I love the joints on Polly's on the last one, especially the hand joints!  People screw up Pizza Cat hands a lot, but you made them look more human while also looking like themselves.

*shrug* I started it, I suppose I could do another page.  It's been awhile.

[wrong]

Well, for my personal translation I used the raws and with Aegisubs I made the subs referring to the Discotek's subs and the help of some friend who talk japanese...
Unluckily my English is not good enough for make perfect subs for everybody. But well, if somebody who can speak English properly wants to use my subs, I have no problems! ^^
For now, the only thing I can do, is to try to understand with the help of everybody, what are the real wrong translation... Gh, for example, just yesterday night I was watching the last episode, and Karamaru called Ko'on-no-Kami "Okama Mitsune"... and Discotek's sub translated it as "sly fox"... I can't take it! 

It's not a popular use anymore, but 'sly' can refer to someone being gay.  It would have been a good translation/innuendo if it was commonly used.  This is frustrating though.

Aside from not having an army of translators to help with a fairly long show, how feasible would it be to subtitle the show without hooking it up to a video file?  People who have the boxset already have the raw episodes, would there be a way to make a file of subtitles so that if they ran the dvd they could get modified subs?  This is just a mental exercise, it would be an impossible amount of work.

I just got the KNT dvd set this morning.  I haven't had time to watch the whole thing yet, but I have a few thoughts so far.  My understanding of Japanese is non existent so I'm probably missing things that other people are seeing.

First off, this seems like a very difficult show to translate.  I can tell that there are a lot of cultural references and puns that are flying over my head and it drives me crazy.  Sometimes translator's notes can help, but the translation's main focus needs to be on clarity and adding information can hurt that pretty quickly, but I really wish there was something.  A better translation team would have helped here, any "additions" by the team used would have made things worse.

Some of the problem with the translation is that it's hard to tell who the audience is supposed to be.  They'll censor some lines like the one you mentioned and then leave others in.  Some of the dialogue feels like a bad translation of an old samurai movie which I can't tell if it's intentional or not- if they're using an older form of Japanese some of the line changes make a little more sense.  The really obvious errors like mixing up samurai and ninja are irritating but they don't hurt my understanding of the show.  The translation of honorifics isn't great, but they get the point across.  I'm not a big fan of translating honorifics unless it's either a huge part of the story or you're translating for a group of people who really care about their significance.  Persona 4 is the best example of that I can think of- the closeness between the group of friends is a big part of the plot and if you're playing that series of games you're pretty far gone into nerd territory anyway.  The translations for the members of the court bother me less than the "Miss Omitsu" bit- you still get the point with the former, but you lose the boys' over familiarity with Omitsu.  I think they were trying to translate for people who aren't familiar with honorifics, but this is a subtitle only release of a 20+ year old anime.  Anyone who bought it is going to understand the honorifics untranslated.

I think that's what happened with the use of 'Teyandee' too.  Does anyone else remember watching the Naruto dub and being constantly irritated with "Believe it!" being said at the end of every sentence in place of "Dattebayo!"?  The mascot catchphrase thing doesn't translate well and sometimes gets irritating even in just the Japanese version.  Some situations lend themselves to workarounds better than others- the English version of Persona 4 changes Teddie's habit of saying -kuma at the end of every sentence to bear puns where they fit.  Teddie gets annoying in the subbed version of the anime with -kuma -kuma -kuma tacked on to everything he says, so I understand what they were trying to do.  Leaving 'Teyandee' alone would have been the best option though.

It's not a pretty translation job, but it gets the necessary information across.  Ko'on No Kami's plots are almost coherent (no translation job would change that) and there are some bits that are really funny!  I hadn't seen the lyrics to Pururun and Omitsu's song before and they added a lot to the episode.  Most of the plot and a lot of the humor is in the animation itself though so it's easy to guess what's going on- even with SPC they mostly guessed right on the plots without any idea of what the dialogue was.

I'm still psyched to finally have a copy of this.  The translation isn't great, but it works and the picture and sound quality is great.  For people who haven't seen it, it's a lot like SPC but a little more deadpan and with a less grating soundtrack.

I haven't finished watching the series on DVD yet, but it is everything I could have hoped for.  It is so nice to physically own this show.  I'm in heaven.

I was scared that the show wasn't going to be as good as I remembered it, but it's even better!   Seriously everyone should buy this.

Also necrobumping, but I can't help it- Polly is the best when she's wearing normal clothes.

Nevermind, I ended up getting SPC first.  Should be here soon!

But if they tried to make some sort of "SPC: The Next Generation"? Maybe.

This would just end with constant arguments over which equivalent of Speedy was the best.

