Hacker News Reader

Comment by totallymike | Hacker News Reader

For at least the past year, subtitles under dubs have been horrendous. I’ve watched a handful of Gundam series over this period, and while the subtitles under the Japanese audio are usually fine, the captions that run under the English audio more often than not get every single proper noun completely wrong, and half the dialog in general.

A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.

View on HN

Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era.

The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?

It gets even worse, when the original mangaka typoes the name, and people follow a single typo like a religion. This happened with Kaoru Mori's "Emma", where a common English surname "Jones" was accidentally spelled "Jounse" by the author, and used in translations without questioning it too much, only later found to be written correctly "Jones" in a later chapter by the author herself.

I see this a lot, and it is a mild pet peeve of mine as well. Along the same lines, since I’m using Gundam as an example in this thread, I’ll point to a technology in the franchise called “psycommu” (pronounced in dubs as psy-com-moo) which is clearly transliterated from how it’s spelled in the original script without taking a second look at it. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have just localized it to “psy-com,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series

Somewhat related is the situation with Shingeki no Kyojin / Attack on Titan. "Attack on Titan" was the manga author's chosen English title, except the story does not take place on the moon of Titan but is instead about giants attacking a human settlement. The Japanese title could be interpreted as "Attack of Titans" so everyone assumed "Attack on Titan" was just Engrish for that, and why CommieSubs' fan translation for example went with "The Eotena Onslaught". [1]

Years later it turned out some of the giants had classes / types and the title was a reference to the Attack type of giant. Thus the English title would've been better as "The Attack Titan", and indeed the Japanese title could also have been interpreted as that, though it's only obvious in hindsight. The Japanese title was likely deliberately intended to have the double-meaning "Attack of Titans" and "The Attack Titan", though this double-meaning cannot be conveyed in English, and in fact we're now stuck due to inertia with a third English rendering that is completely disconnected from either meaning.

[1]: https://commiesubs.com/shingeki-no-kyojin-01/

Most fans I saw called it by the Japanese title, Shingeki no Kyojin. You could almost tell whether someone watched the official licensed translation or not, based on what they called the series.

Actually, another quirk is the German lyric in the first season's opening theme. Crunchyroll doesn't usually translate opening or ending lyrics, but translating the lyrics was standard practice in the fansub era, so the. However, they misheard the lyric as "Sie sind das Essen und wir sind die Jäger" - "You are the food and we are the hunters" - as if the line is spoken by the Titans (perhaps the English-speaking audience is primed to the Germans being the bad guys in movies). The actual lyric was revealed in official Japanese sources as spoken from the perspective of the humans: "Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind die Jäger!" - "Are we the food? No, we are the hunters!" However, the incorrect lyric persists among fans because the second opening theme superceded the first before the error was widely noted in the English speaking anime community.

This is a problem as well, but what I see often is what seems to be the cheapest speech recognition software they could find auto-transcribing the dub, and it falls over any time it meets a name or word it can’t guess out of like to 1,000 most common words in the English language.

Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.

The dub subtitles should be different than the original language subtitles, given the dub script is not just the reading the subtitle track, but that’s not an excuse for the dub subtitles being bad.

I agree that technically this would be incorrect, but I’d still appreciate the option to choose the subtitle track from the original language over the horrible auto-generated subtitle track.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com