Curiosity Killed The Plot

I would like, if I may, to talk about the issue of subtitles, notably as they relate to releases of a somewhat less than official order.

And since this is my goddamn blog, I may. I could spend my time talking about chicken mating habits if I wanted, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

Anyway, moving on.... There is a strange phenomenon I have noted across many of the various quasi legitimate releases I have purchased. You can call them official malaysian releases all you like, but your not fooling anybody. I just finished watching the full series of Ancient Dogu Girl, and the second half of that hasn't even been released in Japan yet.

It's not that the subtitles are bad, which one might expect. It's that for a lot of series the subtitles are almost perfect. At least at first. They lure you in, lulling you into a false sense of security before suddenly switching around and turning crap. It's like there's basically 2 guys doing the subtitle translations. Guy 1 has a good grasp of japanese and english, and consequently translates the script pretty well. And this goes on for a few episodes, but then his shift finishes. And then guy 2 starts work. And whereas guy 1 had a grasp of the languages involved, guy 2 has a link to babelfish, combined with a callous disregard for the names of the characters involved. Seriously, sometimes you may get a chinese version, sometimes you'll get a random name that I guess he just likes the sound off, and on some occaisions even the name of a different character entirely. Not neccesarily from the show you're currently watching.
And guy 2 gets tired easily. Because the translations on his half of the series invariably get worse as time goes on. For example Dogu-Chan becomes Dogu-Sauce, then Doll, before somehow winding up as Small Soil. And I may very well have missed one or two variations. I must confess however to being delighted to seeing Ultraman Cosmos translated to Super Man Goth.

Now, I know what you may be thinking: "Boobs!" It's okay, that happens to me sometimes too. You may also be thinking something along the lines of serving me right for buying obviously bootleg releases. Well, you'd have a point if wasn't for the fact that the official Japanese releases don't tend to have any subtitles at all. And if you're gonna start going on about waiting for an official english language release you can, frankly, fuck right off. I'd rape your mother for a high quality boxset of Ultraman Mebius with proper subtitles, but despite my generous offer nobody seems keen to oblige.

I just felt like commenting on an unusually widespread phenomena, which I find somewhat interesting. You might expect subtitling of whatever quality to be consistent across a release, but this is not often the case. To be fair though, I've yet to come across one that I couldn't work with at all, as you can usually wrest at least the essence if not the detail with a bit of effort.

I guess I'm just saying to the bootleggers: Give that first guy a bit more time to get stuff done. We'll sill be buying your stuff even if it takes a little longer to release. Because it's not like anyone else is putting this stuff out.