Fansub Review: [Commie] Acchi Kocchi (Episode 03)

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This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.

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Hyouka is taking way too long to download (12 kbps), so I’m gonna review stuff that I already have on this computer. I watched this along with Tsumiki’s version, so you’ll see me directly compare the two releases at multiple points in this review.

Release format: MKV (254 MB, 10-bit)

Japanesiness: No honorifics.

English style: American English.

Group website: http://commiesubs.com/

Encoding details: http://pastebin.com/b3tRZT7V

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

Script Quality

Timing

Results

Visual Quality

Karaoke.

Opening. Commie’s karaoke style sometimes runs into snags, because it’s not really intended for hyper, kawaii J-pop. Not like Commie didn’t attempt to match it — indeed, they switched up the colors and made the anime title bounce alongside the Japanese text when it needed to. However, it lacked the “oomph” that pretty Japanese text going along at a k-timed rate can provide.

I don’t mean to say it was bad. Rather, it just wasn’t… exciting.

Ending. This was… fucking great. Well, not “fucking great”, but it was great. The font/color choice matched perfectly with the karaoke and the little *squeeze* effect at the end made me all =^_^=. What I’m saying is, I liked it.

 

Typesetting.

Is it just me or is this not really… good? …at all?

There were a number of minor sound effects that Commie didn’t typeset.

This kind of typeset appears often in the show, so I’m just gonna post this one.

Including these minor signs so you can see just what, exactly, Commie did not typeset.

Okay, you get the picture, right? Awesome work from Commie. I skipped like 20 fucking signs or something to get to the end one here. The preview was masterfully handled. Really, fucking excellent job on this. I could actually read it, unlike Tsumiki’s.

 

Other.

When multiple characters were speaking, the lines were properly differentiated. For the most part, lines in the script never interfered with Japanese text or the typesetting. Good stuff.

Script Quality

Karaoke.

I had no real problems with OP/ED. They functioned exactly as they should. If I were to nitpick, I’d say “I feel like I just don’t have it all” could be rephrased as “I feel like I’m missing something” in the OP.

 

Main Script.

This “clever” exchange of dialogue is anything but.

The “retort” is clumsily written. Three “home”s in two lines? No fucking thanks.

“As a regular guy, I’ve always been more at home in my house.” (“regular guy vs. outdoors guy” shows more wordplay than “normal person vs. outdoors guy”. This version also doesn’t repeat “home” clumsily.)

…The point of “So anyway” is that you can attach to any fucking sentence to start a new topic. It would not be out of the ordinary to use that phrase in… any context, really. Calling it out as weird here doesn’t really make sense.

This is the start of a poorly written joke by Commie. Here’s how it goes.

“How would you drag a cat away from the heater during winter?” (Forget the wordiness here. Shit gets worse.)

“Maybe you could entice her away with food?” (This is the setup of the joke.)

*Headbangs-kun gets an idea*

“If you don’t come play with us, then…”

“Then Io’s gonna get it!” (WTF)

Okay, Commie. You set up a fucking joke with “food” as the theme. How the hell does “Io’s gonna get it” fucking relate? It doesn’t. You killed the fucking joke. The #1 rule for comedy anime is that you never kill the fucking joke. Goddamn.

[Tsumiki] played this right with saying they could lure her outside with bait. And then Headbangs captured Io and used him as bait to get Tsumiki to come out and play (gotta keep ’em separated).

“That probably hurt more than falling would’ve.”

There’s absolutely no reason to “I think” here. Barring that, the line just sucks in general.

“Starting snow compression.”

The robot’s voice had proper punctuation in every other line. This looks like a simple mistake.

custom built -> custom-built

Not extremely important, but I’m gonna point it out anyway.

I couldn’t tell that the previous line had any dialect differences at all. How about you spend a few minutes on Google and determine what a Hiroshima dialect actually fucking sounds like?

http://www.able4language.com/English%20site/Hiroshima_ben.html

The easiest way to reflect this dialect in your subs is to make the character sound like a mobster. Don’t take the lazy route and say “Oh well, I’m totally sure the English viewers picked up on the difference in the Japanese vocal inflections, so we don’t have to do anything with the line.”

Tsumiki played this one the right way.

Commie reflected this girl’s playful voice with a little slang. Not bad. Tsumiki didn’t do this as well.

Tsumiki made it seem like the eyes were unrelated to the nose here, leading to a very confusing part later on where a girl threw onion juice in Headbangs’s face to see if she’d tear up. Commie’s made a lot more sense.

The tenses don’t match.

“I was just joking.”

…What? I’ve never fucking heard this phrasing with “recipe”. The more I think about it, the more shitty it looks.

“We used Tsumiki’s special recipe.”

Otherwise “We made it with Tsumiki’s special recipe.” also sounds better. I am fucking stumped by whatever logic was used for the original line.

Super mistimed. I assume they meant to drop the “Ah.” here but forgot to do it.

Localizing jokes is fine. But your jokes better fucking make sense.

Right now it’s “Do you think I’d make a goo– Google!” The joke is “Hey, we used a random word that doesn’t really fit, so please lol.” No. That’s fucking terrible. Fuck that shit.

It would sound better as “Do you think I could be a goo– Goomba!” (or “goose” or “goon” or “googly-eyed monster”)

Do you see the difference? The point is for it to make sense so it’s good wordplay. “lol, random” is shit writing.

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: A

Script grade: C

Overall grade (timing results not factored in): B-

The sheer amount of joke kill here could only be matched by a clown car that got into a traffic accident.

