So yeah, here’s a comparison of all the major translation errors in episode 3 released by Nyoro~n Fansubs. Of course since I do translation checking for Mendoi-Conclave, you can say that I have a vested interest in doing this comparison. But keep in mind that I didn’t make anything up and all the errors are really there when you watch their release. Enjoy.

Original: よもや君に出会えようとは
Nyoro~n: Oh come now, this is just like when I first saw you.
Menclave: Who would’ve thought… facing you like this…

Original: おとめ座のわたしには、センチメンタリズムな運命を感じずにはいられない
Nyoro~n: You’re not going to end this fated battle without returning my sentimentalities.
Menclave: Being a Virgo, I can’t help but feel this is a sentimental destiny.
Comment: Completely missing out the first half of the sentence (Virgo part). I agree that “sentimental destiny” sounds really stupid, but at least it doesn’t alter the meaning.

Original: それとも、光の粒子を出していなかったから見つけられたのか……
Nyoro~n: Or perhaps you thought I hadn’t noticed that light that’s streaming out of you?
Menclave: Or was I able to find you because you forgot to send out those glowing particles?
Comment: An honest mistake, I’m sure.

Original: 手土産に…破片の1つもいただいていく！
Nyoro~n: I admire your strength… So I’m going to take you back in one piece!
Menclave: As a souvenir… I’ll take a piece of you with me!
Comment: WTF?

Original: いやはや、本当に予測不能な人だよ君は
Nyoro~n: Goodness gracious, you’re certainly someone who grasps your shortcomings far too late, aren’t you?
Menclave: My, my, you’re such an unpredictable character.
Comment: Nice…

Original: 今回の戦闘で得られたガンダムのデータは、フラッグ1機を失ったとしてもおつりがくる
Nyoro~n: We got some battle data on the Gundam, and your Flag was unharmed.
Menclave: Considering the data we obtained on the Gundam during this fight, even losing the Flag would have been a good trade.
Comment: Hey, at least all the important keywords are there!…This time~nyoro~

Original: それにしても若かったな…ソレスタルビーイングのパイロットは
Nyoro~n: I just did this to better understand… that Celestial Being pilot.
Menclave: Besides all that, he sure was young… Celestial Being’s pilot.
Comment: LOL~!! wakai (young) != wakaru (understand)

Original: モビルスーツの動きに感情がのっていたのさ
Nyoro~n: When you’re moving a mobile suit, you tend to lose yourself.
Menclave: I could read his feelings from the way he moved his mobile suit.

Original: 10分以内に速報配信！次のニュースは現地からの中ç¶ã ï¼3æ‚間以内に人革主席の公式声明が出るぞ！
Nyoro~n: There’s got to be something that’s been leaked. Just run a recap for the next newscast; this time tomorrow you all better have something to give me!
Menclave: Send out this news flash within the next 10 minutes! Do a live on-site broadcast for the next news segment! The head of the Human Reform League is making an official statement in less than 3 hours!
Comment: Okay, Nyoro~n, now you are just making shit up.

Original: 枠を空けとけ！
Nyoro~n: Get your asses in gear!
Menclave: Keep that time slot open!
Comment: Mmmm…ass…

Orignial: 21世紀のセキュリティはあってないようなものだからな
Nyoro~n: Besides, there’s no way a man from the 21st century could be around today.
Menclave: Security in the 21st century was almost non-existent, after all.
Comment: Not even close.

Major WTF Errors

Actually I am sick of this. It’s only 5 minutes into the episode and a quick glance through the rest of Nyoro~n’s script reveals that the entire thing is full of nonsense. But I’ll just highlight a few more MAJOR MISTAKES, some of them which totally changed the entire plot. I have doubts that the translator speaks any Japanese at all.

Original: 僕たちに弱点があるとãã‚Œã°ã€ã‚¬ãƒ³ãƒ€ãƒ ãŒãªã„とプトレマイオスの活動æ‚間が極端にéå®šã•ã‚Œã¦ã—まうと
Nyoro~n: If there was one weak point for us… It would be that our Gundams are severely limited by the need to periodically return to the Ptolemaios.
Menclave: If we have a weak point, it’s that, without the Gundams, the operational time of the Ptolemaios would be extremely limited.
Comment: This may sound counter-intuitive, but yes, the Gundams really are Ptolemy’s power source. The original Japanese dialogue made it very clear.

Original: アイルランドのアルスター地方では、散çºçš„ではありまããŒã€ãƒ†ãƒ­è¡Œç‚ºãŒ4世紀近くにわたって続いていまã
Nyoro~n: Ireland’s Ulster Volunteer Forces are scattered across the country, though those factions who engage in terrorist activities remain hidden.
Menclave: In Ireland’s Ulster region, though sporadic, terrorist acts have been occurring for approximately four centuries.

