Who is/was the worst fansub group?

Who is/was the worst fansub group?

did they always have that logo? what are they, an airline?

DameDame was the best.

Competition's pretty tight. You'd need to split them all into seven clans and give them swords and shit. Bonus points if you get them to do it in cosplay, and with real weapons.

Too many obscure ones to remember, but the worst known one, to me, was Hadena.

Some people would consider commie and gg for the memes, which depending on your viewpoint may have no place in a fansub.

That said, CR has _really_ dropped the ball with subs lately, especially when they use Aniplex subs, literally worse than fansub sometimes.

LIME

And whoever does subs for Sentai shows, they're just outright terrible half of the time.

Commie.

Anime-4-ever
I miss when anime was fansubbed, people still seemed to like it

They started taking themselves seriously after funimation bought them out or whatever happened back then

ED

Fuck I miss DB. Those guys were hilarious. Their April 1 releases always triggered me.

Amen.

>dattebayo
Fuck what a blast from the past. Kaizeku was worse honestly. Random ass untranslated words,and obnoxious font effects for character attacks. They made fansubs a lot worse in general since a lot of groups used that style as the "standard" for a while

Nah they just finally gave up when Crunchyroll went legal. By that point they were a laughing stock for still releasing hardsubbed avi encodes

...

>See Nix v. Hedden

>AnimeJunkies
Fuck those guys. Literally holding subs hostage until some weird criteria they had for that week was fulfilled.

animelabs or any fansub group who thought they were cool for adding a bunch of cuss words to make shounen seem more mature

...

>Literally holding subs hostage until some weird criteria they had for that week was fulfilled.
Wait, this I don't remember. Remind me what kind of demands they made?

I can't believe I miss that

While I'm at it.

...

I don't remember them being that bad, just slow as shit. The other OP subs I'd sometimes find were google translate tier so I ended up watching raws after reading the manga.

Tie between Commie & Deadfish

(You)

Not sure if you remember but I remember when Crunchyroll used to have tolerable subs. Now-a-days it seems like they're using more American Slang and shit to appeal to a wider audience.

Either HorribleSubs, Deadfish or Coalgirls.

>(You)

That's all I ever download. What should I be watching?

I remember them being very much decent enough to kill off the subgroups for good, but for a year or two they've not been doing so well for some titles, so much that we're seeing some minor user/fansub resurgence even.

Does anyone have the pic of the time their translator defended yellow subs because the way they made you angry correlated to how you should feel when the villain is onscreen?

Nothing because you fell for his bait.

Horrible.

>to appeal to a wider audience.
Because a product like anime would be so profitable to appeal to a small niche of hardcore viewers in the west.
Protip: Commercially licensing anime means appealing to a wide audience for any sort of profit to happen.
Legal licensing also means having to use even an shitter TL from the publisher if required.

To be honest, isn't anime only appealing to a small niche of hardcore viewers in the west?

DB were as alright as a bunch of fat obnoxious weebs could get. They were sort of proto-commie.

>episode was preempted by soccer? release a torrent of the soccer game
>feeling bored by this shitty filler? entertain self with trollsubs like literally translating everyone's names so now people are being referred to as Strawberry and Rotten Wood or shit like that.

TV-Nihon

Every single one.

Cheer Fruits was HIDIVE, not CR.

It's just that the number of people watching anime is growing, as the current watchers are getting older and the new young watchers join the crowd. In 10, in 20 years this will be a very lucrative business to be in.

Sup Forums unironically defends 2 and 4 these days.

I don't remeber anybody defending fucked up ass tags.

But she's right, you know. The so called "official" translations are done by "professionals" paid by the hour who probably deal with a dozen projects a year without even checking the lore/background of them, they apply the same standards regardless of content because that's the minimum necessary to get paid and get by.

Also whoever did these

Have you seen the shit that this industry keeps pumping out? How the fuck are you gonna get mainstream audiences to watch shows that are by default unappealing to mainstream audiences?

