
How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers - oscarhong
http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/06/24/how-american-fans-pirated-japanese-cartoons-into-careers/
======
cjslep
I enjoy watching various anime but am by no means into Japanese culture, nor
the American culture that is into Japanese culture. However, when I was first
introduced to anime by a friend (minus Spirited Away) which was Naruto, I was
introduced to the English-subbed versions even though English dubs were
available. After watching a few episodes of listening to Japanese and reading
the subs, I thought it would be a good idea to skip the effort of reading and
watch the English dubbed version instead.

That was a horrible experience. The English dubbed voices seemed to lack
passion or say things in the wrong tones (or just be monotone!). Blue Gender
immediately comes to mind as another painful English dub experience.

So, that is how my teenage self wound up pirating a lot of anime: because the
fansubbing was extremely good and I could pick up on Japanese vocal
intonation. I could actually tell what was a joke, and what was anger, instead
of wondering when someone would have feelings at all in their English
monotone!

In the case of Ergo Proxy, the additional notes in the fansubbing really
helped understand the bigger dialogue. Without it I probably would not have
held that particular show in has high of a regard.

The only consistent exception to the poor English dubs has been Miyazaki.
Heck, Liam Neeson was a voice in Ponyo!

~~~
thrillgore
I would agree that a lot of english dubs are bad, but I consider Cowboy Bebop
and Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex, not Arise) to be the two
exceptions. The casting decisions were very well made.

~~~
griffinmb
I would add Fullmetal Alchemist and Death Note to the list of well-dubbed
content!

~~~
kuboa
I'm hearing Baccano! dub is even _better_ than the original, though I haven't
gotten around to that one yet myself.

~~~
james-skemp
I think I went back to the Japanese, but I've heard this as well, and found
the episodes I did watch to be quite enjoyable.

------
bemmu
This is my story basically.

I started getting interested in anime in mid 90s. I set up dial-up Internet
(Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11!). I met this guy from Germany online who had
somehow managed to get Ranma 1/2 on VHS tapes, which he graciously agreed to
mail to me in Finland. I knew a guy who was into video editing, so he had the
setup to be able to copy them so I could mail the tapes back to him.

From there it took many years before I knew enough Japanese to be of any use
to anyone. But once I started to get there (and with a ton of help from my now
wife), I skipped the fansubbing part and instead made a demo manga translation
and sent it in a professional looking folder to two companies who were doing
the official translations. I thought it was worth the shot, but didn't really
expect a response. But to my astonishment BOTH agreed.

Soon I found myself regularly visiting the publisher for new work and had a
professional translator as my mentor. I was getting paid to translate manga,
it was my dream come true.

But after the dream ended the hard work started. I was surprised by the speed
at which I was expected to translate these books. I was supposed to do 2-3
books every month! Take a look at a manga, see how many pages there are and
you are not just translating the dialogue, but also explaining all the sound
effects floating in the background.

Around this time social networks started releasing their APIs and I got into
that world instead and left the translation work for others. That was a great
choice, as I started making WAY more money doing that than I ever could have
with translation. But I'm glad I gave manga translation a shot, as now it
won't be left nagging as an unfulfilled dream in the back of my mind.

We translated the complete series Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and some other manga
before "retiring" from this profession :-)

------
lmm
Piracy has never been about cost as much as it has been about convenience. For
a long time the fansubbers simply offered a better product; shows from now
rather than five years ago, with better-quality translations, and often
better-quality video. Fans wanted to support the industry - I know more than
one person with a shelf full of official English DVDs, still in their
shrinkwrap - but the quality wasn't there.

Even today, as someone who takes the underground to work, a streaming service
is no substitute for the incredibly well-oiled machine of fansubbing.

~~~
digi_owl
One example of impressive fansubbing i have seen was where the subs were color
matched to the speakers hair, and contained cultural/historic/contextual info.

~~~
lmm
Matching the speakers' hair is useful, but too often notes end up as showing
off. A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching
something in its original language, not explain every reference.

~~~
learnstats2
> A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching
> something in its original language

It's my feeling that this should include what would be automatically
understood by natives.

I have never found this to go too far - I have always wanted more local
context.

~~~
gerjomarty
My opinion on this has changed over the years. I now tend to look at any
translation which needs to include translation notes on-screen as having
failed, usually because they explain something that isn't _absolutely_
necessary to know, which isn't a good enough reason in my book to distract
from the dialogue.