Original: 材質はEカーボン。最新素材ではありまããŒã€æ§‹é€ ä¸Šã€ç›®æ–°ã—い技術は確認されていません
Nyoro~n: It’s well-reinforced with carbon, the technology on the inside is cutting edge, some of it’s unheard of.
Menclave: It’s made out of E-carbon. It’s made out of the most up-to-date material, but, in terms of design, we cannot find any new technology being used.
Comment: The whole point of this dialogue is to show that CB are really careful not to divulge their technological secrets. Great job missing the whole point, Nyoro~n.

Original: あの特殊粒子は、ステルス性のほかに機体制御にも使われている
Nyoro~n: If we obtain a sample of that special particle, we can achieve the same results.
Menclave: Those special particles, besides their stealth features, are also used for controlling the suit.

Original: おそらくは、火å¨ã«ã‚‚転用されているじゃろうて
Nyoro~n: So you’re going to give a Flag the firepower to match him?
Menclave: They’re likely to be applied as weapons too.

Original: 恐ろしい男じゃ、わしらより何十年も先の技術を持っておる
Nyoro~n: He’s a wicked man. 70 years ago I learned of his deceit.
Menclave: A dreadful man… having technology that’s several decades ahead of us.
Comment: STOP MAKING THINGS UP!!!

Original: わしは麻薬などというものが心底嫌いでな！焼き払ってくれるというなら、ガンダムを支持したい
Nyoro~n: That’s not the role you’re meant to fill, you need to be remade before then. I want to teach you what you need to blow the Gundam away.
Menclave: I hate narcotics from the bottom of my heart. If they intend to burn that down, I’ll support the Gundams.
Comment: Uh… How the fuck did you even get that?

Original: エネルギー、ヴァーチェからトレミーへの転送準å‚完了、転送開始しまã
Nyoro~n: Virtue now drawing energy from the solar furnace.
Menclave: Energy, transfer preparations from Virtue to Ptolemy complete.
Comment: Once again, Nyoro~n totally fucks up the relationship between Ptolemy and Gundams. Oh well, at least they are being consistent about it. :)

Original: ソレスタルビーイングを利用ãã‚‹å›½ã€‚その国ãã‚‰åˆ©ç”¨ãã‚‹å›½
Nyoro~n: Celestial Being begins to be received by countries. These countries become host nations.
Menclave: The nations who make use of Celestial Being. The nations who use those nations.
Comment: Once again, I admit the shortcomings of Menclave’s version. It sounds a little weird in English, but at least that’s what the original dialogue is saying. We didn’t make things up! Yay!

Conclusion

Keep in mind that beyond the first 5 minutes of the episode, I only chose to highlight selective mistakes because it would probably take me a few hours more to document the whole thing. There’s something wrong with at least 70% of the lines. The translator goes to great length to make it sound like he knows what he is doing, such that his so-called “translations” sound reasonable to someone who doesn’t speak Japanese. That is, in my humblest opinion, dishonest and disturbing.

If you don’t understand a single word of Japanese at all, it’s better for you to watch the raws than to watch Nyoro~n. I hesitate to call their release a “translation” because in reality it is closer to being a parody sub. It’s as if the “translator” decided to write his own story because he didn’t like Sunrise’s scriptwriters. If you are a Gundam fan, please, for the love of Haruhi and all that is good, wait for some other group to release. It doesn’t even have to be Mendoi-Conclave…

If my experiences are anything to go by, some commentators will start accusing me of being “elitist” and “not helping the situation” just about now. But this time I learnt my lesson. Rest assured that Nyoro~n’s translator has had his mistakes pointed out to him many, many times before I typed this blog entry. He continues to insist that he knows what he is doing. Fine, here’s my proof otherwise.

That said, Nyoro~n’s release does offer hours of quality entertainment for someone who speaks Japanese. It’s hilarious. :)

This has been a public service announcement from a guy with too much free time on his hands.

The top on is from episode 2’s raw while the bottom one is from our awesomerific (I’m using this word a lot recently) 1280×720 release. (It’s worth the extra 170MB!) Can’t see the difference? Click on them to see the bigger version.

And that is why we were slower than the other groups for episode 2. We’ll be faster next time. :P

This has huge implications for anime fansubbing. For good or for bad.

But first, let’s take a huuuuge detour and look at a little comparison between fansubs and official DVD releases…

Speed

Fansubs have always been faster than commercial releases. Even if a show was pre-licensed and released with subtitles only, physical distribution just can’t beat BitTorrent.

Fansubs win by a wide margin.

