There is a trend currently were fan translaters are paywalling the latest chapters, with poor translations. What are your thoughts on this? I don’t mind asking for donations, but asking for money with mediocre translation is scammy.
Examples: https://asuracomic.net/ https://madarascans.com/ https://nightsup.net/ https://casacomic.com/
I hate it…hate it…really hate it
Most of them are just machine translated work with little editorial. The only good thing about them is they came out faster than the official translation (which usually will be free anyway).
This is not a fan translation anymore, just plain opportunistic business venture.
Sadly, this can be said about actual streaming services as well. There’s some episodes on Crunchyroll on even big name titles like One Piece is very clear that they took the episode and threw it through some sort of subtitle auto generator because it won’t line up with what they’re saying. And I don’t mean like they don’t align or they’re out of sync. That does happen as well. What I mean is like it will say Fred on the show, but it will say the word bread on the screen.
I don’t get it, because a service that is licensing the shows shouldn’t need to use a service like that, because shouldn’t the original source have that information? It makes me wonder if those big streaming services are still pirating the smaller things, like subtitles.
I’ve talked to a few translators who work on official subs and my understanding is that for simulcast subs like One Piece, they end up having to ship subpar translations with no editing because the deadlines are so ridiculous. So if they mishear a word or make a typo, they usually don’t have time to fix it.
That is dumb, it is fine if the release it a few days after. Management is horrible in Crunchyroll, fun fact though crunchyroll used to be a pirate site.
I remember that. They actually had quite a bit of trouble when they first tried to establish as an officially licensed company because of the fact that their initial user base was sailing the seas.
I don’t doubt it with some of the translations I’ve seen. I think it would be better for them to just release the main content and then release subtitles further on down the road, But I assume there’s probably some sort of accessibility law that forbids them from doing that.
It just gets super annoying watching a show and either having poor quality subtitles or subtitles that blatantly spoil parts of the series.
For example, in one piece
Early on one piece spoiler
When you first meet Blackbeard, from memory, he doesn’t say who he is. He just stands there as an old drunkard. And you’re meant to expect that he’s just some crazy drunk person that’s interacting with the main party. You don’t actually find out who he is for a good 5-10 episodes. However, if you had subtitles on, they clearly label him as Blackbeard during the first encounter, so it ruins that entire revelation.
I use subtitles because I have ADHD, And as part of that, it makes it so I struggle to keep up with audio versus comprehending it and subtitles give me a short delay of being able to catch up and still be able to read the text to understand what happened. when the subtitles are broken, I end up hard focusing on that. or get lost requiring me to rewind. Super annoying.