• Kumikommunism [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, this is very common. Most subtitles are bad because of rushed, underpaid, and sometimes underqualified translators. Even for wide-audience international releases like Terrace House on Netflix. But this show actually is on the better end of low-quality subtitles. A lot of times they will just completely miss lines, mistranslate important points/jokes, and change the dynamics of two characters.

      • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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        4 months ago

        The Norwegian subtitles for Cardcaptor Sakura on Netflix as I remember them kept switching between using Japanese -san, English miss, Norwegian frøken, and just omitting honorifics entirely. When the subtitles would switch between Japanese honorifics, Norwegian honorifics, and no honorifics, then it struck me as an inconsistency in style that was a bit sloppy, but each of those approaches on their own were reasonable translations… But when the subtitles would use English-language honorifics, I was just thinking, “This is a Japanese show with Japanese audio and Norwegian subtitles, so what’s this third language doing here? Get out, English! Shoo! Shoo!”

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    The only experience I can easily recall involving poor English subtitling in anime was Strawberry Marshmallow Encore, where the kanji characters emaciated or 窶鉄emaciated iron would randomly show up every few lines. So the line 「閻魔様Enma-samaですdesuyo失礼shitsureinaことkoto言わないでiwanaideくださいkudasaiyo!」 was rendered as just “Wha窶”.

    This wasn’t necessarily a problem for me because at a certain level of Weeb you can just understand a lot of the dialog without subtitles anyways, and even the points that were lost would later be clarified by other subtitles. And so the absolutely baffling mixing in of random meaningless kanji into the subtitles honestly just created “charm” more than anything. I guess a sort of feeling of “this is a relatively obscure decade-plus old cartoon from a country on the opposite end of Eurasia that you’ve never even been to, so if the subs are a bit janky then all it means is that it is a bizarre twist of fate that you’d ever end up watching this to begin with.”

    I don’t know where I’m going with this.

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    Lol, I just watched the new Haikyu movie the other day and the 🏴‍☠️ release must’ve been ai or auto translated because they kept translating people’s names as literals. So the whenever someone spoke to one of the MCs it was like, “Shadow Mountain, Good serve!”