How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/06/24/how-american-fans-pirated-japanese-cartoons-into-careers/

by oscarhong • 11 years ago

103 75 11 years ago

lmm3• 11 years ago

Piracy has never been about cost as much as it has been about convenience. For a long time the fansubbers simply offered a better product; shows from now rather than five years ago, with better-quality translations, and often better-quality video. Fans wanted to support the industry - I know more than one person with a shelf full of official English DVDs, still in their shrinkwrap - but the quality wasn't there.

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

digi_owl• 11 years ago

One example of impressive fansubbing i have seen was where the subs were color matched to the speakers hair, and contained cultural/historic/contextual info.

lmm3• 11 years ago

Matching the speakers' hair is useful, but too often notes end up as showing off. A good translation is supposed to replicate the experience of watching something in its original language, not explain every reference.

james-skemp3• 11 years ago

This makes me want to try to find the Ghost in the Shell 1 and 2 fansubs I downloaded years ago. I think one of them included explanations of the context of quotes and cultural references. But I might have trashed the CDs or DVDs once I was able to buy legal copies.

Related to the article, is unfortunate that Netflix has lost some of it's foreign film diversity on streaming. But as they move more and more toward appealing to the masses to lower costs, it's inevitable.

Fuxy• 11 years ago

The fan-subbing scene is booming and although i do have a Crunchyroll subscription i do end up on fan subbing sites looking for anime releases that were not offered by crunchyroll or that i wanted to watch on the tube where streaming is not a option.

Fan-subbing is not as underground as this article would have yo think and it's way more convenient sometime.

__z3• 11 years ago

The fansubbing community way back in the day (which is what this article is talking about) was never about convenience, it was about being able to watch anime that wasn't otherwise available. It was the only way. It was actually quite inconvenient. We are talking about the day of trading grainy 3rd-5th generation VHS tapes through snail-mail. Before P2P downloading. Before widespread access to high-speed internet - that's what we are talking about here.

VeejayRampay2• 11 years ago

French japanimation enthusiasts over 30 probably remember how official dubbers for Fist of the North Star/Hokuto No Ken in the late 80's actually took pride in providing bogus dubbing (with bad puns, changes in the dialog and purposely egregious voice-overs) because they thought "the show should not have been brought to young French kids" and just didn't care [1]

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).

aikah• 11 years ago

"hokuto de cuisine ..." ;)

VeejayRampay2• 11 years ago

Nanto de fourrure. Disrespectful jerks :/

mxfh• 11 years ago

This kind of dubbing wasn't exclusive to anime in that era, publishers basically bought the rights to cheap visual content and produced their own stories and scripts on top of it for maximum impact in their respective local markets.

Germany: Die Zwei / The Pesuaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!#Redubbed_versi...

Most famous and polarizing was probably the reworking of three different original programmes (Macross, ‎Southern Cross and MOSPEADA) into Robotech

Earliest example might have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F

but the french perfected this sub-genre in the 70s:

http://physicalimpossibility.com/2011/05/22/movie-rip-offs-a...

__z3• 11 years ago

Also - Mighty Morphin Power Rangers!

bemmu• 11 years ago

This is my story basically.

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 :-)

kriro• 11 years ago

"""piracy is really a last resort for when they really love the content but can’t get it any other way."""

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)

james-skemp3• 11 years ago

I've always been told that it's usually for legal reasons/costs that they'll leave this money on the table. I believe it was in the context of Miami Vice that I saw this came up, specifically in regards to music licensing (for DVD release many years ago).

Does anyone know if contracts have gotten any better with regards to streaming purposes? With Hulu's raise I assume there's now some language being put into these to account for it.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

Yup, that's exactly it. On-demand (not just immediately after release; sometimes you learn about already screened or even finished series and you want to start watching it), downloadable (optical media simply sucks, doubly so when they get scratched) and in original language instead of some crappy translation. There are ways in my country in which you can download like this in a technically legal way, with consistent download speed, simple interface and a better quality than streaming service - you only pay for gigabytes of transfer you use. There're tremendous amounts of money going to such services instead of publishers and authors because official sources can't be bothered to do media distribution in a viewer-friendly way.

cjslep• 11 years ago

I enjoy watching various anime but am by no means into Japanese culture, nor the American culture that is into Japanese culture. However, when I was first introduced to anime by a friend (minus Spirited Away) which was Naruto, I was introduced to the English-subbed versions even though English dubs were available. After watching a few episodes of listening to Japanese and reading the subs, I thought it would be a good idea to skip the effort of reading and watch the English dubbed version instead.

