[Lynk Former]

@ spinkle: Oh, oh, oh, that is HIGHLY speculative on the quality of fansubs compared to official subs.

The reason people find official subs to be inferior is because the people who make them treat them like every other foreign media which needs to be subbed. With that in mind they translate everything into English terms while fansubs pick and choose what they want to translate and what they want to keep in its own Japanese context.

In addition to that, official subs actually get official source material and directives directly from the people who actually made the anime. It IS part of the contract after all to get that kind of material.

And don't make it sound as if fansubs are golden pieces of work where the people who translate them are gods of translating because they aren't. I've seen A LOT of errors in fansubs, not just to do with names but to do with contextual information as well. And yes, I know the quality of fansubs does vary between groups, but let's just get FACTS out there okay? But it's funny how people are willing to forgive THOSE mistakes for something that's completely free from something which they'll have to pay for.

And yeah, I've seen those individual factsheets which some fansub groups release to explain their translations. Some official sources release those kinds of factsheets as well but not all the time... and do you know what I've noticed? Wow, surprise, surprise, it sounds as if THEY put just as much effort into trying to get the right context in the translations as the fansub groups do. How about that. Shocking.

Quality of subs vary way too much to make a clear judgement and you might also want to take into account the fact that you can find 10 different versions of the same anime both official and unofficial and they'll all have 10 different ways of saying the exact same thing in their subs, some being more accurate than others.

I would also like to point out that it's not as if folks who work for anime companies don't have a passion for anime. In fact, if you actually look into these kinds of things, you'd realise that most of the people who do work in the industry, do so because they love anime and are excited about it.


From my view of why people prefer fansubs isn't based on quality, it's based on the fact that they online anime community feels as if THEY have control over the anime themselves rather than.. and I've heard this so many times... "some faceless American corporation"...