Jiban 04

torrent

Thanks to doctordamascus for helping with timing

Fansubbing is Serious Business : An Amateur Translator’s Perspective

Obviously, not a release. It’s another ‘I’m not feeling well and should be resting  yet I can’t’ moment, so because the last rambling is somewhat well-received, here’s another rambling about things.

tl;dr for the rest of this long, long article I’m gonna write excuses for procrastinating my thought process on how I translate things, and why I think translating things takes a lot more effort than I originally thought waaay back then.  

Now with ‘Keep reading’ implemented so I don’t accidentally fill someone’s timeline with a long wall of text.

Jiban 03

torrent

Tactical Officer Jiban 02

Ep 01 torrent by M-L, will seed for the time being Ep 02 torrent

Project-related notes:

Not really Jiban related notes:

Well... out of nowhere another solo group under the tag [XIG] just posted a complete sub of Super-1. You can check Nyaa for it.

Have no idea about overall quality, but unless it's really, really bad with demands to sub it again, I don't really see any point of continuing my job on it.

So... yaay? Well... what now?

Edit : Well, I just checked and it’s good enough. There’s this part of me that wants to keep on working on it, though... I dunno.

To elaborate even further, I just watched an episode, and it's good enough, really. There are honorifics, it’s some sentences are too long, and there are minor TL mistakes, but on the other hand, I gotta admit his/her subs have better writing, as I'm not that good with words and have small vocabulary. If you're not too picky with your subs and/or honorifics, it should be perfectly serviceable.

To me, though, it hits that sweet spot between 'good enough to leave it as is' and 'I think I can do better', add the bias for working on it for 12 episodes already, and thus you have my current dilemma of “i really hate reinventing the wheel but i really want to continue working on this”.

A Brief History In English Toku Fansubbing

I should be sleeping right now but can’t. Got nostalgic out of nowhere, so I thought to myself why the hell not?

PS: Subbing here mostly refers to the English subbing community, as I’m not well versed in (what I assume active in toku subbing) BR subbing communities or other language. Some facts might be off as I’m just basing it from personal experience and limited knowledge with little to no research.

Tokusatsu has been a part of my life ever since I can remember. Where I live, they aired a bunch of 80s-90s tokusatsus. There’s the obvious Super-1, Black and RX, but I’m pretty sure they also aired most Sentais between Goggle V and Carranger, A bunch of Metal Heroes ranging from Gavan to Kabutack, A bunch of Showa Ultras and then the new trio (Tiga, Dyna, Gaia) and I even get to watch those weird standalone late 90s/early 00s toku like Guyferd and Changerion.

Fast forward to early 2000s. The internet was still relatively young, I was still on dial-up, which means the best toku related thing a fan can do is searching the net (with Altavista, or Yahoo) for those rare sites in English explaining about the hottest sequel of the rebooted Rider franchise, Agito. It was second only to spending like an hour to get MP3s from Napster or Kazaa or Audiogalaxy, whatever.

Fast forward a bit to 2005. By that time I’ve switched to DSL/ADSL connection and that means I can technically spend like three hours to torrent a subbed .avi episode of Hibiki and later on Kabuto, obviously subbed by T-N, still young at the time. You don’t really have an alternative back then, T-N practically owns the scene until 2008, where OoZ pops up, and even less so on 2009-2010, which I’ll cover later.

So how’s the coverage on subbed shows back then? Well, as far as I know, laughable. Anything before Ryuki, anything before Dekaranger, practically all of Ultras, Metal Heroes, and other toku series are practically untouched. And well, T-N practically subs anything that is. It was their early days, and on an era before captions, so you can guess how bad it can get at times.

Which brings us to late 00s (2008-2010). By that time connection speed have improved considerably, and it was the beginning of softsubbed HD animes in mkv (which lowers the bar of subbing even further),. Similarly, around that time Kiva was about to end, that fancy crossover Rider, Decade was about to air, and HD raws are easily accessible. However, it doesn’t seem like T-N is going to sub it in HD! It kinda kicks a chain reaction of one or two groups trying to sub Decade with HD raws, T-N ends up subbing it in HD, and with their purpose lost some of those groups begin working on older tokusatsu shows, and one of those leads to a group that’s still working on old shows now. I was there, trying to help what I can and as a fan it was a pretty exciting time, to be honest. 

By early 2010, most major players have established themselves. You have T-N, even now still alive. Over-Time(W-Time/OOO-Time for you old timers) appeared out of nowhere to sub W, and proceeded to sub things and taking names like nobody’s business until it becomes the group you have now. Older groups (by today’s standards) working on older shows are formed around the same time, too. GUIS, KITsubs, Hinotori, etc...