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!

aaggarwal3• 11 years ago

I agree some of english dubbing in anime is very poor. I normally watch subbed versions of anime. Though, I like the orignal English dubbing and music (Funimation version) of DragonBall Z more than the Japanese version :)

marrs• 11 years ago

I thought the actress who played Mima in the US dub of Perfect Blue did an amazing job. I can happily watch that film in English.

On a slightly different note, whilst trying without success to find the actress's name on IMDB, I just found out that the film's director Satoshi Kon tragically died of cancer 5 years ago. We lost a film making genius.

kbenson• 11 years ago

I highly recommend Dragon Ball Z Abridged[1] to anyone who has watched the original. Comedy gold.

1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6EC7B047181AD013

ilitirit• 11 years ago

I feel the same about most Japanese games with dual audio as well, except Metal Gear Solid.

thrillgore• 11 years ago

I would agree that a lot of english dubs are bad, but I consider Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex, not Arise) to be the two exceptions. The casting decisions were very well made.

griffinmb• 11 years ago

I would add Fullmetal Alchemist and Death Note to the list of well-dubbed content!

BrokenEnso• 11 years ago

If you want to hear a good English dub check out AnimEigo's dub's of You're Under Arrest OVA or Oh My Goddess OVA. They are both crazy good. AnimEigo lost the distribution license so you'd have to hunt a little for an old copy, but it's worth it.

Edit: looks like I'm mistaken about the You're Under Arrest distribution license [1]

[1] http://www.animeigo.com/products/anime/youre-under-arrest

Kalium• 11 years ago

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.

Ergo Proxy in particular sticks out to me as a case where the fansubs were superior to the commercial release. The DVDs didn't have any of those notes, and they added a lot to the show.

jzelinskie• 11 years ago

Fansubs are almost always better than the commercial releases, because if the show is even relatively popular (and shows that get official releases usually are), a group will edit the official release's script.

You honestly can't beat the time and passion fans will put in. Most of translators working for places like CrunchyRoll get paid per release, so they have no incentive to spend more time on a release and give it a quality translation. On the other hand, fans have already read/played the source material and will use background knowledge to properly translate the material.

Glyptodon• 11 years ago

I've seen Ergo Proxy with 3 different versions of subtitles (regular, and at least two fansubs) and I've always dreamed of combining the scripts used because none of them quite voiced things perfectly alone, but snag a few conventions from one or another of the versions and use them throughout and suddenly the whole show would just be so much more accessible and clear.

stonemetal• 11 years ago

Maybe it is because it isn't fan-subs but when it comes to watching anime on Netflix, I much prefer the dubs. The subtitles maybe closer to what they said originally but the English is usually stilted and hard to follow.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

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!

This seem to hold for classic cinema and television as well, which is why I avoid dubbing like the plague. Not only people who get paid for the job can't get translations right (which is a problem with subtitles as well, but at least if you know even a little of the language of the movie, you have a secondary reference to sort out translation errors on the fly), they often also can't convey the emotions, so you get a severely degraded experience.

Nadya• 11 years ago

That was a horrible experience. The English dubbed voices seemed to lack passion or say things in the wrong tones (or just be monotone!).

What did you do. You killed my friend. I'll have you pay for that. Rrrraaaarrrgggh. I'm so angry.

(Note the lack of exclamations or question marks.)

Scuds• 11 years ago

The English dubbed voices seemed to lack passion or say things in the wrong tones (or just be monotone!).

Acting takes time and a good voice director. Can't just hand a VA a script and expect magic. If there's a 1:1 ratio between time in the booth and play time, because the whole thing is done on the cheap, then fuckit. Garbage in garbage out.