There were some awesome lines, but honestly, Tsumiki’s release had those same lines, but much better. Take the scene where Tsumiki covered headbangs-san in snow and then threw a snowball at her, saying “Coup de grace”. Good writing. Loved it, Commie. But Tsumiki had “And here’s one for the road.” which is better for that scene because it plays on the fact that she just doused her friend in snow already.

When it comes to typesetting, the typesetting here was great. Nearly everything was typeset. But here’s the thing, Tsumiki had EVERYTHING typeset except for one thing in the preview. And their typesetting had better effects. This is by no means a bad release. By many measures, it would be considered a good release. Unfortunately, Tsumiki just outperformed Commie in every possible way here and a lot of Commie’s jokes fucking sucked.

Of the three releases I’ve seen thus far (Hatsuyuki, Commie, Tsumiki), Tsumiki had the best release.

0 thoughts on “Fansub Review: [Commie] Acchi Kocchi (Episode 03)”

  1. Welp, the script grade is my bad. I’ll clarify a few things, though:

    The repetition of “at home” for the first joke was on purpose. Basically, the joke there is that Sakaki calls himself a 風の子 (lit: child of wind – an idiom basically meaning “outdoors person” as we typeset) and says that’s why he’s at home out in the snow. Io’s sarcastic retort is that he is a 人の子 (child of a normal person), so he’d be a bit cold outside. At this point Mayoi bursts in saying that she’s also good with the cold, and Tsumiki calls her a 寒い子 (lit. cold girl, but ‘cold’ has an alternate meaning of ‘dull’ or ‘lame’, referring to her humour). So it’s basically a triple pun of things involving ‘child’ and then an additional pun on top of that for the double meaning of ‘cold’.

    The first joke is that Sakaki calls himself something fantastical and Io responds by cutting him down by sarcastically stating the obvious. Instead of keeping the “child” theme throughout (which doesn’t really work in English), we went with “at home”. That’s why Sakaki says he’s at home outdoors, and Io snarks back with how he’s “at home when he’s at home”. That’s the joke, that “home” is the most logical place to be “at home”. Using any other word would have killed it.

    In addition, we kept in the following joke about Mayoi being lame and still managing to pun in the ‘cold’ alternate meaning, using the “From the cold reception your jokes get” line.

    Now obviously if I had to write this much text just to explain a joke that should have been obvious from the start then I’ve failed in your eyes, and I’m sorry about that. Just wanted to get my reasoning out there along with an explanation of the original joke in Japanese. I’ll add more in a following post, because this one’s long enough already.

    Reply

      • Yeah, I didn’t have too much of an issue with the “at home” repetition. The phrasing is a little awkward, but overall it works. I like FalseDawn’s suggestion of adding italics.

        Reply

        • Italics calling attention to puns in fansub translations are usually a good idea. Fansubs in general aren’t exactly the pinnacle of great writing, and viewers are generally too attuned to processing awkward English to pay all that much attention to the exact way a line is worded.

          Reply

  2. The food/bait thing is my bad, yeah. Translator originally had “food” and it made enough sense to me that I didn’t change it over, but I agree that “bait” works better.

    I actually thought “made it to my recipe” was something people said, but I guess not. I might have been thinking of “according to”, or whatever.

    “The joke is “Hey, we used a random word that doesn’t really fit, so please lol.” No. That’s fucking terrible. Fuck that shit.”

    Eh, it’s the same as the original joke (they just filled in “oyome” with “samba!” at the end, and I can tell you now that being a bride has very little to do with sambas). Tsumiki didn’t localise that joke at all (they just TL note’d it to interpret it as a reference to a song called ‘Oyome Samba’, which I thought was a bit tenuous – seems more likely that she was simply adding an extra syllable onto ‘oyome-san’) so I wouldn’t necessarily say either of us won out there.

    The rest of the stuff you mentioned is fair enough, though I’ve been following both our scripts from the start (mostly because it’s interesting to see how other groups handle the same jokes) and had you reviewed ep1, the result would probably have been the opposite.

    Reply

    • http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%8A%E5%AB%81%E3%82%B5%E3%83%B3%E3%83%90

      Oyome Samba is in fact a song. When I type “oyomesan” into Google, autocomplete gives me “oyome samba” as the first suggestion. The next suggestion is “oyome samba lyrics”. I seriously doubt it was a coincidence that Mayoi interjected with “samba!” right as Tsumiki was saying “oyome”.

      I tried to come up with a localization for it, but other folks on staff said viewers would object (which is probably true) so I shrugged and let it go. Not a fan of TL notes, but I’m not in charge of this project.

      Reply

      • It’s a song, yeah, but I figured that the name came from the same pun. Our TL told me that Mayoi was just finishing off Tsumiki’s sentence with a random word that could be connected to the end, and he’s native Japanese, so I took his word for it. Here’s the original script I was given for that part, with notes:

        I-Io…
        Well…
        Yeah?
        I-II… {again, sounds/looks weird to make Japanese stuttering in English}
        Oyo-oyo-oyo… {wants to say Oyomesan which is bride, which is consitent with previous conversation}
        Hm, what?
        Oyo-onyo…
        Oyome… {Bride../ Potential complete sentence she wanted to say is “Would take me as you bride?” or something along that line}
        Samba {Mayoi took over Tsumiki’s word, Oyomesan, and continued to make another word, which is totally irrelevent}
        That was…Mayoi-san’s fault.
        R-right.
        I had sudden urge to continue it.

        Reply

  8. Looks like this is categorized as “Article”, not as “Fansub Review”. I’m guessing that’s not intentional.

    Reply

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