47 thoughts on “Translation Review (Shorts): [Migoto] Boku no Imouto wa Osaka Okan – SP”

1. The Commie route link links to the HorribleSubs screenshot.

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   • Fixed

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2. That Commie screenshot made me vomit to death. How does someone think that’s an okay thing to do?

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   • Personally, I wouldn’t watch the show any other way.

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     • I concur.

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       • As the editor, I found the show right offensive bad. Made me madder’n a wet hen an’ that there carpin’ done gone so far outta right-thinkin’ it’s ’bout as useless as a bent-dick hound.

         So I asked if I could simply remove the series from realm of sanity altogether, the request was approved, and I compiled a collection of weird Southern idioms that survives on my hard drive to this day. So yes, the purpose was not so much to “translate” the show as to “render it fun to watch.” I laughed an’ laughed an’ I was right happier’n a buzzard inna truck fulla hog guts, an’ that’s God’s own truth for y’all.

         If for some reason you wish to punish yourself by watching the unununbowdlerized Osaka Okan, Migoto and HS are clearly the superior subs. If’n y’all wanna have more fun’n a hoot owl’n heat, set yerselfs down’n, fire up that Commie release right good, an’ start rip-roarin’!

         tl;dr: DARN TOOTIN’!

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         • Commie: We don’t like the show, so we’ll just rewrite the script entirely to conform to our own sense of humor.

           Who needs an actual translation when you have the wit of Commie?

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           • In Japanese the show is about a girl and her dialect. In English it’s about a girl and her dialect. Nothing was rewritten.

             Moreover, Margaan’s opinion and editing is not perforce reflective of that of the rest of the group. We love liberty. We love freedom. We are American. Each editor can do his own thing without being disturbed by the petty considerations of others. We will not threaten his freedom of expression as guaranteed by the constitution of the United States of America.

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           • More like, “Who needs an actual translation of this show?”

             But I thought we were bad subbers because we’re no more than minimal-effort CR-rippers with “editing” that consists of nothing more than adding random profanities to our releases. Or was it because we use the same damn font for everything? Or was it because we keep on filling our releases with exotic typesetting and weird fonts that break people’s computers? I’m getting really confused now. It’s almost as if we tailor our techniques to each show we release.

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             • Look, you clearly didn’t take this release srsly. The fact that people are pissed off about it and question your ability to take other releases seriously will come with the territory.

               Also, freedom of expression does not equal freedom from criticism.

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               • I should hope not—good criticism is incredibly helpful. We made plenty of mistakes on Osaka (like the three-liner, which came about when two lines were accidentally merged, or my boneheaded newbie typos http://i.imgur.com/FMzQI5l.jpg ) people could constructively point out, but “sasuga Commie” isn’t going to help anyone.

                 But ignore my wishful thinking. You’re quite right of course: all groups appears monolithic to those on the outside, and hate is the functional currency of anime fandom, so any out-of-the-ordinary action is bound to be met with such a response.

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             • You’re bad subbers because you think that re-writing the script, completely altering the intended meaning of what was in the original, is the same as editing.

               Not like this is the first time we’ve seen you make a decision such as this because you think you know better than the show’s creator.

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               • If you’re complaining about rewriting, you definitely think I’M a bad editor, not that Commie are bad fansubbers. Seems like you’d have no beef with herkz or jdp or shirt or Xythar or any of our other fine Not-Margaan editors, at least on that count. Our handy Showtimes page may help you avoid me.

                 That said, my goal is always to produce high-quality English that conveys the meaning of the original Japanese as authentically as possible… but I’m far from perfect. If you have any examples of lines in which I have failed to do so, please do share them so that I may defend myself or apologize grovelingly as necessary. (The Eoten Incident has already received its apology.)

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                 • Actually, the rest of you Commie guys (herkz, Xythar, fnord, whoever) are no bit better than you.
                   Massive localization is always to be found, as is adding vast amounts of American slang and swearwords. Changes from the original are frequent, too, whereas it’s debatable if they stem from deliberately rewriting the script or from not understanding what was said properly. I’d put deliberately rewriting the script as even more shameful.

