Doing Pointless Things for Stupid Reasons: Part 1

Nothing makes me want to write stuff more than getting annoyed by things in my immediate surroundings.

Today’s annoyance is fansubbers translating production credits. Among all gay and meaningless things you can do when fansubbing, this ranks incredibly high on the idiocy scale, right up there with AFX karaokes that take two days to render, leaving random Japanese words untranslated for no real reason and plastering fansub credits with gigantic text all over the OP/ED.

Why is that?

Simply put, the effort invested to fansub improvement ratio is incredibly low, if not zero. First off you’re quite likely to get a lot of name romanizations wrong because some people just love spelling their names with weird kanji that are supposed to be read in some obscure way. Probably you’ll get most of them decently right, but you know what? It doesn’t actually matter, because whichever way you spell it, the viewer won’t be able to do anything useful whatsoever with the information. If your viewer wants to, say, find out what else this random Japanese guy has worked on, the natural thing to do would be to use Google. Can you guess what will happen? He won’t get any hits whatsoever because any pages that has info on this guy will be in Japanese, and they sure as heck won’t have any romanizations. Sure, if it’s one of the more important staff members he might get a hit in the ANN database if he’s lucky, but then, what was the point of you translating it again if it was easily accessible on the internet all along?

It goes further than this, though. Even for people who are just interested in knowing what episodes of the series this guy worked on the information is useless, because it’s not indexed and not machine-searchable. To find the information sought, you’d have to watch every single OP/ED of the series. Not funny. Information that isn’t indexed and easily searchable might as well be entropy, because you’ll never do anything useful with it.

Finally: NOONE CARES. No, really. Most people watch the OP/ED once and then skip it. Noone cares about your epenis credits. Put the effort into something else instead, or go outside or something.

Comments (4)

  1. D404 wrote:

    Indeed, agreed.

    Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 05:04 #
  2. acro wrote:

    Yap, no reason to translate credits. Shinsen do so. go figure >_>

    Friday, July 4, 2008 at 21:31 #
  3. martino wrote:

    They’re not the only ones, and definitely not the ones that do it with their every single project… hurr hurr Menclave and the list could go on.

    Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 19:11 #
  4. tecenda wrote:

    I’d say put that information somewhere else or just do the voice actors; doing the whole staff is time-wastage and overkill.

    Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 11:15 #