Don’t get too nostalgic for fansubs

Every time an official translator does something remotely interesting, some anti-localisation chud shows up and laments how fansubs have disappeared, because these people knew how to translate properly, giving you exactly what the funny cartoone characters were saying, without using their misguided creatifity to improve things. Oh for the days of fansubs like this:

In the end into a community that seems very strange I joined, says this school girl character from Tesagure Bukatsumono episode 2.

Goddamn that was rough. The first episode of Tesagure! Bukatsumono — a 2013 part improv slice of moe comedy show — had not prepared me for how bad the subtitles would be in the second episode. Not that official subtitles can’t be bad, but when they’re this bad people notice. Clearly this is somebody who just took what was said in Japanese and dumped it into English, without activily understanding what was said or how it should work in English. For context, she’s talking about joining a strange school club and that’s how it should have read: “in the end I joined a strange club” or I ended up joining a strange club”, depending on taste. Not this monstrosity, with its sentence structure taken literally from the Japanese. I kept watching to see if it got better and sampled some later episodes, but unfortunately, it didn’t.

A shame, because that first episode was funny. But with this being the only fansubs available and neither Crunchyroll nor seemingly any other legal (English language) streamer having it available, I doubt I will ever watch more of it.

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