Though, in 2010 the coverage was still pretty sparse. There are progress on Heisei Riders (mostly T-N coming back to work on Ryuki, CA/GomenRider on Agito, MCS on Kuuga), but Showa Riders are still practically untouched, barring the occasional one offs of episode 1 subs and Hinotori who finished Amazon, and CenturyKings with Black. Sentai, Metal Heroes are as untouched as they are five years before, with GUIS, DFF and HKs slowly filling the void.

In the next six years tho, as a community I’d say we’re making a lot of progress. There’re still holes here and there, but a lot of grounds are covered now, if you’re not picky about quality. Rider as a whole only have like three shows without complete, non-HK subs. Sentai, seven out of forty. Ultras, four (I think). For Metal Heroes and other tokus, well... there are still a lot of things unsubbed there, but we’re still making a lot of progress. This month we have Gavan and Juspion completed, Winspector finished not too long ago, etc2. New tokusatsu shows like Garo, Cutie Honey, After V, etc also get subs pretty reliably too.

So... what am I trying to say? I dunno. I just kinda want to ramble about this out of the blue. I guess if there’s something I wanna say, it’s probably “be thankful to those folks subbing your favorite shows”. I know coming from me it sounds kinda...egomaniacal?, but I’m referring to folks that keep on trucking, subbing weekly things regularly, to the point you start taking it as granted. The fandom as it is now sometimes gets really, really entitled about subs for weeklies. If you really have to be so vocal about stylistic translation choices, maybe you should learn Japanese so you can watch it raw (like me!). I mean it’s a fansub you got for free, not official translation you pay for or anything. (I like complaining about official translations, too) Of course, you should bring up any straight up mistranslations if you know the language, but I feel like nitpicking everything is beyond silly.

Me, I’m just doing this whenever I feel like it, so there’s that. The fact that the audience for older shows are a lot lower than those fancy new shows helps a lot, too.

See ya later.

Not really a release but

I’ve been rereading my own Spirits release and some of the dialogues are admittedly pretty stiff, even for my really low standards. Well, this is my first attempt on working on a manga solo, and Spirits’ vertical speech bubble just made my already poor writing skills even poorer.

Might make a V2 whenever I got the time. No major translation changes or anything, just gonna rewrite some of the dialogues.

Just wanted to say that out. (that is to say, just wanted to make an excuse. Sorry. Hope you still enjoy it.) 

Still undecided on what to work on next.

Kamen Rider Super-1 11 + 12, 01-12 batch torrent

01-12 batch torrent

No individual torrents, hope you know how to pick individual files. 01-05 courtesy of KITsubs. 06-10 are the same as old releases aside from renaming the filenames Masked->Kamen for consistency. For those who want to help seed, unfortunately you have to rename your files manually. 11-12 are new release. Will stop seeding old individual torrents and just gonna seed batch one for convenience. Might take a break from Rider-related stuff for a while. We’ll see.

Kamen Rider Super-1 10 + KITsubs 01-05 batch torrent

10 torrent 01-05 batch torrent, courtesy of KITsubs On the new episode you have a surprisingly dark first half.

As for the batch, KRDL is going offline at the end of the month, and the old torrents are not seeded, so I made an emergency batch. Probably will combine everything whenever I reach 12 (out of 48, which makes it 1/4th of the series)

Kamen Rider Super-1 09

torrent Several things to mention/clarify that I forgot to post here: - This (and Spirits, too) is a one man project. Meaning it comes with all the benefits (only one bottleneck) and all the drawbacks (said bottleneck is so prone to mood swings, subpar editing/timing/typesetting, etc). Be warned.

- It’s a translation of the japanese captions and -not- HK scrubs. Unfortunately proving it is a pain in the ass, so unless you have japanese knowledge, you skeptics just have to trust me on that one.

- Some might’ve noticed already, but the styles are taken from KITSubs’ past releases with permission.

For any other questions you can do it via the ask page above or Twitter.

Kamen Rider Super-1 06-08 06 torrent 07 torrent 08 torrent

Might as well post it here too. Also, long time no see. Both Spirits and Super-1 will be worked on the same pace - that is to say whenever I’m in the mood, so be warned.

There’s also a Twitter account if you like your updates in 140-character bites.

Kamen Rider Spirits Vol.12 Ch.01

Mediafire

Torrent

Also looking for Shin Spirits raw past vol.10