                   > my goal is always to produce high-quality English
                   Your subs are as much “high quality” as is “high quality” food from McDonalds, “high quality” clothing from Walmart or “high quality” cars like a 1970s Dodge, driven by Al Bundy who has the “high quality” job of a women’s shoe salesman. (I’m sure Al would love your subs.)

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                   • Nope.

                   • Why is it that every time I give an invitation to dialogue, the dialogue suddenly shuts down? I must be most detested.

                     But seriously, your post says, “your subs are bad because they overlocalize and change the script and you don’t understand the original and there is cursing and they are bad,” which is exactly what Hairy said expanded into a few more words (apart from the cursing, which I mentioned a few posts back). The only new information you have added to the conversation is, “I don’t like your subs.” Now that’s fine; you don’t have to like Commie any more than you have to like the color red or pickles on your burger. But my call for examples of my own shortcomings was neither facetious nor intended as a challenge: it was your opportunity to show me up in public (and secretly, my opportunity to improve). The fact that you provided no such examples merely makes it seem as if you’ve never actually watched my subs, undercutting your own point. Having opinions is good, but having opinions about things of which you have no experience is how religious wars happen. If you want to judge something guilty, you need to provide evidence of guilt or you wind up being one of those political radio commentators who think that repeating their opponent’s points in silly voices somehow invalidates their arguments.

                     Don’t be a politician, man. You’re better than that. Add something to the conversation, and we can talk.

                   • Then why don’t you do it instead of whining about it. Sometimes they don’t fit, sometimes they do fit the character. Every fansub group makes errors and there are people who don’t localize and people who do. Commie has a rule for that, otherwise, go and watch the other groups. It’s simple as that. Otherwise, learn the language and watch the raw.

         • Yes, I can tell you put out borderline troll subs because you didn’t care much for this show in the first place. However, even if I actually liked what you did, there’s no excuse for things like this.

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           • Three-liners and forced contractions aside…

             To make sure, I need some clarification. Was the character really intended as a complete caricature that’s supposed to be annoying, or was the original (Japanese) rendering a little less disdainful than that?

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             • Yep. The fact that they inserted that phrase denganamangana which is pretty much obsolete is a dead giveaway that Namika was never intended to portray a “real” Osaka resident.

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               • That’s why I found the series actively offensive. I live in Japan and know plenty of Osakans, and I am absolutely certain they never ever talk like that. The show isn’t the series of witty observations about minor cultural differences it could have been (I had hoped for a Kansai “How to Talk Minnesotan”); instead, it’s no more than a series of stultifyingly scurrilous stale stereotypes ceaselessly screamed at its viewers and I felt that presenting it as unfiltered “truth” to an audience not equipped to pick up on its pure ludicrousness would contribute to making the world a worse place.

                 On a related note, we have no plans to sub this special.

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                 • I think your subs are “actively offensive”.

                   If you don’t like a series, then why waste time on subbing it, just to put out borderline troll subs?

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                   • This is a good question. When I first joined Commie at the beginning of that season, I was assigned Osaka Okan and Kotoura as my “training shows,” and I’d never have considered subbing the former had I not been forced to think about how I could render it watchable. After I checked out the first episode I told the rest of the group, “this show is awful and I hate it but we could have fun with it this way; should we go for it?” Everyone laughed and said yes, because Osaka Imouto just isn’t worth getting butthurt over and it was a good chance to relax.

                     Although it’s too bad you don’t find these subs enjoyable, as kokujin-kun pointed out it’s not like they somehow corrupt the beautiful Japanese of the original. If you don’t like our take, you don’t like it; just be careful not to confuse “I do not like this thing” with “this thing is objectively evil.”