The only consistent exception to the poor English dubs has been Miyazaki. Heck, Liam Neeson was a voice in Ponyo!

I think Disney know a thing or two about casting and producing a good voice performance.

el33th4xx0r• 11 years ago

dammit daiz.

andyzweb• 11 years ago

gerjomarty3• 11 years ago

“Now it’s all about who has the fanciest typesettings and who has the wackiest karaoke lyrics for the opening songs,” Nadelman pointed out. “They just want to have bragging rights to say this is their version of it, even though the same show will be available on Crunchyroll, or Funimation, or a number of other streaming sites.”

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.

kevingadd2• 11 years ago

I have paid subscriptions to the legal streaming services and own a handful of the anime series I watch on DVD/Bluray. I still almost always download releases off of websites - some of which are actually just the legal streaming release repackaged into a form you can watch offline. I'd be happy if the services I paid for gave me a reason not to hit the shady fansub services.

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.

kelbesque• 11 years ago

I'm not always the most attentive viewer, could you give me an example of the colorspace problem? I'm really interested to see the issue side-by-side.

kevingadd2• 11 years ago

Video is typically transmitted in one of two colorspaces. The terminology here is tricky and hard for me to remember, but I think it's 'studio levels' and 'computer levels'?

Anyway, all you really need to know is that there are two main standards for the range of values in each RGB color channel. IIRC, they are 0-255 and 16-235. So if you're using the broadcast standard (16-235), values below 16 or above 235 don't exist, and 16 is black. But a 24bpp/32bpp surface on a computer can store the full range of values no matter what, so there are various scenarios where graphics code needs to know what to do with those values. Discard them? Saturate up/down? Rescale everything so that the whole buffer is 16-235?

It gets trickier when interacting with other hardware. Your TV might expect 16-235 values, in which case your video card and/or software need to rescale 0-255 values down to 16-235 so they look correct on your TV. Your game console might be putting out 16-235 because it assumes you have a bad TV, and when you run that console through an HDMI capture device, it might be doing a 16-235 -> 0-255 rescale behind your back to 'fix' your video. Then when you fix your console settings to output 0-255, your capture device is still doing the rescale, and you're saturating values below 16 or above 235.

It's a mess.

If you search 'rgb studio levels' on Google you can find some people talking about it, like this: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/975618

It's a common source of confusion when dealing with video, and if you're unlucky, multiple stages in a display pipeline will each mishandle levels, scaling them to a range that's too small or truncating values, etc.

djent2• 11 years ago

What really makes me love fansubs is when they include the honorifics when mentioning names. There's a lot of meaning that is put behind various honorifics, and that is lost when they are absent.

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.

emodendroket8• 11 years ago

I speak Japanese and I think putting those in is a distraction. That is one of many deep nuances in Japanese that can't be directly translated into English but needs to be considered in the translation's gestalt. Your choice of personal pronoun, use of end-of-sentence particles, and choice to use polite, extra-polite, or casual expressions also conveys a lot about you and your relationship to people. However, nobody wants to read gibberish like "Boku am coming-masu now yo!!" because it's not English.

These issues are hardly unique to translation from Japanese, by the way.

djent2• 11 years ago

There are times when the plot changes and for example, in a romance, characters may switch from using surnames to first names. I've seen many low quality subtitles where the character will use another character's last name, but the translation will use the first name. While it does require some knowledge of Japanese (or other Asian cultures), it does contribute to the overall consumption of the anime, and only distracts from the attempted transition from Japanese culture to Western culture as translated.

PaulHoule• 11 years ago

The anime translation business was on the brink of disaster until crunchyroll came around. They just could not sell DVDs of episodes that anime fans could afford and if took them 2 years to get product out and fansubs hit the street in 2 days the commercial product can't survive.

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.

emodendroket8• 11 years ago

Translation is an overcrowded and not very generously paying field, especially in media. It's cool these guys can do it for a living but I gave up on it, personally.

sireat• 11 years ago

I too was a fansubber in the mid 90s.

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.

How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

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