Quality

Fansubs appear to have the upper hand with their fancy karaoke effects and typesetting, but in reality commercial translations are of significantly higher value. Personally, I would rather have professionally translated and edited subtitles than colourful effects. Official translations are done with the original script on hand, which makes a lot of difference compared to me translating Happiness! by ear.

Of course there are exceptionally good fansub translators, such as crustol who used to translate for AnimeOne, but they are extremely rare because if you are that good, you are usually getting paid to translate. Watching Triad’s Nanoha reminded me of just how bad fansubs are…

DVDs win. But I guess some people, such as Doremi fanboys, don’t care about translation quality. :P

Price

R1 DVDs are certainly not as overpriced as their R2 counterparts, but even factoring in the manufacturing cost, quite a huge portion of the price tag goes into overheads (wholesalers, retailers, transport…). Fansubs, like all other forms of piracy, are not exactly free. There is a moral cost involved which is dependent on your conscience and a risk cost involved which is dependent on your country’s copyright enforcement. Generally speaking, most fans want to support their favourite series and in that sense official DVDs have the advantage of providing a warm and fuzzy feeling after you purchase them…until you look into your emptied wallet.

It’s hard to compare this, so I have come up with a brilliant formula instead.

Makes no sense? Well I thought so…

To put it simply, fansubs are not free because money is not the only cost involved. However, fansubs generally still enjoy a “price” advantage because we are all heartless pirates and Big Brother has more things to worry about than cartoon pirates. Unless of course you live in Singapore. Ops.

Conclusion

Commercial releases are of higher quality than fansubs, (again, unless you live in Singapore. Ops.) but physical distribution is the fail. The only reason people like me buy DVDs is for the extras that come with the limited editions, which defeats the point of having DVDs at all.

In this age where data can be copied as many times as desired for almost no cost, it’s only a matter of time before the death of physical media arrives. Well, except for books because they provide a significantly different experience than from reading an e-book, whereas watching anime off a DVD or an exact digital copy makes zero difference to the viewer. So books are safe, that is of course until digital paper technology is perfected.

iTunes recently overtook Amazon as the 4th largest music retailer in USA. It’s only a matter of time.

What about anime?

It’s not going to happen overnight, but eventually the best model for the anime industry (at least IMO) is to legally distribute the anime episodes themselves as cheaply as possible to an audience as large as possible over the Internet, and then make a killing off selling merchandises (i.e. things that still hold meaning because they cannot be digitized…yet). It’s like how non-label bands give away their songs for free online and make money by holding live concerts and charging people $5 for a can of Coke.

By switching to digital distribution, the speed advantage of piracy is automatically gone. Commercial releases will still enjoy the advantage of higher quality. Because the overheads associated with physical distributions are gone, the price will be low enough (with a little push from fanboyism) to “underprice” the guilt+risk factors involved in piracy.

Now if only someone would take the first step…

…Or did Viz already?

I believe in a digital future. :P

It seems like Bandai has been getting a lot of, to misuse tj han’s term, “negative energy” recently for the whole Solid State Society fiasco. Some people see my latest rant on the Long Tail phenomenon as an indirect attack on Bandai.

The truth is, as hypocrite as this may sound considering my rant on the Wind incident, I support Bandai in its business decision to protect its profits. Bandai exists not to spread the love for anime but to make money. Popularizing anime is one of the ways through which Bandai can make money but the difference between an end and a mean to an end must be made clear.

It does not serve Bandai’s purpose as a company responsible to its investors to continue to turn a blind eye on fansubbers, especially for its most popular franchises.

It’s illegal. GASP!

First thing first, fansubs are illegal. There is no possible defence. Most of the world belongs to the Berne Convention that establishes the shared international laws of copyright. All rights of all works of any value, monetary or otherwise, belong to their creators unless the creator explicitly releases it to public domain or a set time period has elapsed since the creator’s death.

These rights include the right to translate the work, the right to distribute the work and the right to make derivative works based on it. Fair Use is a clause to grants very limited rights to people to use very limited portions of a copyrighted material for special purposes such as education. You can quote a line from a novel in your school essay without seeking permission from the author. You can watch a DVD with your friends without buying a copy for every one of them. If you translate a movie for your friends and families, then it can probably be considered Fair Use. But once you start distributing the translation online in great numbers, good luck trying to convince the judge/jury (depending on your country).

Fansubbing has nothing to do with Fair Use. Fansubbing is illegal in all countries except certain African states and Pacific islands that you are most likely not living in if you are reading this entry. There is no “grey” area with regards to copyright laws and fansubbing.

That said…

However, fansubbing does have (or did have, if you ask certain experts on the subject) a very special difference from bootlegging and piracy in general.