                   • Actually, what you did was the equivalent of taking Osaka-ben, Kyuushuu-ben, Akita-ben, Kyoto-ben, Sendai-ben, and all the other dialects in Japan, putting them in the blender, and pouring our the whole mess. I see a whole bunch of phrases in your subs that can’t be even be called “Southern” to anyone familiar with the region, and as a parody it goes too over the top to even be considered funny. But, hey, you accomplished your goals. You took a giant shit on a show you hate and people are calling you out for it.

                   • Er, my apologies; I seem to have created a misconception with my mention of “a collection of weird Southern idioms.” Namika’s accent is based on a number of stereotypical (and mostly mythical) Southern American speech patterns, but it’s not intended actually to be Southern. The problem with “translating” Osaka-ben is that there’s no regional dialect of American English that fills quite the same cultural niche (that weird combination of urban, old-fashioned, and just-slightly-low-class); I considered using a really hardcore Boston accent, but I found that it just didn’t come across properly in subtitles and that it lacked the significantly idiosyncratic vocabulary of Osaka-ben. (Although it would have been fun to have Namika saying, “I gottah wicked pissah of a bangah! Hey, brothah, you wanna get me a tonic?”)

                     In the end, I decided that there was no need to perform a one-to-one conversion to a “real” accent to capture Namika’s ridiculously over-the-top Japanese, and so I started with my Southern idioms and then developed “Namika-ben” on top of them. There are many things unique to her language—that weirdly ungrammatical use of “druthers”; the almost obsessive use of “right” as an intensifier; the seemingly insoluble phonetic puzzle created by her simultaneous use of “y’all” (suggesting an opening of the vowel sound in the second-person pronoun) and “yer” (suggesting that the vowel sound is fronted but closed)—but I actually created a little set of general rules she had to follow and made sure I didn’t break them (I also avoided any specifically rural, regional, or religious idioms no matter how much fun they were on the grounds that they didn’t fit a Osaka context, although in some cases I was able to rationalize particularly appropriate Southernisms like “grab a root” for “eat dinner,” as the Southern “root” may be a potato, but Namika’s “root” would clearly be a daikon) so although my success is as this conversation proves highly debatable, I at least made an effort to create a consistent “new” dialect for Namika that resembled her disfigurement of the Japanese language. This meant that I wound up spending around three hours a week editing a three-minute show but I enjoyed the heck out of the time (writing weird language is how I relax) and I think I achieved my goal, which was not so much to take a giant shit on the show as to create an English that was (like this interminable parenthesis-filled post) about 80% comprehensible to the casual viewer upon first watching: enough to enable understanding of the episode, but not enough to be deluded into believing anything was being “taught” about Japanese culture.

                     Now this is where someone starts yelling, “but that’s not translating! That’s rewriting!” I respectfully disagree. To give an example of my process, I might hear Namika utter in her dulcet tones like the sound a hollow metal lamppost makes when one rubs one’s bicycle lock up and down its length a pair of lines Crunchyroll staidly translates as, “I can’t say much about that. So, what do you wanna know?” I run it through the Namika Converter and come out with, “Shucks, that ain’t my know-how, no way. So watchya wanna know?” Or I might idiom up a dully-translated line like “Mikami-sensei’s sure got it rough” to achieve, “Poor girl. That stinks so bad it’d knock a buzzard offa gut wagon.” In both cases, the words have changed to match Namika’s English dialect, but the sentiments communicated have not… and the increased strangeness of the English better reflects Namika’s skewed language. It’s not like I’m What’s Up, Tiger Lily?ing the series here. But if I’m not providing an alternative to Crunchyroll that’s actually an alternative, rather than the exact same thing with a different font, what on earth would be the purpose of having fansub editors for streamed series? […Seriously?]

                     And that’s the last I’ll say about this. Love it or hate it, it is what it is. I had fun working on it, and if at least one person had fun watching it I consider it a job well done.

                   • Margaan, I like you, but you’d take the b out of subtle if you could.

                   • Great balls of fire, that wound up long.