If you can't explain what you need to in the translation itself, just don't.
Or include a TLNote.txt if you _really_ must.

~~~
polymatter
what made you change your opinion? I love it when there are translation notes
on screen. It feel inclusive to explain to me what's going on.

I can't speak Japanese, am not embedded within current popular Japanese
culture and did not go to a Japanese high school and therefore there are
references which I will not understand. These include jokes that rely on
wordplay such as puns and malapropisms, and historical notes about Japanese
history, geography and society which I am mostly ignorant of.

Without those translation notes, you exclude me from understanding anything
but the surface of what's going on.

~~~
gerjomarty
Many fansubbers didn't know where to draw the line, or didn't have very good
editors, so sometimes you got the situation where there were so many TL notes
they were stacking on top of each other.

Others have noted the most egregious TL notes ("Keikaku means plan" and so on)
but there are some other bad examples, including "This is a reference to..."
(not even everyone in Japan is going to get references either) and even a few
explaining what the _English_ words they used meant.

There are many fewer these days, thankfully.

>jokes that rely on wordplay such as puns and malapropisms

While many disagree, I like translations that attempt to localise these. You
can never get literal accuracy this way, but you can make a fun, entertaining
and engrossing script. You might say it's not the job of the fansubbers to
write the script, but it is their job to translate the one they have, and the
best translations in my view are ones that take intended audience into
account.

I watch anime comedies to laugh, not to read an explanation of what the joke
is and why it's funny.

------
gerjomarty
>“Now it’s all about who has the fanciest typesettings and who has the
wackiest karaoke lyrics for the opening songs,” Nadelman pointed out. “They
just want to have bragging rights to say this is their version of it, even
though the same show will be available on Crunchyroll, or Funimation, or a
number of other streaming sites.”

It is true that many fansubbing groups now (much like in the old days) compete
on who has the flashiest karaoke and typesetting, but I'd say it's unwise to
completely fob off fansubbing in 2015.

The article goes into more detail on this, but video quality and encoding is
generally still better on fansubs than on streaming sites, largely because
anime fansubs tend to be on the cutting edge of video encoding. MKV has been
the container of choice for years, 10-bit colour has been around for a few
years now, h264 encoding even longer. You could argue whether this justifies
the illegal fansub, but there are people who will give this as a
justification.

There are still arguments over translation. Crunchyroll and Funimation have
their "good" and not-so-"good" translators. The question is - do you keep it
literal (perhaps keeping some Japanese idioms and ideas intact, causing
confusion for some in your Western audience and possibly breaking immersion
somewhat) or go more liberal (translate some concepts into Western concepts,
such that it may not literally match the original script word for word, but
the idea will be the same). I tend to go for the liberal side because I want
to be entertained, not frustrated by concepts I know nothing of, but as you
could imagine the arguments are fraught. Comedy is an especially difficult
genre to translate successfully.

Also, America is still provided for better than other English-speaking
territories in this regard. What's most annoying to me is when a company like
Funimation picks up English-speaking streaming rights for a show, then
restricts that to US/Canada. UK/Ireland/Australia often gets left out in the
cold with legal streaming like this.

I'm kind of happy that fansubs are still around to keep the legal sites on
their toes.

------
VeejayRampay
French japanimation enthusiasts over 30 probably remember how official dubbers
for Fist of the North Star/Hokuto No Ken in the late 80's actually took pride
in providing bogus dubbing (with bad puns, changes in the dialog and purposely
egregious voice-overs) because they thought "the show should not have been
brought to young French kids" and just didn't care [1]

This is precisely why you need enthusiasts providing quality subs, because
those anonymous people actually care about the body of work, being fans
themselves. That the anime industry in the US was smart enough to recognize
and offer them jobs is a sign of hope. Good on them.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2jfBEgtc88](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2jfBEgtc88)
(this is NOT a parody, this is the ACTUAL dub for the anime series).

~~~
mxfh
This kind of dubbing wasn't exclusive to anime in that era, publishers
basically bought the rights to cheap visual content and produced their own
stories and scripts on top of it for maximum impact in their respective local
markets.

Germany: Die Zwei / The Pesuaders
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!#Redubbed_versi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!#Redubbed_versions)

Most famous and polarizing was probably the reworking of three different
original programmes (Macross, ‎Southern Cross and MOSPEADA) into _Robotech_

Earliest example might have been
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F)

but the french perfected this sub-genre in the 70s:

[http://physicalimpossibility.com/2011/05/22/movie-rip-
offs-a...](http://physicalimpossibility.com/2011/05/22/movie-rip-offs-a-users-
guide-detournement-and-dub-parodies/)

