It’s been two weeks since Kadokawa began broadcasting the Haruhi-chan and Churuya-san shorts on their YouTube channel. Most of the episodes have been funny, though I took a couple for Churuya-san to click with me because I felt its 4-koma origins initially shone through too much in its joke structure. Each episode has been posted in both raw and English-subtitled versions and those subtitles have occasional misspellings and instances of odd grammar.
As a nitpicker, I have listed below errors and oddities that have appeared in their subtitles so far. Hopefully, whoever is doing the translating for Kadokawa gets a native English speaker to look over their translations because their current competition for English-language eyeballs is coming from a non-professional group, which also offers scripts in French, German, and Russian.
Haruhi-chan #1
0:29 – “The malice lurking uder the casual greeting. She’s good.” => ‘under’
4:05 – “Go to sleep in this world, then you wake up at the other.” => ‘in the other’ (consistency)
Haruhi-chan #2
2:18 – “And above the big four of our group, is the top three leaders…” => ‘are’ (plural nouns)
Haruhi-chan #3
2:07 – “Fire work is set on a close call.” => “That lit firework was a close call”, maybe?
Haruhi-chan #4
2:44 – “By the time I’m fully revived, you’d be turned to ashes.” => ‘you’ll’
3:26 – “There’re only two including mine.” => technically correct but a bit awkward
4:04 – “So I assumed that is how I’m being.” => being…’viewed’, perhaps?
Haruhi-chan #5
0:15 – “want you to play a match of our dodge balll game” => ‘ball’
1:20 – “A game is just too dopy!” => ‘dopey’
Haruhi-chan #6
0:18 – “I found lots of clothes in the stool that I don’t recognize.” => ‘on the stool’
0:22 – “Oh, that’s probable Nagato’s.” => ‘probably’
0:32 – “Rivalry develpoing as a costume-play character?” => ‘developing’
1:56 – “It’s been decided to be animationalized.” => not really a word but could become one with repeated use. Also, the whole sentence has wooden construction.
3:20 – “Gee! Does she think I’d delighted by this?” => ‘be delighted’
Churuya-san #1
none
Churuya-san #2
0:11 – “We’re playing rock scissors papers.” => either ‘paper’ (preferred) or ‘rocks’
(traditional English ordering is rock, paper, scissors)
1:23 – “I call smoked cheese the “smochi” for a short.” => ‘for short’
Churuya-san #3
0:24 – “You out!” -> You’re out!
0:35 – “We’re going on a training camp tomorrow.” – though technically correct, ‘going to’ is preferable
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Tags: churuya-san, haruhi-chan, kadokawa, subtitles, youtube
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Dear Mr. CalAggie:
As you are a certified nitpicker :-), I suggest you to review the horrendous work
done by the CoalGuys on the ToraDora Series. The errors the do on translating
are much worse than the simple typos you detected here.Yours
Pimpao
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The subtitling done on the shorts distributed through Kadokawa’s channel is generally considered more professional than that of a fansubbing group and thus held to a higher standard. Even though this case involves two net anime, the subtitlers should try to produce the best work that they can. Amateur groups may strive to achieve similar standards but they will still have difficulties being viewed on the same level, part of which stems from its illicit nature.
I doubt I will write critiques about fansubtitling with regard to specific groups for two reasons: 1) I don’t care that much and it would take more work than I would like, especially if I chose to split hairs on a more subjective level about meanings and word choice, and 2) other bloggers do a keener of ripping on poor translations and typos. (By the way, I think I’ve viewed Aero’s subs for most of my Toradora watching.)
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Man your a grammar nazi.
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“Man, you are a grammar nazi.”
vould be more proper. ^^
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This kind of translation work from the Japanese is pretty common-place in my experience. After all, we wouldn’t have “Engrish” if there were people who were really up to speed on English in Japan hired to translate or to make sure English words/grammar were done right. I own a couple of Japanese R2 DVD’s which were officially subtitled and while mostly OK, there are several spots where you can tell the translator/adapter was not a native English speaker and that the translations used were questionable at best.
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Any fansub quality checker would spot (most of) these errors on their first run. CoalGuys suck because they leave QC out or they have foreigners doing it.
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Not sure if we should be complimented or insulted that you called us “an amateur group”, but yeah…
Just off of memory, I know you missed one. They misspelled one of the “ball”s in Haruhi-chan 05 as “balll”…
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One anime world, uder Haruhi~
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Imhomeless: I prefer to be called someone who shows concern for language.
AstroNerdBoy: Errors ideally will decrease with practice if there is an honest effort to right bad habits.
Miha: That’s a common complaint about speed subbing in general.
Shimasen Subs: I should have explicitly said what I meant to imply, which was that your group may viewed as “non-professional” compared to the staff employed by a company, even though both have organizational structures and the former may have the potential do a better job than the latter. I have since tweaked the text to say “non-professional”. (I did include that “balll” screwup in the original post.)
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Oops, sorry, I somehow skipped your stuff for 5 and went straight to 6. ;P
^^’
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