Fansubs are created for people who fall outside the target audience. As mentioned in my arguments on Wind, fansubs serve to create new markets where there were none. This should always be the main purpose of fansubbing: to induce more fans into the hobby.

The purpose of fansubbing was never to let you “try before you buy” or get things for free if you don’t think they deserve your money. When you think that way, you are basically admitting the fact that those things are available in your local market and they are being sold with you as the target audience. That means that fansubbing, by that stage, has already lost its original meaning: to give us access to shows that have excluded us from their target audience. Because now we ARE the target audience and yet we choose to download pirated copies citing the same reasons that I have heard a million times before in the warez scene long before digital fansubbing took off in the Love Hina era.

It’s more convenient for us to download a fansub than to buy a physical DVD, I agree. That is a limitation of traditional distribution that has to be re-examined by the industry soon. But that does not grant us the god-given right to download and watch fansubs faster than the companies can bring them over to the English-speaking world.

The state of fansubbing

The truth is that fansubbing in America today plays a terribly minute role in promoting new anime series. It probably does a better job at promoting piracy.

Unlike the underground anime fandom of the last century and the ren’ai game community of now, anime has already achieved the amount of success needed to guarantee its continued survival and growth in North America. Fansubbing will occasionally create success stories of an obscure anime title being brought to fame by the internet, but that’s simply insignificant when you compare it to the market that Bandai, ADV and Geneon are enjoying right now. They don’t NEED fansubs.

Pulling statistics out of my ass (actually I think I read this somewhere before), only a very tiny portion of American fans was introduced to anime by fansubs. The anime on TV, the HUUUUUUUUGE variety of anime DVDs and manga you get in stores and the various major anime conventions held in America, those things do a LOT MORE to help promote anime than fansubs are doing now. Clearly, fansubs, at least for the anime market, are losing their original purpose of promoting anime. Without that purpose, fansubs are no different from bootlegs of Hollywood movies.

And indeed, Ghost in the Shell, along with most of Bandai’s portfolio, DO NOT need fansubs. Bandai is well-established in North America and Ghost in the Shell is already very popular there due to the previous titles in the franchise. The very same titles that you can just waltz into a store and purchase, i.e. they are marketed at you! GASP!

Bandai doesn’t need fansubs!

What can Bandai hope to ever gain if it allows fansubs for a series that was created with the obvious intention of being brought over to North America? NOTHING! So what if it appeased a few “fans” who absolutely must watch the series within two days of its Japanese release? There’s no guarantee that the fansubs will reach a bigger North American audience than what the series is already reaching. The only guarantee is that there is now a free and easily-available bootleg copy of the series before it has even been released in the North American market.

If you want to “try before you buy”? Go watch it on cable TV! I bet it’ll be there. You Americans have it all so good but yet you demand for more. There are anime that were created with YOU in mind. Just look for those sponsored by Geneon.

“I want my anime now!” Well it’s not YOURS, it’s BANDAI’S. Shut the fuck up and wait for it.

If you plan to download Solid State Society like I will be doing, please at least admit that you are a pirate. I download pirated games and movies all the time too. But it just sounds terribly silly if you start calling foul when the company tells you to stop pirating. :) Stop pretending to be fighting the good fight, it’s not the 1990s any more.

Repeat after me:

We are just selfish bastards who want to watch anime for free and we have no right to whine if Bandai chooses to do something about it.
We are just selfish bastards who want to watch anime for free and we have no right to whine if Bandai chooses to do something about it.
We are just selfish bastards who want to watch anime for free and we have no right to whine if Bandai chooses to do something about it.

In conclusion

There is a huge difference between fansubbing an obscure eroge-based anime that would never have had a 1/100000 chance of being released for the North American market and fansubbing a series that is pre-licensed and obviously made with the North American market in mind.

Doing the former produces the occasional success stories like KimiNozo (aka Rumbling Hearts).

Doing the latter pisses off the hand that feeds you.

Just some thoughts from a disillusioned ex-fansubber.

[00:25] <gara> this is level1 stalking. just idletime-monitoring.
[00:25] <gara> level2 would be connecting to random other networks to see where you are hiding.
[00:25] <gara> level3 involves figuring out people you know in real life and have them bug you. ;)
[00:26] <gara> aeh. did i say stalking? typo. was supposed to be “proactive project status update distribution”.
[00:34] <ThePaper> ok… im going to blog what you just said now D:
[00:35] <gara> there has been only one case of level3 stalking in my personal history of fansubbing, and while interactii wasnt exactly happy about it, he DID time the damn eppisode very quickly after that. ;)
[00:35] <ThePaper> T_T

Alright. That’s it. No more blogging. Time to sleep…