Below are a few things that have been bothering me about fansubs. I know I can?t complain too much, since the stuff is free, but I?d love to make a few suggestions to the groups. Obvious ones are ugly fonts and translations that are too liberal and not properly synced, so I won?t even go into that (much).
I dislike the way fansubbers often edit street signs and ads and such with their own soft graphics or texts, as if the character lives in an English speaking country. If the writing is important, just put the translation in quotes or italics at the bottom or top of the picture, like official film subbers.
I prefer a font that?s ordinary/neutral and not bold, and a white that?s slightly grey. The text should be big enough that I barely have to look. Some fansubbers keep the subs almost at the edge of the picture and use the whole width. I like mine more narrow (almost as if it the picture were 4:3) and further from the bottom, so that my eyes don?t have to move as much and I miss less of what?s going on. Below are subs by niizk. They?re too wide and too close to the border, pulling the viewer away from the picture.
I chose to override the custom subs with my player?s settings.
I?ll probably keep that override option on. The only problem is that it causes the stylized secondary subs to be elevated as well, resulting in problems like this
This picture brings me to my next point?
A character may look at a letter and the subbers will put up a huge box with the translation, after which the character will immediately read it out, with the same subs now at the bottom of the screen, making the translation box in the previous scene pointless. Okay, that?s pretty specific. But so many fansubs have redundant translations, like the text appearing over and over as the characters say the same thing. Or text for easily understood English dialogue. It bothered me enough in the opening of Ghost in the Shell, when the police dialogue is being spoken in several languages including English, that I extracted the subs, deleted those lines and muxed the subs back into the file. Fansubbers also color lyrics like it?s karaoke, which I find distracting. And they usually sub lyrics for easily understandable English language songs, like the opening to Serial Experiments Lain, which is played by a British alternative rock band, but subtitled by Coalgirls. If Disney did this for all their animated musical films, people would find it distracting. Maybe that?s how the subs are on the Lain Blu-ray. I would have removed them, though. I would also remove many of the translations for hai, arigato, sayounara, itadakimasu and all the other little common phrases everybody should know and can hear anyway. A lot of it is easy enough to understand with context and body language, like bowing, so the picture can be left blank. That?s how The Criterion Collection does it, and it?s never confusing.
Videos are often compressed to the point that the colors and blacks lose their vibrancy and details are faintly lost. I compress most of my Full HD movies at 20,000 kbps, but most fansubbers, including big ones like REVO and THORA, use much smaller bitrates. I can?t complain too much about this, though, since the people downloading these files obviously want them small. But then why are audio tracks left at such high bitrates? THORA, REVO, Coalgirls, niizk and I believe most of the other big groups use FLAC. Some of the Kametsu and REVO releases I downloaded have stereo tracks at 2300 kbps, while Blu-rays often have 5.1 DTS tracks at 1500 kbps, meaning you divide the bitrate between the five channels. I do not yet have a surround system. For now, I?m keeping my audio tracks uncompressed because I don?t know what they?re going to sound like on a decent system. But I?m skeptical about those high bitrates. I know Master Audio, PCM and TrueHD tracks are often pretty high as well, but those come on Blu-rays (sometimes), which usually have far higher video bitrates/sizes than fansubs. So I don?t understand why the groups care so much more about audio quality than video quality.
Some other things that distract me are confusing explanations for things that get lost in translation or trying to sub for a lot of different characters, including ones in the background. A lot of the time, fansubbers will put text all over the screen for multiple characters speaking, which is impossible to read and pointless, as only some of the dialogue is important and the rest is chatter. Often, less is more. I also think it?s unnecessary to subtitle Japanese honorifics, since they can be heard anyway. I would remove them and use appropriate translations where possible, like ?mister? and ?sir?.
Fansubbers often merely edit official subs. Problems arise when they try to improve what?s already good, cluttering the picture.
Here is an example:
And here are the original subtitles converted to SRT.
One last thing I wanna mention is how many of them now cut off the openings and endings and replace them with clean versions (no credits) that your video player pieces together, as if the people who made the anime don?t matter. An opening or ending will often have specific places for the credits, which just become empty blanks without the text.