That's not my experience with professional translators.

In that case you have very limited experience with professional translators.

How many do you know personally?

That's irrelevant. Personally knowing a translator doesn't give you any sort of expertize to talk about their work in general. It would take a very dedicated translator to actually spend hours and hours of their time to familiarize themselves with the subject matters relating to every given translation job. They're not paid that much and there's deadlines too so they'd have to use their free time to research. And there is very few translators who get to choose what they translate. I'm not saying there isn't any translators who do their job that well, but I am saying that the number is very low and you can see it in the quality of the work, many times even if you know the language just a little.

4Kids did it right, butchering and replacing unappealing content of course.
CR trying to appeal to everybody, while still trying to get the monopoly on ALL airing titles (literally impossible for every single title to appeal everyone on CR), indirectly started the end of anime as we know it, you'll see when it gets worse after the 2020's olympics.

Not many months ago a famous media group in my country created a hour-long documentary on otaku culture portraying it as something insanely maniacal, showing only what was fitting their narrative, shit I didn't even know existed, like akiba's black market of teenage escorts, half-truths and what not that make you think "this shit is weird yo what the fuck is japan doing" when it's really a very rare and limited occurrence not much of a big deal and worse happens in many other "ok" countries.

Enlighten me then, how can "professional" translators, who deal with plenty of projects at once and don't bother to work after 4PM because it would be free work, put out a better job than somebody who does it like once or twice a year and is fan of the series, knows all the background and stuff about the story, gets feedback from dozen people from the internet and listens to it for improving future works, unlike "pros" who either QC on their own or hire some one random "pro" who also doesn't know shit about the series?
Professionals aren't any better than big groups who hoard all for epeen and attention, like our beloved Natbols meme group.

I just don't think you actually know their process. It's rare for a translator to just be given something without any context. Most of the time translation houses try to keep the same translator on any given series they have the rights to. That doesn't mean there aren't bad translators out there, I just don't think it has anything to do with how holistic their understanding of the material is.

DUWANG, YOUR-MOM were among the intentionally bad subs that were dear to my heart.
Horrible lived up to its name before it actually stopped subbing and ripped CR TL's. Now what's horrible is how the industry is.
gg was annoying for their VLC trolling/MPC master race dicking sucking, dattebayo was annoying for shitposting leddit memes before leddit came into existence
I think kaizoku-fansubs did the most damage by single-handedly shaping a generation of retards with One Piece, by leaving things like "nakama" untranslated.
oh, who could forget Nyoro~n that made shit up?
Triad was the best sub group. RIP.

Well that's the point I was making. It's very fucking difficult for them to do it any better. No one's saying they're doing especially bad job, just that it'd be very hard for them to do the kind of stellar job constantly, exactly because of the reasons you already seem to understand.

But it really does have a lot to do with it. Especially when talking about anime or some other smaller medium. If you speak more than one language you know what I mean. There are lot of languages that are for example heavily context based and knowing the actual vocabulary and grammar is rarely enough to create accurate translations even in simple conversations. I admit I don't know how much of context they're generally provided with, but I speak 4 languages and every time I've seen translations made in any of those languages I encounter this exact problem. It might be that you happen to know especially good translators who get paid well and know their stuff, but vast majority of them have to work fast and with seemingly limited contextual resources and that in itself creates challenges which can then be seen in the translation.

Taken to an extreme, they could just rewrite the dialog with anything that could possibly fit with what is shown on screen, as long as it increases the audience size. Great for a company wanting to make money, but ultimately eliminates the original audience.

>it'd be very hard for them to do the kind of stellar job constantly
And that's why pros are shit, it's not their job to do things right, their job is to respect standards that bring money in their pockets.
Have you read Danmachi official english release? since when childhood friends talk to each other with "Miss." and retarded honorifics like that?
The fan-made translation wasn't using the best grammar but the translator knew his shit, he knew the personalities of each character and their relationships. Just being grammatically correct doesn't mean shit when you're doing everything else wrong, but that's not requirement of pros, because they've to look like pros.

