I love language. I find other languages fascinating. Japanese especially so because so many of the things I enjoy come from Japan. Ever since I was young, Ive always loved watching television. Whether it was Pokemon, Digimon, Dragonball Z, Power Rangers, or the numerous Western animated shows, I enjoyed them. Of course I didnt learn that the majority of the former were originally Japanese shows until I was in middle school and started binge watching Naruto. That is how I came to know the beauty that is known as fansubs. I even watched those lovely bootleg DBZ VHS fansubs from eons ago. My, those were some amazing times (the fact that “candy-ass faggot” graced my screen will forever remain etched in my heart). Of course, being naïve and innocent (pfft) I had assumed that the profanity that the subs had used was reflecting the actual dialogue. And who was I to question it? I had the sum of zero knowledge of Japanese, and I was perfectly content with just watching the show and not paying much mind to what the dialogue was. This worked for me... until I got to high school. This is where my interest in language took off. I started reading manga and got interested in what honorifics meant, so I started researching that and that sort of snowballed into my interest in learning the language. I started “learning” the language around my junior year of high school, where I began to memorize hiragana and katakana (I think Tasia learned around that same time I did, yeah?). I kind of got interested in translating, but I knew I was nowhere near close to the level of proficiency required for that. Hilariously, it was around this time that I learned about Super Sentai and Kamen Rider. And that introduced me to the fansub group called TV-Nihon (Oh, but well get into them later). So my learning sort of took a back seat for the rest of my high school career as I finished up. I wouldnt look at learning the language again until I hit college. Flash forward to the Spring semester of my Freshman year of college. I started taking formal classes in Japanese. For the first few weeks, it was pretty easy, since I already knew hiragana and katakana at this point. Even the basic grammar was pretty easy since I recognized most of the structure from watching so much. It was around this time that I had undertaken an... interesting project. Now, up to this point, TVN were the only subbers around. I still didnt mind them much. But they have a notorious reputation for being slow with their releases (especially if its a backlog show). At the time, they were redoing their Kamen Rider 555 subs because of the DVDs. They were stalled at episode 16 for a while, so I decided I would... help them along a bit. I took the DVD raw and manually did all the timing and fixed the dialogue for episode 17 and released it into the wild. It seemed to do well, so I did it for a few more episodes (with the timing provided by Portuguese scripts). Getting a bit of experience with timing and such, I applied to be a timer with another fansub group, Grown Ups In Spandex. I was tasked to time the last... I want to say 9 episodes of Liveman. Im pretty sure I blitzed through them in like 2 weeks or so (maybe less). Of course, I was a newbie timer and I was pretty ineffective at that. But I did the best I could at the time. I did a few pre-timing projects for GUIS, like the Ultraman Zero: Revenge of Belial movie, the Abaranger movie, and the Ohranger movie (not sure if this ever amounted to anything). It was a learning process. And I enjoyed it. After getting a bit more experience, I decided I would help out other fansub groups. Since I was a Lightspeed Rescue fan, I looked into GoGoV, and that brought me to Hikari Senshis thread on Henshin Justice Unlimited. Thats where I met Matt and he asked me to time GoGoV episode 9. I got it back to him in a day. That was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. In the background, I had become a cast member on Dans (Toku) Rants after Dan extensively grilled me- er, I mean “interviewed” me prior to do our first cast. Which was, ironically, Antonios debut on Power Rangers Samurai. It was through the cast that I met Nicholas, Shamus, Gemma and eventually Thomas, Jason, Alek, and Dante. And they in turn introduced me to even more people I would come to know as friends. This is important, as one of the people I was introduced to happened to be my future partner in crime in fansubbing. Back in the fansubbing world, I had a working relationship with Matt and did the majority of the timing for GoGoV. Around this time, the “scrubbing movement” began to gain steam and I decided I would try my hand at a Super Sentai show. Since Juken Sentai Gekiranger was my favorite at the time (and it still is), I decided to try that. Boy was that an uphill battle. The main reason for this was because Gekiranger is a very, very unique show to try and translate. Dialogue-wise, TVN did mostly fine with it. But they still had issues. Leaving attack names untranslated (which I understand is for flair, but still) and leaving the majority of Jans speech untouched was unreasonable. I had to do something about it. And for a while, it worked. It wasnt until around... I want to say episode 14 that Matt had the interesting idea to do a joint. I figured things wouldnt change too much. By now it was the middle of my first semester as college Sophomore. Still taking classes in Japanese, I decided to be bold and try translating something. So I got a raw of the first episode of Abaranger. It was terrible. My listening skills were nowhere near good enough and I didnt trust myself enough to go through with it. This is when I met Brian. My