                     The autism is strong with this one.

                   • Is that a challenge, Sage? Because the “b” doesn’t even belong in “subtle.” The spelling is a product of the exact same kind of elitist snobbery that gave us (the totally incorrect) “octopi”; see http://www.pronuncian.com/Podcast/Default.aspx?Episode=101 or http://www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk/?p=404 for the whole story. Milton uses the spelling “suttle” in http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/of_education/ and I rather like that vaguely sepic rendition of the word.

                     …

                     What can I say? I’m a skeptic by nature and an essayist by training. Subtlety is a highly admirable quality of art, but in fora (or forums; whatever, they’re both correct) like this, clarity and frankness are most greatly to be desired. I can be subtle if I want to, though. Just look at my name. (Okay, I admit my nick is “subtle” only because its wordplay is so terminally stupid, it’s an inverse version of The Emperor’s New Suit: the intelligent mind refuses to recognize that such mind-numbing idiocy can exist, and thus smart people are incapable of understanding it while the less intellectually gifted grasp it intuitively.)

                   • To be honest, I didn’t read that post beyond the first line. In fact, I skip over most everything you write.

                     I’m saying this as much for your sake as my sanity, but learn how to fucking write, you boring, halfwit sod. Because if even I can’t be assed to read your posts when you’re writing them on my blog, your time would be better spent conversing with yourself in a shower than wasting the space of my comments section.

                   • Ooh, I like “boring, halfwit sod.” That’s one to pilfer for my insult database.

                     I’m a little curious, though: why should my writing jeopardize your sanity if you don’t read my posts? You have absolutely no moral obligation to read every single thing in your comments section. If my posts are too long, you have full authority to ignore them, not to approve them, or to delete them. This blog is your show. I’m writing for people interested in reading what I write, whether to mock it, glean information from it, or contribute to the discussion. If you’re not in that group, that’s fine. Most people aren’t. But be careful about opening yourself to charges of bad faith by passing unnecessary judgment in your own domain on something of which you have no experience. It’s very possible my writing really is unbearable, but if that’s the case and you want to critique it, you need to support your case. Anyone can see that my posts are stupidly Dumas-level long, but how do you know they’re badly-written (unless brevity is your sole criterion for the quality of the written word)?

                     In short: if you’d written, “learn how to fucking paraphrase, you boring, halfwit sod,” or, “learn how to be fucking concise, you boring, halfwit sod,” I’d be a happy camper.

                   • …Because “badly-written” doesn’t need a hyphen in that position, Margaan, you thunderously doltish, harebrained troglodytic nincompoop.

                     Oh well. Hopefully that ends the conversation.

                   • Yes, I read your post, and I can see where you are coming from. You wanted to create a “unique” speech pattern for Namika which is a hodgepodge of different colloquialisms.

                     But what I read is that you actually took your work on this show more seriously than you say. Why can’t you admit that you were pretty much trolling and be done with it? You created a whole new stereotypical dialect? Mazel tov. However, the subs are still far too over the top and call too much attention to themselves (one needs to pause the video several times just to see what the fuck she’s saying). Whatever you set out to accomplish with this show, I guess you did it. It doesn’t mean the rest of us have to like it.

                   • TL;DR: Margaan doesn’t (want to) realize that he overshot the goal.

                   • You definitely don’t have to like it. But I’m a bit confused about how I’m managing to make you angry: “Why can’t you admit that you were pretty much trolling and be done with it?” makes it sound like I wasn’t taking the show seriously enough to please you, but then “you actually took your work on this show more seriously than you say” makes it sound like you consider me a failure of a subber for wasting everyone’s time with my finicky devotion to a stupid task. Either critique is cogent, but the two are mutually exclusive: either I wasn’t serious enough, or I was too serious.