Honestly, I think the issue is that no one who can speak both languages will ever be satisfied with a translation. I certainly have become less forgiving since I've picked up basic moon. I don't disagree that translation houses are often complete garbage, but I think it has less to do with how well the translator understands the work, and more to do with purposeful decisions made for their audience. Editors care more about flow than accuracy. And when I've been in the booth watching a dub happen, it's very apparent that directors don't know the language, and care more about making it fit the lip flaps and their mental conception of the show.

In my opinion, there are no professionals translating light novels or manga. They're disinterested amateurs who get paid.

>They're disinterested amateurs who get paid.
That's exactly what the industry calls a "pro" sadly.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of them even hated Japanese but sucked it up anyway because they have to pay the bills and this was the only job offer they could apply for.

There are serious translators out there doing good work, they just translate real books. I think Murakami has a pretty consistent translator who does a fine job.

I don't doubt that there're good translator who do it for a profession, I'm just sick of publishers buying licenses for stuff I'm reading and forcing the unofficial translation to be pulled out of the internet, then they pull stupid shit like that in Danmachi because they don't have translators who know what's actually going on in the stuff they're translating.
I'm sure if you wrote a complain to some personal "pro" translator's twitter account they'd just say "chill bro, it's just a light novel..." like they've the right to look down on anything when they're getting paid for it.

My point is that you'll only ever get the kind of dedication you need with the High Lit type translations. You need someone whose passion is translation, but manga and light novels are translated by people whose passion is manga and light novels.

NAKED SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND

Whether a branch of literature deserves more or less credit is entirely subjective and I've many doubts about these translators having any passion in what they do anyway.

>啊
Boy, do I miss these.

I meant the numbered points below the screencaps, silly.

Triad was definitely top tier. I miss the old guard.

You're right, I will defend honorifics in most cases. For any given culture that doesn't have its own direct hierarchical translations, you just lose nuance, and subs are allowed to be more obtuse than dubs.

When they started translating attack names for Bleach I was done with them forever.

fuck CR

I remember these retards had an option for paid "professional" dvd releases in their site. I don't know how they got away with that.

>give me an feeling so complicated
Laughed harder than I should have

No, they're not the only one. And they're right. It helped Bleach a lot.

>CR
>fansubs
Yet they are still the worst.

Most serious, professional Japanese-to-English translators are working in either the legal or technical fields. Patents, especially automotive and pharmaceutical patents, are extremely lucrative and have much higher demand than the limited amount of anime, manga, light novels, and fiction works coming out of Japan and being published in the U.S.

That's not to say that anime companies don't hire good translators; they do test everyone they hire. However, just because one does well on a test doesn't mean they'll do well in practice. There's definitely a lot of turnover. As far as I know, Crunchyroll is known for this as they pay very low and don't have the highest standards compared to "bigger" studios.

There's also the issue of some anime studios providing their own translations for their series or movies, which sometimes make it to publication. These translations are done by non-native English speakers and are notably horrendous, but distribution companies often don't have the time or manpower to run it through a full editing pass, so it gets released as-is. In these cases the translation is adjusted and corrected (and sometimes completely re-translated) for the DVD/BD release.

Source: I work in the industry

I'll always defend 2. It literally cannot be translated.
You can only go so far with leaving honorifics alone though. Something like "X-kun" or "X-san" etc. is fine but the retarded TV-Nihon shit like "X-tachi" is bullshit since you can easily translate that shit without losing any significant meaning.

Hadena.

They were machine translations from Hong-Kong DVD's I believe. I still laugh when they call Joey "Serenity"

>that pic
This completely applies to Viz Media. Fuck these localization retards.

