This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
They hardsubbed their fucking typesetting. God fucking dammit.
Release format: MKV (277 MB, 10-bit), MKV (285 MB, 8-bit), LQ MKV (159 MB, 8-bit)
Japanesiness: Honorifics.
English style: American English.
Group website: http://hadena-subs.com/ http://shinbunbu-subs.com/
Encoding details: http://pastebin.com/PiCTC0qL
8thsin’s translation critique: http://8ths.in/spring-2012-fansub-comparison-reviews#Acchi
Ji-hi’s screenshot comparisons: http://www.ji-hi.net/sp12/acchi/
Table of Contents
Visual Quality
Karaoke.
Opening. Average, decent karaoke.
Ending. Again, it’s suitable, but nothing to write home about.
Typesetting.
As a viewer I don’t care if my shit’s hardsubbed. Why would I ever want to watch it without signs? But it’s hard for me to review typesetting when everything’s fucking hardsubbed because I’m not sure whether to credit the animation company or the group for a given sign. Oh well, this is what I got out of it:
That’s very readable. Thank you.
Yes, put your subtitles over the typesetting. That’s an excellent idea.
More great line placement.
You should get your typesetter to learn GermanEnglish because it’s “kindergarten”, not “kindergarden”.
Overall, if you’re gonna burn your fucking subs into the video, you better make fucking sure you do it for all relevant signs and you do it well. I can’t say this was the case with Shin-Hadena’s subs.
Other.
I tried to go to a previous point in the episode and then damn thing glitched out on me for a few seconds. Not cool.
Typical Hadena credits placed on a sponsor screen.
Generally, you don’t want your subs to run into the Japanese text.
This typesetting gave me motion sickness. Last I checked, that’s not a good thing.
Typical Hadena sponsor screen bullshit. It’s not 2004 any more, so quit with this shit.
Script Quality
Karaoke.
“Living out life alone lacks something small.” could be much improved. I get it’s probably a metaphor or something, but we can play around with words to make it:
“Living out life alone lacks just a little something.”
This allows you to retain the meaning of the original line, while also allowing an additional interpretation from the improved phrasing.
Other than that, the OP/ED were fine.
Main Script.
This was randomly put at the top of the screen.
The original line is short and basically meant as a confirmation for what Headbangs-kun said. There’s no need to repeat the whole goddamn line.
“Whatever they want?”
This should be “And Tsumiki-san.” because all the previous lines ended in periods, not allowing for a lowercase continuation of the sentence.
And again they fuck their standards up. For every other person, they end their introduction with a period. This should be “Kana-yan.”
At first, I thought this was just an issue with the font. But after a couple lines I realized they actually put two spaces in between certain words. They did this 12 times throughout the episode.
How does this go unnoticed?
Terrible timing. This line runs into when another character starts talking. Bad, bad, bad.
Hadena-tier editing.
“And his friend, Io, who happened to mindlessly tag along.”
spur-of-the-moment
Why is there a comma here?
“Isn’t that amusing?”
Question marks are not that hard to use, people.
Haha… ha… ha?
Wait, isn’t this supposed to be a comedy? Why is this line so fucking stupid, then?
The previous puns in this exchange were fine.
“I’ve mused up a plan.”
“That’s amusing.” {As in, “You’re retarded, so I find it hilarious that you claim you thought something up.”}
but having this as the final line in the sequence doesn’t work at all. There’s no humor or logic in it. His response would make more sense if it was written like he was offended by Io’s statement. You know, something like “Fuck you, dipshit. My plans are fucking sugoi.” There’s no need to work a pun back in there because it would seem tacked on and forced.
Try “So you think my plans are funny, do you? Like you could do better!” {You can drop the fucking TL Note here too. Also be aware that while my change doesn’t result in any “humor”, it really doesn’t need to. This is a pretty shitty spot to add a punch line, so I’m not keen on doing so.}
Does that match the original Japanese words? Well, it’s not a 1:1 translation if that’s what you mean. But when you consider one of the central tenets of translation — that translations should convey meaning and intent rather than literal phrases/words — it becomes pretty obvious that editors are just as responsible as translators (if not more so) for making these jokes work. And in the cases of comedy shows, that sometimes means scrapping unwieldy lines and rebuilding them with a different base.
If this is fucking blowing your mind, you can thank the poor state of the fansubbing community of yore for spreading the belief that translations need to be 100% direct translations without any attention paid to any other aspects of translation.
Three things wrong in the top line:
- Don’t, not Dont
- Needless double space between “wrong” and “idea”
- Missing a needed comma before “okay?!”
…
There is not a single goddamn way a human being could phrase this to make it sound good. Worse, this line is supposed to be delivered in a stereotypical tsundere fashion. Yeah, sure sounds tsundere to me.
“Don’t get the wrong idea, all right?! Stop staring and go to hell!” {“go to hell” is delivered in Engrish, so it’s almost a necessity to keep it in here.}
“Stop staring” is a better line because it allows the sentence to flow unstilted and remains something you might expect a tsundere to say if he/she were in “Flip the fuck out mode”.
Non-native speakers, if you want to edit, you need to learn how to use tenses correctly.
“If I took you up on that, I’d end up with more than just a broken heart.”
In addition to the wrong tense being used for this sentence, they spelled “conversation” wrong. Also, while “one-way trip to depression” makes sense in that we get the gist of what they’re saying, it sounds stupid. How does one take a trip to depression? Spruce it up a bit.
“Yeah, that wouldn’t be a conversation; it’d be a one-way trip to depressionland.”
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: D+
Overall grade (timing results not factored in): C-
When the other groups are operating a tier-and-a-half above this one, I don’t really see any reason why you would want to hold out for this release. Stick with Tsumiki for Acchi Kocchi.