                     But I think we’re still suffering from a miscommunication about my objective: the goal was not to mock the show or its viewers but to create an impediment to understanding that mirrored the impediment existing in Japanese in as lighthearted a manner as possible. To quote myself, I tried to “remove the series from realm of sanity altogether” by making it “about 80% comprehensible to the casual viewer upon first watching”—the concept is insane not because I wanted to troll, but because I wanted to break the fansubbers’ golden rule by deemphasizing comprehensibility in favor of flavor (but not actually to destroy the import of Namika’s lines). The subs are intended to call attention to themselves, because they’re meant to convey that Namika’s language is no more a “real” form of Japanese than my deranged new patois is a “real” form of English: “nobody fucking talks this way” is the reaction I want. I took the process I followed to reach that goal seriously and tried to do my best work, as I always do when fansubbing (not that I’ve ever once actually reached my own standards), but I was well aware that the product, being different from the standard fansub, would probably give some folks (like those who got super-mad at Jay Rubin for cutting out pieces of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) conniptions. The possibility of making a few people angry, however, did not dissuade me from putting forth my best efforts to produce a unique version of the series that would curtail the illusion of “cultural education” even as it entertained an audience willing to laugh at absurdity.

                     So I’m honestly not trying to make you like the subs; if you prefer subs that place intelligibility higher on the priority list, good for you! I just want to know where in my process I’ve perjured myself or lost sight of my goals so badly it’s worth getting upset over.

         • But it’s not punishment. I like the show. I think it’s a good show.

           The “if you don’t like this you hate fun” argument only works if what’s under discussion isn’t an abomination. I’m not saying I dislike lively or interpretative subtitling (even if a show warranted it to this degree); I’m saying I find reading unpleasant English that is at times near-gibberish detracts from the fun inherent in the show.

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           • “Abomination” is the perfect descriptor for this anime (see rant above).

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             • …in your opinion. I think it was worth a few chuckles, and it was pretty obvious from the get-go that they weren’t being serious.

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             • “Abomination” is the perfect descriptor for your subs of this anime – or even for Commie-Subs in general.
               If you think that wasting your time just to put out trollsubs (this anime, Hyperdimension Neptunia and others) is a good idea, then there’s something wrong with you.

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               • Does samefagging make you feel accomplished? I somehow doubt you’re going to change the opinion of anyone who matters no matter how many names you post under.

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               • Holy crap! I’m subbing Neptunia? Wow. I didn’t realize I was even watching the show. Am I carelessly neglecting my duties? Is this like one of those awful dreams where I’ve totally forgotten to attend an important class and my life is about to be over even though I graduated from university years ago, and then I wake up and the lingering guilt senselessly hangs over my head all day? Help! Help! I don’t know who I am anymore!

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3. commie devs pls go

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4. http://i.imgur.com/S0Flb3h.jpg

   Too bad D_S never reviewed Commie’s release.

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   • Dark_Sage probably wants to keep what little sanity he still has, that’s why he didn’t touch Commie’s release.

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5. I don’t really know what the debate is this time, but I’m enjoying the hating. I’m on Commie’s side, as usual~

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6. So I haven’t watched the show and am just commenting from the little I’ve seen in screenshots and what I’ve read from the comments above, but why are people getting their panties in a knot over Commie’s release of the show? Their approach might be flawed, but it seems like a plausible way to sub the show, and if you don’t agree with their decision—gasp!—you can watch someone else’s release.

   If you want to pursue why you think their approach is wrong and how they could have handled it better (like kokujin’s doing), that’s fine, but if your whole comment is going to be, “lolcommie, horrible as always,” or “that’s dumb, I hate your trollsubs,” your post has absolutely zero value.

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   • Basically, if you watch Commie’s release, you will have one of two reactions:

     1. If you have a sense of humor, you’ll laugh it off as the joke subs that they are and move on with your life.

     2.) If you appreciate language and all the aesthetics that go along with it, watching these subs will be painful—literally painful.

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     • >If you appreciate language and all the aesthetics that go along with it, watching these subs will be painful—literally painful.

       Just like listening to Namika’s Japanese.

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