>King me
Duwang's will always be the best.

simply masterful

>I think kaizoku-fansubs did the most damage by single-handedly shaping a generation of retards with One Piece, by leaving things like "nakama" untranslated.
Don't forget they would edit blood in some episodes to try to make it look "more like the manga"

>Don't forget they would edit blood in some episodes to try to make it look "more like the manga"
visual examples? i googled "kaizoku fansubs blood" and while i did see reports, i haven't seen visual proof

So why bother with translating at all if there are no equivalents for Japanese's myriad of ways of saying the same thing depending on social standing of parties involved? Can't translate that, you lose nuance, game over!

The only good fansubs are from small one-man teams doing a show they're passionate about, like the Vivd Strike subs. Any group with a recognizable name trying to outdo one another by seeing who has the fanciest karaoke or highest quality graffiti plastered on the show is fucking awful. This includes "good" groups like utw or FFF.

I have to give Underwater some credit for offering two sub tracks so you had the option for full honorifics.

To be fair, they were the only ones consistently fanTLing One Piece for a long time and they were very adept at it making attempts to TL everything related to One Piece because they wanted to bring it to fans really hard. Especially during the 4Kids One Piece era. They pushed the fansub hard.

>Vivd
I wonder who could be behind this post.

Yeah right, have you ever tried to actually switch the tracks or just settled with whatever your player loads first and assumed the the secondary track would have honorifics because somebody said so on Sup Forums?
Sadly, I often found the secondary track to be IDENTICAL to the first, because nobody ever switches tracks and Underwater knows, they're making fools of all you retards.
They're no better than trollsubs and not using honorifics by default makes them even worse than CR.

>trying to create an nth daiz conspiracy
Keep it up guys.

>honorifics are a bad thing
Let's make an example: there're 4 girls, they're all friends one of them calls the names of the other 3 friends like this:

Miku-chan
>a shy petite girl

Ninocchi
>tomboy carefree girl

Nana-san
>composed girl with disinterested attitude

How do you translate this to English, without losing in the process all the different feelings that the girl is conveying when she calls her friends using these different honorifics? you can't, it would simply become:

Miku, Nino, Nana.

This is not a translation, it's 4kids-tier butchering.

Often, not always.

There's workarounds but it's simply autism at this point anyway. Leaving honorifics make your adaptation retarded. Either adapt it or remove it. It's the same for anything that don't have an 1:1 translation and that applies for every language.
If you consider removing honorifics for the sake of localization "butchering", I wonder how would you call your average scanlation/novel translation when it's most of the time filled with such localization.
Just learn the damn language if you want to have the True Experience™.

>autism
>retarded
Not an argument.

>localization
Nobody wants a localization, anime is not for normalfags, leave that shit to FUNi and 4kids.

>your average scanlation/novel translation when it's most of the time filled with such localization
Fan-made translation almost never remove honorifics, because they care.

>Just learn the damn language if you want to have the True Experience™.
This is just like saying "I don't give a shit about making good translations, go learn Japanese"

What are you making translations even for? to show off your cool twitter avatar? if you don't care, leave the series to somebody who does.

I also think it's because anime is still thought of as mere cartoons so there's no inherent reason to try. As you said, the actual pros work in the legal or technical fields. I'd imagine even a single word mistranslated (especially in law) could be extremely consequential. Compounded by the fact that the medium is not in English makes it obvious why these official streaming sites don't give a shit.

Just my headcanon though, in any case.

FFF

"bitch"
"whore"
"slutface"
etc

>they had "yosh" and "baka" untranslated a few times at the beginning so they're the worst ever

no

>Either adapt it or remove it. It's the same for anything that don't have an 1:1 translation
Honorifics aside, how about terms, methodology, or even language specific tales and the like? Literally things that do not exist in English because we don't have or use it. If I may be retarded for a bit, it's like translating "Tokyo" to "East Capital" all to uphold the belief that everything should be translated.

And it's all hard subbed