the full quality of anime.
Another thing that angers me about companies releasing DVD’s (and why fansubs are so much better) is the sever lack of either, or both, pronunciation of names, places, titles, etc.. as well as the lack of typesetting signs, letters, you name it. After sitting in on the Bandai panel for Eureka seveN, it was quite apparent at how they don’t bother to pronounce anything properly (just listen to how they fuck up saying “eureka”) also various members from Nanashi have watched the Cartoon Network episodes and only come back to IRC to report the countless fuckups in translation or pronunciation.
[/rant]
And main lesson, You can’t trust anyone but yourself, as DM proved here. So go learn Japanese if you care, be ignorant if you don’t. I personally like challenging myself to watch the newest RAW of Bleach just to see what % of the ep I understand.
August 30th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
@Shouta: You’re wrong. When I do translation check work for all the groups I work for, namely Nanashi, I make special notes whenever I find translation errors and I write the mistake, the correct literal translation, and an acceptable figurative meaning that would make sense in English. Not only do I need to be able to find what’s wrong, I need to be able to back it up by offering a suggestion as to what’s correct. An unfortunate side effect to many layers of quality control is a lack of speed, which is apparent from the release intervals from fansubbers who actually care about quality the most deep down inside. The groups that release weekly or on any consistent schedule tend to make sacrifices from quality at some point in time, however small, to maintain that time schedule.
I, for one, belong to the camp that is committed to as accurate translations as possible while sacrificing any speed that is necessary to achieve that quality.
August 30th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Thanks every1, had a good laugh readin all this. XD
August 30th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Wow, thanks for that Dark Mirage. I love helpful and informative posts like this. I appreciate people who love finding problems, complaining about them for cheap laughs and not contributing any kind of solution.
I suggest you get back into fansubbing, and do something useful with your amazing comprehension of the Japanese language rather than simply lying back and insulting people who don’t share you unequaled translation prowess, but are trying.
I don’t mind people pointing out errors in fansubs, but you have no right to personally attack ladholyman for his translations, which were based on the chinese subs (the source of error, you’ll find). Try and be constructive in future rather than derogatory and needlessly rude.
August 30th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
So what if they translate from chinese? At least this allowed them to realease two series other fansubs didnt even have the balls to even touch. And judging from one their early releases, the group seems to improve little by little, beacause unlike other complete dickheads they are open to criticism and admit their mistakes.
August 30th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Washi: So you would rather that I keep my mouth shut and let the problems solve themselves? Just because I’m not the one to solve them doesn’t mean I can’t whine about my annoyance by them.
I mean, people can have cheap laughs off Osama bin Laden and George Bush and now you are telling me that I can’t get cheap laughs off someone just because you know him. It’s the goddamn Internet! I don’t even know who ladholyman was! It wouldn’t have mattered to me no matter who he was, because the translation just SUCKED and he took credit for it.
Anyway, I realized that the fact that he had no idea what the original Japanese lines said means that he isn’t the liar I accuse him of being. But how was I to know, considering he was the one credited for translation in the ED. Hrmmm?
August 30th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Wow… and I’ve never (really) translated anything because there’s always 4-7 words I can’t figure out. :p