~~~
__z
Also - Mighty Morphin Power Rangers!

~~~
emodendroket
They rather quickly started collaborating and I understand that now most
sentai shows are produced from the beginning in cooperation with the American
studio they expect to be subbing in American non-costume scenes.

------
kriro
"""piracy is really a last resort for when they really love the content but
can’t get it any other way."""

This is very true and a pretty strong indicator that you are leaving money on
the table by ignoring a customer segment. I've reduced my media consumption a
ton but know enough people who stream TV shows (technically not illegal)
they'd gladly pay for. The problem: they want to watch them in the original
language (typically English) and when they are released.

Incidentally that's also a segment that is willing and able to pay for that
(for starters knowing the language means they are usually better educated than
average which c.p. means a higher income) but the problem is it's just not
available to buy. Pay TV is sloooowly getting there (I could watch GoT
instantly on a pay TV channel for example)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup, that's exactly it. On-demand (not just immediately after release;
sometimes you learn about already screened or even finished series and you
want to start watching it), downloadable (optical media simply sucks, doubly
so when they get scratched) and in original language instead of some crappy
translation. There are ways in my country in which you can download like this
in a technically legal way, with consistent download speed, simple interface
and a better quality than streaming service - you only pay for gigabytes of
transfer you use. There're tremendous amounts of money going to such services
instead of publishers and authors because official sources can't be bothered
to do media distribution in a viewer-friendly way.

------
PaulHoule
The anime translation business was on the brink of disaster until crunchyroll
came around. They just could not sell DVDs of episodes that anime fans could
afford and if took them 2 years to get product out and fansubs hit the street
in 2 days the commercial product can't survive.

Note there is a genre of anime inspired video games (particularly for the PS
vita) that I imagine are doing well commercially and there the complaints
about bad voice acting do not apply. For instance the voices of Neptune and
noire in the current gen of hyperdimensional neptunia are better in the
English than Japanese in my opinion.

------
sireat
I too was a fansubber in the mid 90s.

It started innocently enough when I asked a friend for Akira tape and instead
he gave me a badly but sufficiently subbed copy of Kimagure Orange Road from
infamous quantity fansubbers Arctic Animation.

That lead to a local chapter of Cal-Animage (University of California anime
club), where I eventually became an officer in charge of acquisitions and
fansubbing.

At first I traded 3rd or 4th generation VHS tapes, but that was not to last.

I scoured obscure Japanese family stores in greater LA for new finds. I bought
a LD player, a number of S-VHS recorders not to mention regular VHS and Beta
decks.

I shelled out $500 for a Genlock for PC. I secretly envied those with Amigas
whose equipment was better suited than PC.

I suppose the highlight was subbing of Evangelion episode 1. a week after a
release in Japan and showing it at the club.

Reportedly I was responsible for kickstarting Fushigi Yuugi when my raw copies
made it to Tomodachi Anime who were the big time fansubbers back then.

There was no money in it, most reputable fansubbers wouldn't charge more than
a buck over reproduction costs and offered an option of sending in your own
tapes.

Fansubbing was a team effort as it was rare for a single person to know enough
Japanese and also possess the technical chops for editing/timing, producing.

Fansubbing seemed to start to die when pretty much everything seemed to be
picked up by commercial companies but apparently it has never gone away.

These days I seldom watch anime, but when I do it usually is a dubbed version
with my kids. And I realize that all those sub/dub wars were a bit silly.

------
emodendroket
Translation is an overcrowded and not very generously paying field, especially
in media. It's cool these guys can do it for a living but I gave up on it,
personally.

------
djent
What really makes me love fansubs is when they include the honorifics when
mentioning names. There's a lot of meaning that is put behind various
honorifics, and that is lost when they are absent.

I'd say the largest reason to download anime from fansubbers rather than
stream it is that you become part of a culture that dedicates their life to
anime. It can be rewarding, time consuming, and you might end up taking
Japanese classes hoping to one day translate anime and manga.

~~~
emodendroket
I speak Japanese and I think putting those in is a distraction. That is one of
many deep nuances in Japanese that can't be directly translated into English
but needs to be considered in the translation's gestalt. Your choice of
personal pronoun, use of end-of-sentence particles, and choice to use polite,
extra-polite, or casual expressions also conveys a lot about you and your
relationship to people. However, nobody wants to read gibberish like "Boku am
coming-masu now yo!!" because it's not English.

These issues are hardly unique to translation from Japanese, by the way.

~~~
djent
There are times when the plot changes and for example, in a romance,
characters may switch from using surnames to first names. I've seen many low
quality subtitles where the character will use another character's last name,
but the translation will use the first name. While it does require some
knowledge of Japanese (or other Asian cultures), it does contribute to the
overall consumption of the anime, and only distracts from the attempted
transition from Japanese culture to Western culture as translated.

