How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

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!

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 :-)

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

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.

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 (this is NOT a parody, this is the ACTUAL dub for the anime series).

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.