This was like the worst episode in the entire show and it’s been ages since I worked on it, but I’m pretty sure that the whole joke about the “kokkei” part was that they were talking about “battle strategies” as some kind of metaphor (because girls are “warriors in the battle of love” or some shit) and there’s some kind of convention or something where the names for all the strategies ended in -kei (e.g. “kakei”, which is the strategy of using fire). The joke was that Sakaki’s strategy is “kokkei”, which isn’t actually a strategy at all (it means “being ridiculous”) but it ends in the same -kei sound but a different kanji. Hurr hurr.
I’m not really sure how they got from that to this, but there you go. For reference, for Commie’s I had “fight fire with fire” / “fight fire with oil” (sorry, it was 4am and I wanted to finish with the episode already) and Tsumiki had the much better “blazing troops” / “clown troupe” (which also plays off the ‘homophone but different word’ aspect, making it a pretty good localisation).
On the upside, this episode was the one that made me decide not to stay up on Fridays editing Commie’s release any more, and I think the quality drastically improved from ep5 onwards as a result.
Out of curiosity — you always comment when groups put credits on sponsor screens, what would be the best place to have them? Or not have them placed in the episode at all?
I’d be for the latter. It’s not 2004 anymore, and people can check the website if they care.
There’s really no need to ever include the sponsor screen unless you’re using it for something useful/interesting like EveTaku’s Inu x Boku.
Mix them into the opening/ending credits.
Checking the website generally works not well as most groups either don’t list the projects, or don’t list past projects.
Adding them to the actual credits always felt too presumptuous to me, like group logos. But I understand some people go for that kind of thing so whatever.
Checking the website would work fine if groups followed my suggestion! It’s not even that hard, just keep a pad or something during the season where you keep track of who did what then throw it on a projects page at the end.
“I’m not sure whether to credit the animation company or the group for a given sign.” Objective complete.
But what if we want to know who sponsored the anime?
Yeah, srslyman, sometimes I wanna know if McDonald’s sponsors my anime so I can feel all cool and shit when I buy a Big Mac.
Keikaku means plan.
Best fansubbing joint of 2012.
I hate how it just had to be the one episode I couldn’t spend more than 2 hours on. I’ll blame uni for that.
Also that credits thing is bullshit. It’s wrong half the time.
You’re doing the translating for this release, right? I’ve been following all the releases for this show, and you really need more/better TLC – or at the very least you need to pay more attention to the show to identify when things don’t make sense. For instance, I don’t know how you would have thought that the joke about Mayoi’s labcoat at the start of ep6 is that the colour was fading when it zooms right in to the tag to show you that her winter coat is 100% wool and her summer coat is like 20% wool and 80% polyester. They pretty much spell that one out onscreen.
Not to mention stuff like this: http://puu.sh/ARRb
which should raise a red flag because it simply doesn’t make sense. What village square? Why would she go there just to make a hat?
See thats how the credits mislead you.
I only do part A and Shitagi does B.
As for TLC, I’ve asked for one the past ten weeks with no luck. The first 5 eps didn’t even get checked, and I had to quickly skim through for errors when I had the time.
So basically, yeah, we need a TLC.
Oh, and signs are all Shitagi territory. I don’t have enough time to check those and since its hardsubbed on AFX I can’t go back to fix them either.
I guess if we delayed by a couple hours, I could do a full check but right now with uni exams and stuff I just can’t do that. I’ll do a full fix for the batch, though.
>It’s not 2004 any more, so quit with this shit.
That applies to most shit Hadena does.
Ah, I remember the “go to hell” line. It definitely sounds pretty stupid, but it didn’t exactly flow well in Japanese either. If we’re talking about translating to match the intention of the original, then the original was intended as a non sequitur. The joke is that he starts with the typical “hiding embarrassment” tsundere line and then cuts off in the middle to say something threatening and out of left field.
The whole radio segment was a clusterfuck, though.
>The whole radio segment was a clusterfuck, though.
Yeah, tell me about it :(
Not to brag or anything but are you going to bring back the fansub review wrap up?
>brag
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
And no. What’s the point when I have the Review Summary?
“Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like I— Go to hell!”
That’s from Tsumiki’s release. I think your active dislike for Acchi Kocchi is causing you to think that this line should be different, but this is how it’s supposed to be. No, it doesn’t ‘flow’ correctly. That’s because it’s supposed to be a joke. Maybe not a super high-class joke or anything, but this is the humor of the show. It’s supposed to be funny because you expect him to be acting like a tsundere and then he just stops and says “GO TO HELL!”
Hence the line that comes six seconds later: “That doesn’t even make sense.”
It’s just one of those things that some people don’t really like, but to others, it’s hilarious.
Yeah, I had something pretty similar. It’s such a well-known phrase and the “go to hell” is so obvious that there’s not much else you can do without having it go incredibly awkwardly with the audio (and I’m usually the last person to care about things like that)
About the only thing I’d say is mandatory is to split the line so the ‘Go to Hell!’ doesn’t appear until he says it, otherwise it kind of ruins the joke in advance.
That would be my immediate response too. If you’re gonna use the em-dash as a cut-off, at least make it, y’know, cut-off. Otherwise you’re just doing it wrong (you can use em-dashes for other purposes, but most times, without a space either side).
Hmmm… I thought I sub-par tlced ep 4… but according to the pad’s history, I didn’t. Can’t be helped.
http://bit.ly/NOK5Bp
This just kills me. They get it right, yet they get it wrong at the same time (those of you not following along, the TSed signs should be switched around along with their respective colors).