Wow, that's just awful for a professional translation. But that was kind of the attitude the industry seemed to have toward translating games back then. And at least it gave us some memorable and humorous quotes, such as "All your base are belong to us" and the like.

It is bad for a professional translation, but the gibberish became a part of the game itself.  You're wandering around in the woods and you stumble across this guy just standing there waiting to give you advice and then it's b 8nibnlro9;lbn.  It's really funny.  Recruiting the character that plays the soundtrack and then only getting silence from her was not as funny.   I'm trying to say that it's best to roll with the punches even though that's frustrating with KNT in particular.

You'll find a lot of 1990s-era JRPGs were translated 'poorly' (by purists' standards), but they wound up having cheesy lines that have stood the test of time.

It was what it was back then, especially during the 16-bit era, due to limitations in technology and space to place text.  Nowadays there isn't any excuse for it.

I'll admit, there's sometimes I feel we are basically 'fed' various translations of anything from Japan, and it's claimed to be the 'right one' or 'most correct' one.  From fansubs, to 'hacks' of games, to 'official' released media.  I sometimes question what is the 'correct' one?

And no, it's not always the fans who are right, contrary to popular belief, nor is it the official released version (as we have seen with KNT).  Even basic courses in Japanese that are offered at universities, or those 'learn Japanese in 10 minutes' things you can buy for 100s of bucks, don't always get it completely right.  It's mostly about the jokes, puns, and 'what we find funny' (which are mostly culture-dependent), don't translate to other cultures / languages, ditto this for Japanese-to-other cultures/languages.

KNT isn't the only victim....I'm sure they did their best, but it wasn't going to be perfect.  Another anime series, Azumanga Daioh!, was up against a lot of the same trouble.  The end result was fine by some, disliked by others in the fanbase.

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Suikoden in particular suffered from "You have two weeks to translate these tens of thousands of lines of text" resulting in inconsistent spellings, a few awkward lines, and well....

.

This happens several times.

From what little I've seen from the KNT release budget/time problems are similar.  What I was trying to get at is I'll love it like Suikoden II despite (and partly because of) its faults anyway.

I keep meaning to, but money's been really tight.  December is the worst though.  Maybe I'll get money for Christmas.  Otherwise probably not January because that's vet checkup month.

Thanks!  It's awesome when it's not terrible and it got me into doing pixel art.

I'd want to see a change in writing- update it a bit and change the structure of the plot some.  There are 52 episodes of the show, it would be time for a slightly different direction.  The tone needs to stay the same though.

I'm still shocked and overjoyed even after all these years that anime is about on par with the price of an American tv series.  Treasure that.  Treasure it, while the stores may have all your money, you have all of the animes.

When I bought FLCL is was $30 a disc with 2 episodes per disc.  Lain was $100+ for 12 episodes.  Anime has come down a TON in price and is way easier to get legally in general.

Thanks!  I might wait a bit to finish Lucille, I'm a bit burned out at the moment.

See how the dress widens way out at about the waist?  You're given a rectangle to work with.  You have to squish in your pattern at the top half so they don't get covered by the sleeves/end up being on the side of the dress and on the bottom half you have to try to compensate for the fact that all your pixels are far wider than they should be.  For example, normally I'd have tried harder to blend in the lines on the obi so they weren't so jagged, but it stretches out so weirdly that not only do I know how to compensate, I'm not sure that you can.  You can see it on the front piece too, I had to take in the front part of Vi's kimono in a line because otherwise a piece that should be straight would be all the way out to the edges.  Also you can only go one step backwards so if you make a mistake and want to fix it you're screwed.

Luckily you can't see a lot of that on the DS screen, but it drives me crazy.

I made another Animal Crossing dress because I hate myself.  The editor is a nightmare to use.

http://cloverthegreat.deviantart.com/art/Princess-Vi-398841081

I can only make shirts and dresses, so I'm probably going to finish Lucille and be done.  I'd kill to be able to make pants/shorts.  You can kind of make hats but it's a bit of a mess.

Thank you so much, that's a huge help!  I think I have her mostly done now.  All I had to do was put what was clearly not a dress on a standard dress form in the worst possible image editor imaginable.

This sounds like a random question, but what color is Princess Vi's jetpack (I think it's a jetpack).  I've got a good idea of what it looks like from the model sheets but I don't have the color.

I'm making another Animal Crossing dress.

Considering that people waited more than a decade to get a DVD release on just SPC, I doubt you're going to get a response other than, "JUST BUY IT."  Seriously.  Just buy it.

If this is a DVD region issue then there's probably a way for you to get a dvd player for your region for not too much money.  I think there was an Australian release with a different cover but I don't know about other regions.