~~~
emodendroket
I mean, that's important, but the other nuances I mentioned can change in just
the same way. An adept translator can capture these things without resorting
to lots of untranslated Japanese (although whether the people doing fansubs
are adept is a different question... often there are quite obvious
misunderstandings of what was said in the fansubs I've seen).

------
kevingadd
I have paid subscriptions to the legal streaming services and own a handful of
the anime series I watch on DVD/Bluray. I still almost always download
releases off of websites - some of which are actually just the legal streaming
release repackaged into a form you can watch offline. I'd be happy if the
services I paid for gave me a reason not to hit the shady fansub services.

Why?

* There are specific fansubbing groups that have a well-earned reputation for quality. They consistently do a better job on translation where even major shows will have glaring translation errors on the paid services. Some of these groups even manage to do it quickly.

* The video encoding is superior in both size and quality. (Sometimes video quality issues are down to the original broadcast looking awful, due to how HDTV works these days.)

* I can download an entire season of a series I've paid to watch, and watch it at my leisure on a laptop or tablet. If I wanted to stream it off Crunchyroll I'd need to have a stable network connection at the time and hope I'm not exceeding my 4G cap (on a mobile device). In practice the streaming players will break, too...

* Often the paid services release an episode days or weeks late (to be fair, usually due to negotiated agreements). This is a pain since it's very hard to avoid spoilers from people who watched it day-of in japan or quickly via fansubs.

* The viewing experience is better. Most of the paid services still use a flash plugin, which is pretty much a worst-case for watching 24hz video content - judder, tearing, dropped frames, bad upscaling/downscaling, etc. Worse still, the paid services often butcher the color-space and framerate of the video. When you combine all those small mistakes together, it's REALLY distracting to watch an action scene on these services. Sometimes the color-space issues render entire portions of scenes invisible.

Aside from a discussion of whether the localization is being done 'right' \-
dubbing vs subbing, 'literal' translation vs natural translation -
occasionally the paid services treat content with respect and I have no reason
to use a fansubbed version. Those are great moments, but they're extremely
rare. The last time I can remember this happening was the (FYI, pretty gross)
series Kill la Kill, where the translation was supposedly provided by someone
hired by the animation studio. There were no errors in translation, the script
felt natural, and the video was good. Those occasional successes are part of
why I still pay for the services I rarely use.

FWIW the manga industry has this same problem, but far worse. It's a miracle
official English localizations of manga sell at all. Every company in that
chain seems to be inept or actively taking steps to hinder their sales. Manga
piracy is an actual business online, unfortunately, where anime piracy is more
of a casual thing - there are dozens of websites out there that make money
running ads on pirated manga. Naturally, the pirated manga usually ranks #1 on
Google.

~~~
kelbesque
I'm not always the most attentive viewer, could you give me an example of the
colorspace problem? I'm really interested to see the issue side-by-side.

~~~
kevingadd
Video is typically transmitted in one of two colorspaces. The terminology here
is tricky and hard for me to remember, but I think it's 'studio levels' and
'computer levels'?

Anyway, all you really need to know is that there are two main standards for
the range of values in each RGB color channel. IIRC, they are 0-255 and
16-235. So if you're using the broadcast standard (16-235), values below 16 or
above 235 don't exist, and 16 is black. But a 24bpp/32bpp surface on a
computer can store the full range of values no matter what, so there are
various scenarios where graphics code needs to know what to do with those
values. Discard them? Saturate up/down? Rescale everything so that the whole
buffer is 16-235?

It gets trickier when interacting with other hardware. Your TV might expect
16-235 values, in which case your video card and/or software need to rescale
0-255 values down to 16-235 so they look correct on your TV. Your game console
might be putting out 16-235 because it assumes you have a bad TV, and when you
run that console through an HDMI capture device, it might be doing a 16-235 ->
0-255 rescale behind your back to 'fix' your video. Then when you fix your
console settings to output 0-255, your capture device is still doing the
rescale, and you're saturating values below 16 or above 235.

It's a mess.

If you search 'rgb studio levels' on Google you can find some people talking
about it, like this:
[https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/975618](https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/975618)

It's a common source of confusion when dealing with video, and if you're
unlucky, _multiple_ stages in a display pipeline will each mishandle levels,
scaling them to a range that's too small or truncating values, etc.

------
andyzweb
related:
[http://www.phauna.org/papers/anime/anime.pdf](http://www.phauna.org/papers/anime/anime.pdf)

------
el33th4xx0r
dammit daiz.

