VIDEO, SCRIPT TRANSLATION BC
Fansubbing for video and script translation is a current practice where fans of foreign television programs do the translation and subtitle the latest episodes released. This phenomenon appeared in the late 80’s in the USA with Japanese animes. There were tensions between the Japanese producers and the American distributors who, for instance, were cutting some parts of the episodes for budget reasons. The low quality of animes led to the development of the fansubbing. The fans decided to go find the original video and to make their own video and script translation.
The Fansubbing: A new way for the video, script translation
Good or bad quality?
Fansubbing is not necessarily synonymous with bad quality. Some communities of fansubbers have established rules to provide the best quality to the watchers. For example, it is always the same persons who do the multilingual subtitling and the proofreading for a same series in order to be consistent in the translation.
Of course, some practices do exhibit the bad quality of amateur subtitles. For example, sometimes the goal of the fansubber is not to provide a good quality translation, but only a fast translation for the fans who want to hurry to watch an episode of their favourite show.
What is the impact on the subtitling companies?
It goes without saying that this practice receives critics from the professional associations as the fansubbers provide the subtitles for free. It can be also a cause of the deterioration of professionals’ working conditions with the foreign studios competition. But, fansubbing also brought some positive aspects. The spread on the Internet of subtitled foreign programs increased the passion of people for original versions and contributed to its broadcasting on the national channels. This is a way to improve language skills and also to enjoy a better quality of the show (the show can lose of his quality with the voice, script translation, in particular for comedy shows).
The fan subbing disease
Among the fansubbing community, it’s the name they use to define the obsession of some fansubbers. These people can easily spend 10 hours on the subtitling software without noticing it. Some of them are told that their private and professional life is suffering because of that. Once you are involved in this practice, it’s hard to get out of it because you always want to do more and to deliver the video, script translation as soon as possible.
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Check out our blog post on how to handle multilingual subtitles in YouTube >>
