This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
All these shitty groups on a decent show. Fuck. Honestly, your best option is going to be Funimation’s subs. I know that’s not really an option for you non-Americans out there though, so sucks for you.
Release format: MKV (351 MB, 8-bit)
Japanesiness: Honorifics. Japanese name order. “Onee-chan” used.
English style: American English.
Group website: http://araaraufufu.wordpress.com/
Encoding details: http://pastebin.com/Wc7jVEEW
8thsin’s translation critique: http://8ths.in/spring-2012-fansub-comparison-reviews#Eureka
Ji-hi’s screenshot comparisons: http://www.ji-hi.net/sp12/eurekaao/
Table of Contents
Visual Quality
Karaoke.
Opening. The first scene shows what happens when the karaoke goes wrong. The final syllables of lines often linger too long on the screen, interfering with the incoming karaoke. And the English at the bottom sometimes overlaps the Japanese. When it works (second screenshot), the karaoke is fine, but those errors are quite noticeable.
Ending. The color choice made sense and the karaoke as a whole was decent.
Typesetting.
They only added their group name to this shot.
The “Light My Fire” part was the only thing they added.
You can blame the anime company for this one. Figured you guys would get as big a laugh out of it as I did.
“Preview” was added here.
And they didn’t add any of the typesetting here. (The blue is this group’s regular font.)
Other.
Shitty, small blue text combined with an inability to understand how to break lines. Bad, bad, bad.
Script Quality
Karaoke.
As far as I can tell, they’re trying to say that “your tears were dyed in the colors of the rainbow and flew away” (though with some weird tense use), so I’m really fucking confused here.
Other than that, the OP/ED were fine.
Main Script.
“There’s no better view when enjoying such indulgences…
as your last meal in this world.”
This suggestion allows the lines to fit together better. The first line is also fixed (“extravagances” doesn’t fit together with “last meal” as well as “indulgences” does).
The pausing here is fucked.
“Because of you, our country’s economy is on… the verge of bankruptcy!”
There’s no reason to have a comma here.
There’s no need for a comma, and it should be “messed-up”.
“Welcome to this messed-up world. It has groups with shitty names creating shitty subs.”
Why is “kilometers” capitalized? Also, it’s the Republic of Colombia, not the Colombian Republic. Yes, it does fucking matter; it’s the name of their goddamn country. I’m sure your editor would be offended if I called his native Retardistan something different.
“back up” -> “backup”.
“Chief Bruno”. The title, combined with his name, is a proper noun, so capitalize it.
This is a military setting, so at least use common military words. They didn’t “dispatch”; they sortied.
Just wanted to point out that there’s nothing wrong with tildes being used here.
Ara went with tildes for this girl because she’s otaku as fuck and also likes extending the ends of her sentences. The tilde is traditionally used as a length extender in fansubs, so its use is perfectly fine here.
No need for a comma here.
It should be “Team Goldilocks” for similar reasons as those I outlined in my “Chief Bruno” comment.
The word “Even” here distracts from what they’re trying to say, which is “The Options may regenerate, but it’ll take some time to do so.”
“If we destroy its Options, they’ll regenerate. But the regeneration process takes time, right?”
Timing fail. These two sentences should not be on the same screen.
“Ao, You did well.” is a shitty fucking sentence. You don’t capitalize the beginning of a line just because it’s a new line.
“Is that everything you need before you move in?”
There’s no need to classify it as “shopping” when they talk about how they shopped not two sentences later. Therefore, the awkwardness of the current line cannot be excused for the reason of plot explanation.
You’re going to want to italicize the first “you” here.
who’s should be whose, but the entire line needs a rephrase.
“Generation Bleu is effortlessly attacked by a man with a clear objective.”
Huh?
“People try to change themselves as they deal with the reality that surrounds them.” <- Still seems kinda stupid to me, but that’s what you’re getting as a correction. Deal with it.
Timing Review
Incoming. When “Timing Critique” is added as a category, you’ll know this part is done.
Results.
Watchability: Watchable.
Timing Grade:
Visual grade: C+
Script grade: C-
Overall grade (timing results not factored in): C
“Episode 6 is out and I think this is our best release yet!”
If this is the best you’re going to get from these guys, I think it’s best to just avoid them. A good QC would have taken out most of the errors I pointed out, which would have likely made this the best release, but this is what we got. But they got the best grade for this series, so if you have to choose one of the releases out there, go with this one.
>“Chief Bruno”. The title, combined with his name, is a pronoun, so capitalize it.
Do you mean proper noun or am I missing something here?
I blame the liquor.
From what I saw of an earlier episode, this probably is their best release yet… =____=
I’m relatively certain that it started out as a one-man project and they’ve been slowly picking up staff as their episodes progress.
Would you believe it if I tell you: I just found out they were encoding on our server. Heck is that, I am mad now.
Ara used your server for encodes? lol, someone’s getting fired.
Yeah, ben was encoding for them.
at least he was making good use of your server. your encodes look like shit anyways!
check their latest ep man.. it’s better than this!
Sounds more like an F than a C to me.
Maybe a D at worse (they got a C-, which is close enough), but this is far from F-tier. A lot of the mistakes are minor, and it’s a better release than Hadena’s and gg’s.
Blame the font.
Relative to the other reviews this season, it’s a C- for the script. A C- is a pretty bad rating, though. If your group hits below B-tier for the script, that means you fucked up.
Meh, C- isn’t great, but it could be worse given that only a month ago this was a one man outfit and none of us have any prior fansubbing experience; I’ll take some small pride in the fact that you’re rating us higher than two well established groups, and we’re still at that stage where we’re learning new things and improving with each release.
As for the criticisms themselves… some of them are somewhat subjective (i.e. the usage of commas usually being to reflect pauses in the spoken Japanese), whilst others are entirely fair. I’m pleased that there were no major errors, though I guess there were enough minor ones to add up and lower the overall grade. Rather getting butthurt and trying to defend individual errors, we’ll put your critique to use in improving future releases so thanks for that… and yes, having more staff probably wouldn’t hurt either. (hey guyz, you should totally liek check out araaraufufu.wordpress.com if you want to help make the best release for this show even better ^_-)
Also, have you actually watched Funimation’s subs? Christ, they are far and away the worst option…
Commas might work that way in Japanese, but they certainly don’t in English. Commas aren’t representative of pause, despite generally dictating the flow of a sentence, but are punctuation necessary for grammatical English. The generally accepted punctuation for pauses is the elipsis (…). Furthermore, there shouldn’t be any need to mark minor pauses— viewers can hear the character pausing anyway, and it doesn’t contribute to the nuance of the sentence in any way.