Editor's Note

The good, the bad, and the ugly: Fan Subtitled Anime

One recent weekend I had an opportunity to watch a sampling of a wide variety of current fan-subtitled anime. Speaking as someone who has done translating and subtitling both as a fan and as a professional, I found that they could be sorted into the three categories listed below.

The Good

Subtitles are clean, clear, and unobtrusive. The translations are nicely done and rendered into sensible, intelligible English. Unfortunately, this was the rarest category. These people invested a lot of time (and very little ego) into their work.

The Bad

The subtitles were for the most part okay. Sometimes the font was a little small, and thus was degraded since the copy we saw obviously wasn't a master. However, the big problem with the "bad" group is not necessary with the mechanics of the subtitling, but with the translation. Lines were completely wrong, unintelligible, or just plain missing! What's the point of subtitling a show if you leave out one-third of the dialog? And if you credit someone with being an "editor," shouldn't they actually edit the dialog so that it is readable? I'm not talking about typos here—I'm talking about lines like "I'll becoming very mad and over the bridge."

The Ugly

This refers to one thing and one thing only: fonts! The font craze seems to have infected some recent fan subtitlers. Each show was in a different font., and some shows have several fonts each÷one for narration, one for thoughts, and one for spoken dialog. Several of these fonts bordered on unreadable because similar looking letters, such as "a", "o", and "c", were nearly indistinguishable.
The function of subtitles is pragmatic rather than aesthetic÷readability is the foremost concern. If the subtitles cannot be read, what's the point? Subtitles should also be unobtrusive. I watch anime for the anime, not to be dazzled by the latest subtitling technology.
Of course, all of this is entirely my opinion, and I'm certainly not going to tell those who invest their time in this labor-intensive endeavor how to do it. From my conversations with others about this, however, I know that I'm not alone in my opinions.
And before you write nasty e-mail telling me that I don't have to watch fansubs, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly. Some of the ones I saw I would never watch again; that's fine, since my Japanese is good enough that I can do without subtitles for most things. But there are many people who cannot. And a bad subtitling job can and often does negatively affect the viewer's opinion of the show, and that is at cross purposes with subtitling the show in the first place.

Ex animo,

Charles McCarter
Publisher/Editor in Chief

Charles McCarter

Keith Rhee

Chad Kime

Peter Cahill
Roderick Lee
Charles McCarter

Peter Cahill
Eugene Cheng
Ken Cho
Eri Izawa
Mark Johnson
Roderick Lee
Egan Loo
Charles McCarter
Maria Muñoz
Taku Otsuka
Keith Rhee

Geir Friestad
Chris Kohler
Tom Larsen
Eugene Moon
Keith Rhee

Sun Hak "Sonny" Chung
David Van Cleef
Scott Frazier
Geir Friestad
Chad Kime
Eric "Scanner" Luce
Mark Simmons
Albert Wong

Eric "Scanner" Luce

The SPJA (Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation) and OBJECTIVE CONSULTING INC. for donating server space and making this magazine possible.

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