interdimensional clone from a parallel universe. We bonded over Sailor Moon (among other things) as true friends do and our friendship grew steadily from there. Back to Gekiranger: once my Sophomore year finished out, I basically ran through the entirety of Gekiranger in a month. I was too eager and might have pushed Matt to do editing and rush it. The result was catastrophic and the threads on 4chan basically destroyed whatever confidence I had in my ability as a subber. That was a depressing summer. And that still haunts me to this day despite being 2 years ago. For a double whammy, I also had been dabbling in song translations. Mind you, I was going off a dictionary and my barely functioning beginners knowledge of Japanese. Obviously these werent all that great. They were terrible in most cases actually. I got called out on it in an IRC chat, and I pretty much died inside. It was my fault for overestimating my abilities, but it still stung regardless. I didnt sub anything for a looooong while after that. The most I did was timing for Over-Time when they needed a timer for Kamen Rider vs. Super Sentai. I just quietly continued my Japanese lessons. It wasnt until the end of my Junior year that I considered subbing anything else. I had gotten into Precure hardcore during that year (which is entirely Ryans fault). But there was just one problem. One of the series, Yes! Precure 5 Go Go! Wasnt finished. The subs for it came out a snails pace, and it was the only Precure show not fully subbed. At the time, Doremi had released episode 36. I didnt want to step on their toes, so I began subbing backwards, from episode 49. It was the first time I translated anything by ear and also the first time I translated anything from scratch period. And translating by ear is a pain. How I wished I had scripts... Still, I had enlisted the aide of Brian to be my co-translator and QC. And for the most part? … It worked. The script was something resembling 90%-ish correct. We released under the name Dreaming Roses and it was good. That said, we did get a few things wrong, but then we jointed with Doremi to do v2s and finish up the series. I had ended up translating 9 episodes (41-49). And I was proud of this accomplishment and regained some sense of self-confidence. The very next project I translated, thankfully with scripts in tow, was Pokemon the Origin during the fall of my Senior year. It took maybe a weekend to translate it and all, but we eventually got it out under the DR banner. And it was a success. This gave me enough confidence to start regularly translating from scripts. Then December came around. For Thomass birthday, me and Brian decided wed do Bakuryu Sentai Abaranger, since the only subs for it were horrendous HK subs, he happened to like Abaranger, and the fact that it had scripts available. So I began to translate the show from the very beginning. We didnt release to the public (partly out of my personal fear of backlash, and partly because I wanted to build a backlog of releases). And things were mostly going well. And then Ressha Sentai Toqger happened. At the time, it was uncertain whether OT would pick the show up, so me and Brian decided that we would take up the show ourselves, even though the show would be airing weekly. I had finished the translation of the first episode when OT announced that they would indeed pick the show up. I figured wed release it anyway, since I was done. We released under the name of “Imagination Station”, but kept ourselves anonymous. It went over relatively well, minus a translation mistake or two. Still, it was fun and I had a good time working on it. But I was glad OT picked it up. A weekly wouldve been too much work to keep up, and I had to focus on finishing Abaranger. Hahahahaha... We eventually did do a public release for Abaranger by ourselves under the IS name in March. By that point, I had translated up to episode 34, the movie, and the team-up movie with Hurricanger. I figured that was a big enough gap. That was met with... mixed reaction. But we persevered and got ourselves a translation checker (thats when Alexander came in) and a new QC in David. From there, our releases got better. A month passed. Thats when Brian and I watched a show called Marvels DISK Wars: The Avengers. Unlike tokusatsu subbers, there were PLENTY of anime subbers and we figured that someone would pick it up eventually. A week passed. No subs. I... sort of liked the show, and Brian is a downright Marvel nerd, so we decided to save the show from untranslated obscurity. And thats how we began “Marvelous Heroes”, yet another subgroup. The show is still airing, so Im still translating it. But 18 episodes later, Im in love with the show, so its okay I guess. ^-^ We continued on, putting out DISK Wars and Abaranger on a weekly basis and being relatively happy about it. We did do a special release in commemoration for Sailor Moon Crystals airing by translating the first episode of the live-action Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon. Which Im looking forward to working on fully after Abaranger is all wrapped up. But aside from that, we dug out the old DR name once more and translated the newest Precure team-up movie, and jointed it with Doremi for old times sake. And that brings us to the present. As of writing the post, Im currently translating episode 43 of Abaranger, just seven episodes away from the end. And I couldnt be more excited to finish it. And thats basically my entire history with fansubbing. Heres to more in the future! これからも、よろしく！
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 22:44:49 +0000
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