This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
This is a review of Doki’s Nichijou release. It’s aimed at helping you to choose which fansub group’s release to watch. EDIT: I should note that I only reviewed the English of this release. Apparently the translation had some inconsistencies with another group. This will be taken care of in a new post.
Doki
Note: Because Doki uses British English and I use American English, there is a very slight chance I might say something is wrong when it’s right under British English rules. I don’t think I’ll run into that problem, but I figured I’d give you a heads up.
Also, I really liked the typesetting in this show. It was pretty professional.
OP/ED
simple-minded, more like. If you wanna use it as a single adjective, you gotta join ’em together.
No, this isn’t styling on purpose. When you use the {fscx200} tag, the things that come after it look really weird. They didn’t realize this before release.
What should I do? I forgot my stationery…
Misspelled. It’s “selamat pagi” like three other times in the episode.
Pick one and stick with it.
I’m pretty sure that even in Britain a better idiom would be “Be grateful for small mercies.”
“It can’t be helped” doesn’t bother me, and I’m not counting it against them. I just know there are some people out there who can’t stand the phrase, so I’m including this pic for them. <3
me, okay?
Oh, a shichirin is a stove? Well then how about you fucking translate it as “stove”? Jesus…
I get really nervous when I’m in front of this many people. {She’s talking about her stage fright as she’s on the stage}
These lines are directly after each other. As you can see, they don’t exactly flow right.
Oooh. No, bad phrasing. Bad!
“I don’t think these kinds of pranks are good!”
No, the set-up to this one goes
“Thank you very much for your work up until today, principal.”
I’d knock them for not calling him “Principal”, but I’m gonna let it slide~
Ya know, I think they call these ‘fire alarms’ even in Britain. Also, I’d change it to “strong, almost-magical pull” so that it sounds better.
This is referring to the earlier conversation about riding a goat to school. The subject in question is not goats. Rather, he’s talking about riding a goat to school. Therefore, the sentence should be “It’s true, it’s not a violation of school rules” where the “it” refers to the riding of a goat.
Pretty sure “little” doesn’t need to be capped here.
Every day
Overall grade: B-
Still not seeing why Doki gets so much hate. They had a lot of little things that really got to me, but overall they didn’t fuck up that much at all. Plus they beat HorribleSubs to a release and they TL’d it themselves. Kudos to them for that.
Do you ever notify them directly of their mistakes? I think constructive criticism is a good thing in fansubbing cause they can learn from their mistakes, so kudos to you for that.
British myself and the two mistakes you pointed out would of bugged me still. Think Doki might be the better choice for this series though so still going with it.
“Oh, a shichirin is a stove? Well then how about you fucking translate it as “stove”? Jesus…”
Keikaku means Plan.
O U, talking about mistakes bugging you and using ‘would of’ in that same sentence <3
“the two mistakes you pointed out bugged me still.”
Made that post about 10 minutes after waking up, no idea why I had “would of”. It was unnecessary, yes, but are you seriously critiquing my comment?
Am I being evaluated for something in particular or is it just nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking?
That’s seriously uncool and pointless. xD
Nah, it was just a bit ironic. I had no ill intentions whatsoever.
I think the reason Doki gets so much hate is that (at least, from what I’ve seen) their quality tends to be very inconsistent. For instance, I thought they did a great job with Ore no Imouto, but I felt their Zombie release was lacking quite a bit. Also, I remember one time, one of their translators had come out and said something about how he cared more about the number of downloads than the quality of his releases. So, in other words, thank you very much Dark_Sage for doing these reviews!
You know what, I take back what I said about Zombie. Turns out I had only watched the v1 of episode 1 from Doki. Looking over the v2 script now, it looks much, much better. Perhaps Doki isn’t quite as inconsistent as I thought they were.
The reason why Doki gets so much hate is because their translators aren’t good. This Nichijou release has a lot of Japanese derpiness. The KY part was especially bad because it’s a very common JP term on the interwebs.
“Aren’t good”
Point out an actual translation error?
It’s good to know that them crazy Nips use tentacles as string.
Squid leg and string are written with characters that are almost identical to each other. It is probably impossible to tell what it was given the very low quality raws used for translations.
Holo, I want to say this as politely as possible, because I’m not here to rip on your subs…just point out “actual translation errors”, as you asked.
I haven’t watched your version yet, but I have watched the first episode, and just based on captures from ji-hi, nearly everything was incorrect, or poorly phrased.
For the sake of brevity, let’s look at only things that are outright errors.
http://www.ji-hi.net/sp11/nichijou/Doki/10-sign2.png
ゲソ. I think you guys probably thought this said ゲン, although even so, one glance at it would have suggested otherwise, and 絃 is really not that kind of string. I understand that ゲソ and ゲン can look similar, but instrument strings don’t usually have suckers all over them.
http://www.ji-hi.net/sp11/nichijou/Doki/12-dialog6.png
Again, I can kinda see where you went wrong here, but this is pretty basic Japanese to be misinterpreting. 先生、ヤギではなく、笹原幸治郎と呼ぶわけにはいかないか？
Sensei, couldn’t you call him Sasahara Kojirou instead of “goat”?
http://www.ji-hi.net/sp11/nichijou/Doki/13-dialog7.png
I’m at a total loss with this one. Between 秀で and 痛覚, I don’t know how in the world you managed to get so lost. Did you hear 数学? Even with that, you’re just inserting other words that are not even close to being present (like 博士,宿題, etc).
http://www.ji-hi.net/sp11/nichijou/Doki/14-dialog8.png
I’m back to sorta kinda seeing how you went wrong with this one. I’m assuming what you heard was “昼だけは満載です”…but when you misheard this line, that should have been your cue to go back and revisit the previous one. It’s obvious that Nano was correcting her earlier claim, and she actually delivered the line more clearly this time around. This should have been an opportunity to get both of them right.
http://www.ji-hi.net/sp11/nichijou/Doki/15-dialog9.png
And I end things with being lost again. I have no idea what you thought you heard here. I’ll concede that telling Nano to take her Akutagawa prize is pretty out of left field, but she clearly said 取って in the previous line, and it should have only taken a few listens to parse it out. What you came up with instead is, as near as I can figure, entirely made up.
Again, I wasn’t coming here to say “Doki is bad”, or anything of the sort. You guys have been around a long time, and I know from experience what a pain in the ass fansubbing can be. But if the ji-hi comparisons are any indication, you should probably slow WAY down this week before release. Here’s hoping things go better next time!
seriously holo, you should know best that your TLs bullshit more than half the script.
No, as mentioned above, it’s some inconsistency with translators and fanboy-ing that some haters gather. I’d override all those with the awesome BD/DVD releases and karaoke they’re giving me though. Heck, if you’re bothered, rip out the subs and fix them yourself, not saying that the mistakes shouldn’t be fixed by the group.
I don’t mind them putting common JP terms in the translation, it’s just that they forgot to explain how the joke goes.
deluded.mkv
Even though I’m late to the party, is release speed really that important?
Okay, granted that you fix stuff in the batches and Blu-rays, but still…
“Oh, a shichirin is a stove? Well then how about you fucking translate it as “stove”? Jesus…”
Because it’s not typical stove. Well, it’s hard to call it stove just like that. It has no sense as regular stove in this situation anyway. Good for you Doki.
And btw if you are searching subs for Nichijou – they improved many lines in final version, so yes – it’s definitely THE BEST translation for this show. Don’t even think about wathing it with cummie.