The Energon Pub

Howdy all,

I'm sure many of you already know about the awesome work being done by Karyuudo Fansubs to bring Japanese language TF content to English speaking audiences. I started tinkering with taking this a step farther and wanted to see what folks thought about it.

Using the videos and subtitles already distributed I started editing the subtitles to localize them for North American audiences. It's mostly been name changes, but I've also edited some dialogue to make it sound more natural for a North American audience. So far I've done this for:

Zone

and

6 episodes of Car Robots

I know from comments I've read on the Boards that not everyone is a fan of localizing Japanese language shows, but I really like what Shout Factory did when they brought Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory to the US. That said, I'd love to hear any feedback you may have.

If you have suggestions or corrections to provide for any of the subtitles, great! That's easy to update. If you have advice on the appropriate way to credit Karyuudo Fansubs for their work, I'm open to that, too. I don't want to give the impression that this was all my work from start to finish.

If you worked with the Karyuudo Fansubs team I hope you see this as what I intended: a next step in making Japanese TF shows more accessible to Western audiences. You did something similar with your release of Legends of the Microns. If anyone feels I'm misappropriating anything, please let me know and I'll take these down.

xxaMaxx wrote:I know from comments I've read on the Boards that not everyone is a fan of localizing Japanese language shows, but I really like what Shout Factory did when they brought Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory to the US. That said, I'd love to hear any feedback you may have.

I strongly, passionately, thoroughly disagree with what was done to the subtitles for the Shout! Factory DVD releases of those series, for the damage done to those scripts was far worse than simply giving everyone their Hasbro toy names. The folks at Hasbro who rewrote those subtitle scripts should be ashamed for what they did, for it was a desecration to the integrity and fundamental purpose of what subtitles are even supposed to do for subtitled anime releases. Changing everything that was changed in those releases was a disservice to those series and to the people who wanted to watch them, as all those changes created lies and falsehoods that treated the viewers as fools and ignoramuses. Anyone who didn't know a lick of Japanese would be easily deceived by those rewritten scripts and never know that what they were reading was contrary to the dialogue being spoken onscreen. Such dishonesty and trickery is completely disgraceful and arrogant, as though Hasbro somehow felt that the changes they made to the scripts were somehow the "correct" versions of the dialogue instead of the actual dialogue being spoken by the characters themselves. Bad form, Hasbro, creating a product that lied to and mocked everyone who watched it. Bad form.


As for these projects, I fail to see the reason for localizing Car Robots when it was already localized years ago as Robots in Disguise.

Sabrblade wrote:As for these projects, I fail to see the reason for localizing Car Robots when it was already localized years ago as Robots in Disguise.

Well, I guess I was thinking more or less what you stated in your post. I had always heard there were huge differences between Car Robots and Robots in Disguise. This all started off as watching the Karyuudo Fansubs to see for myself what was different. So far I've been enjoying the Japanese version much more. I never liked the RID dub with their "fast talking" and added dialogue. It's like they were afraid of silence.

I've tried to keep dialogue changes simple, reordering sentence structure to make statements sound more natural, at least to me. I'll admit I probably got carried away a few times and changed too much. My goal was to stay true to the original story/characters.

Anyway, I'll wait to see if anyone else has thoughts. If Sabrblade's thoughts represent the general consensus I'll shut it down. Obviously, people may feel strongly about this.

I appreciate straight translations and localizations. With localizations, it's too bad everyone isn't Ted Woolsey, but I can still appreciate the effort. At the same time, it is nice to have the option to hear/read the originally intended words as "accurately" as possible.

I tend to go with dubbing = localize it so it sounds natural, subbing = straight up translate it, but in cases where there's no chance in hell of a dub I'm ok with localization. Or, just having options would have been cool, such as in the Shout Factory releases Sabr mentioned.

I say keep going if you enjoy it, very cool stuff!

If the Shout! Factory subtitle scripts had been for a dub, I would have been more fine with the changes they made. All of the dubbed TF anime have had such changes made to them. But since they were used for a subbed release, they did a disservice to those who wanted to check out the Japanese versions as they already were, as well as a disservice to the integrity of the dialogue in the shows themselves.

But I don't blame Shout! Factory for the misgivings of their DVD sub scripts. The party at fault was the folks at Hasbro who provided those scripts, which they had taken from the UK and Australian DVD sets and rewrote to include nonsense and falsehoods before submitting them to Shout! Factory.

Though, FWIW, the use of English names on the Headmasters DVDs and the "Autobot" and "Decepticon" term used on all three series' DVDs, were done originally by the UK and Australian DVD sets, and which cases were okay since the characters that the Headmasters DVDs gave the English names to were the same characters in the West as in the East (or had the same names in both markets anyway). But using the English names for Masterforce and Victory characters was wrong of them to do on all accounts since none of them were the same people between both markets.

And then there's the censorship like changing the Breastforce to the "Chestforce", which is ridiculous since they did that to be kid-friendly in these releases, yet kids are not the target audience for subtitled anime. It's a niche market comprised primarily of adult otaku. A child isn't likely to want to sit down and read a television for a long time, when they'd rather watch the action on the TV instead, which they'd have trouble doing if they'd be trying to constantly keep up with subtitles.

And of course there's the nonsense of rewriting lines of dialogue in the subtitles to either just conflict with the Japanese dialogue for ill good reason, or to add Transformers terminology from other series for the purposes of fanservice. The latter of which in turn made many things confusing and weird. The subs called Sixshot a "Phase Six Decepticon Officer" when the Phase Six concept is an IDW-only thing that doesn't exist in the G1 cartoon world. Chokon Power was changed into being called "Energon Power", which completely ruins its very nature as a unique source of energy unlike any other. And the infamous "Light our darkest hour" phrase was forced into a situation in which it made no sense in the context of that situation, since the phrase refers to a moment when the Matrix itself is saving everyone from something, while the situation the phrase was put into involved the Matrix itself being the thing that was being saved, not the other way around.


As far as making localized subtitles, I really don't see the point in doing so when subs are supposed to stick true to what's being said, outside of special cases like gags and jokes and such.

Then I suggest you look at the UK Metrodome sets. Those subtitles kept things suitably japanesy. Headmasters were given their western counterpart names, but Masterforce and Victory, where the characters became more obscure in the West, were left with their japanese names. Sixshot was a Ninja Staff Officer. Jokes were left in that wouldn't make sense outside Japan, but an extra subtitle was put in to explain it briefly so we could still get the joke. And Ginrai was most certainly using CHOKON POWEEERRRRRRRRR! all over the place.

Insurgent wrote:Sixshot was a Ninja Staff Officer.

Did that release have the Omni Productions language track, too? I know some of the non-American releases did. That's something I wish Shout Factory had included. Even though they're terrible, I love Sixshot the "Ninja Consultant."

Insurgent wrote:Then I suggest you look at the UK Metrodome sets.

Already got'em. Though, the subs for The Headmasters contain some different kinds of problems from the Shout! Factory sets since the company that translated that series for Metrodome wasn't that familiar with the series and didn't fully understand some of the things that were said in that show, and so mistranslated some lines, as well as making some spelling and grammar mistakes, and one episode containing the subs for another episode overlaid onto its own subtitles.

But the subs for Masterforce and Victory are fine since those were translated by a member of this fandom.

The Madman DVDs from Australia contain the same subs as the UK ones, technical errors and all.

I've also got the old fansubs of the three shows that TV-Nihon did back in the day, but their subs for The Headmasters are a bit clunky in the translation (but like the UK/AU DVDs, Masterforce and Victory are fine).