This is true sometimes, but usually it's not true because nobody does fansubs anymore. Most subtitled torrents are copies of the official subtitles.
(Also you can't judge a translation unless you speak Japanese.)
That may be part of the problem with the industry. The average viewer is none the wiser, so the translation industry gets to make a subpar product and get away with it. If it wasn't for fansubs, they'd have a monopoly. Thankfully, the industry has spent the last 10+ years competing with fan subs instead of outright trying to nuke them and it shows. Subs (and dubs) were far far worse not that long ago.
Ironically or perhaps paradoxically, as professional made dubs and subs have increased in quality fansubs have decreased in quality. It's almost like fansubs are giving the industry a push forward.
Thus they've largely kicked fanmade speedsubs out of the "market".
The fansub quantity, for sure, has decreased, but not the quality. Speedsubs are no longer a concern for fansubbing these days.
Meanwhile, the remaining fansubbers are competing by maximizing quality, with features such as singable song translations and full sign typesetting. But you end up with up to weeklong delays between airing and fansub release.
As far as purely translation quality goes, pro translations are much better than they used to be, but speaking as an amateur translator myself I always think it's good for the viewer to have alternative interpretations for more difficult-to-translate passages.
That's exactly why the quality has gone down, due to these speed subs. Back in the day speed subs were not a thing. They popped up when legal subs started popping up, almost as a way to compete.
I think the first big name speed sub group was horriblesubs, and they still exist today. Today fansubs are dominated by these groups. They're quality is okay to good. Sometimes they're the only option now, so I'd say the quality has gone down.
Back in the 4:3 days when anime was vbr and sources were interlaced fansub groups would go through frame by frame doing pulldown and denoising. It was amazing. They'd have high quality karaoke in the opening and ending scenes. When's the last time you've seen high quality karaoke on fansubs?
No, quality has gone down. They don't even do color correction today. Maybe in the last 3 years or so fansub quality has gone up a bit, but it's not a lot.. not enough for me to notice much.
>speaking as an amateur translator myself I always think it's good for the viewer to have alternative interpretations for more difficult-to-translate passages.
Yah. You don't often see translation notes any more either.
Real fansub groups used to compete to be the first to release their translations, so you wouldn't have translation checks or as many editing passes.
Nowadays, the simulcasts (and the rips thereof) are faster than any speedsub could possibly be, so the remaining fansubbers definitely put more effort into quality.
> Back in the 4:3 days when anime was vbr and sources were interlaced fansub groups would go through frame by frame doing pulldown and denoising. It was amazing.
You don't need to do denoising and deinterlacing these days, so... I'm not sure why you think things were better back then? Nowadays encoders are more concerned about banding in particular, so they may specifically add noise on a scene-by-scene basis.
> When's the last time you've seen high quality karaoke on fansubs?
If you get actual fansubs these days instead of simulcast rips, you'll find they have high quality karaoke. I particularly remember the Railgun S karaoke which had realistic-looking lightning striking each syllable. And more recently, you may find the English translations have been worded so that you can sing along in time with the original song.
> You don't often see translation notes any more either.
If you're talking about TL notes in the subtitles themselves, they really went out of style. Nobody wants to be the next "Translator's note: keikaku means plan".
I think we're a bit late to be calling Railgun S "these days" these days...
Today options are limited for many different anime, where you get one or more choices and all of them are just okay, not keeping up with the standard a decade+ ago.
At least professional subs today are better than fansubs in the 80s and early to mid 90s.
Venture into the realm of even slightly obscure and you generally have ... zero to one choices of script translation, usually. To this day, even.
Killing fansubs was worth it to stop people from adding "creative" exploding lyrics all over episodes that didn't come with them in the first place.
Literally this season, on DameDesuYo’s subtitles for Attack on Titan.
Though, it is a bit unfair to take the most popular anime of the decade (by non-japanese watchers) and the highest rated anime of all time (by non-japanese watchers) as an example. I would be worried if there wasn't a quality fansub group covering it.
This was the norm for all anime once upon a time ago.