Fansub Review: [CoalGuys] Ano Natsu de Matteru (Episode 04)

This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.

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They have a humorous take on how native speakers actually talk.

Release format: MKV (250 MB, 8-bit)

Japanesiness: No honorifics. Japanese name order.

Group website: http://coalguys.com/

8thsin’s translation critique: http://8ths.in/winter-2011-anime-subtitle-comparison/#Ano

Ji-hi’s screenshot comparisons: http://www.ji-hi.net/wi11/anonatsu/

 

Karaoke.

Opening. It’s not good, but it’s serviceable.

Ending. Standard font, standard color.

 

Typesetting.

The quality of their typesetting shines as bright as Coal.

 

Script.

A few pixels lower and you would’ve been fine. :/

At this line, anyone who’s taken classes in the US should notice something’s up. “finals” is almost never preceded by a definite article.

“How were finals?”

“You prepped for finals?”

“Come finals, I think we know which group is gonna fail the English test.”

It’s like a combination between “every now and then” and “once in a while”. I think they were going for “I do every once in a while.” but this line is most assuredly an unfortunate corruption of the proper idioms.

And this seals the non-native deal. I tried speaking this line out loud and nearly threw up. An English speaker’s tongue is simply ill-prepared for such shitty phrasing. Again, they were confused by two regular lines — “I apologized yesterday.” and “I’ve already apologized.”

You can’t just shove shit together and hope it works. English isn’t so forgiving.

As for how to r
ephrase this, I’d prefer “I’ve already apologized.” I don’t feel that “yesterday” is super important or even necessary to indicate here.

So so so so so

For the love of your god, please don’t phrase lines like this. It’s fucking annoying to people who can actually read.

“It was so sudden, I was just surprised.” or “It was sudden, so I was just surprised.”

I prefer the latter.

These changes are so fucking simple it’s pissing me off. And they’re not even “Whoops, I made a little mistake” things. These are embedded into the core of the subs.

in. -> into.

Fuckety fuck fuck fuck. No!

As it is, the line can be rephrased “Girl-C, it seems Woman-A has a rival.” which is absolutely fucking wrong. Replace the comma in the original line with a colon and there won’t be any goddamn confusion.

Are they trolling, or does this group really not have anyone who speaks conversational English? Again, this is a fucked-up mix of two normal idioms.

Does it make sense? Sure. Is it English? Technically. Is it right? No.

“Gotta get it together.” or “Get yourself together.”

Choose either one. They work much better separately.

How does this happen? What possesses people to write lines like this?

“I wouldn’t forgive him even if he begged for it.”

“I never would’ve thought that’s what she’s actually like.”

If that’s too wordy (it is), go with something around the lines of, “So that’s what she’s really like…”

 

Watchability: Watchable.

Overall grade: C

Even ignoring the terrible “typesetting”, goddamn are there some stupid fucking errors here. There’s something called “speaking with people” which this group’s members clearly haven’t done in a while. Take a break from the internet and learn human English, guys.

Of the groups I’ve reviewed thus far, go with Commie. I’ll be taking a look at Hayaku’s release later tonight.

24 thoughts on “Fansub Review: [CoalGuys] Ano Natsu de Matteru (Episode 04)”

    • Wow… It really is pretty bad.
      Also, I found quite a few errors, or at least what seemed like errors. :/
      There are several “…” consistencies. At the start, it uses “… (capital_letter)—-” From there on, “… (lowercase_letter)—-” It switches back at the end of the script.
      Although this isn’t really an error, several sentences beginning with “But” can be replaced with “However,” or something similar.
      “He erased a show I TiVoed without asking me!” I don’t think it’s possible to use TiVo to record something if there is no service of such in Japan.
      The sign of “I love you.” has no punctuation.
      Those are the things I believed were errors as well.

      Reply
  1. That boy-A, girl-B, girl-C bullshit was stupid. It just made more sense when Hayaku used A-kun, B-chan, C-chan… if the items are different you don’t use a chain of letters, it should be boy-A, girl-A, girl-B, or just boy and drop the letter. It easily could have worked without the a, B, C shit if they wanted to drop honorifics.

    It works in Japanese because the character’s sex was out of the equation so it was 3 people not 1 boy and 2 girls.

    Reply
    • As 8th said, the name endings did imply gender, but I figured for our release the honorifics would imply that well enough anyway and it would just get too confusing if we tried to localize it somehow, so I ignored it.

      Reply
      • It was a crappy translation either way, the A,B,C thing just made it worse. This is just one of those shows where the honorifics and odd language quirks are going to matter and they are being butchered.

        Reply
  2. I translated this in less than 2 hours, so C-grade was pretty much expected. Some of these mistakes are pretty disturbing though… I should be more careful next time ^^;

    @NakkiNyan
    The Japanese here was “A-ko-chan”, “B-ta-kun”, “C-mi-chan” etc.

    Generic female names end in “-ko” and “-mi” , and “-ta”, “-o” for male names. Alphabets and sexes are clearly included for every hypothetical character.

    Not to mention “A has a rival: C” would be confusing as hell since Kaito and Ichika had their “A” and “B” reversed. It was also my intention to differentiate Kaito and Ichika’s examples (girl/woman) for this very same reason. The generic names used were different too.

    Reply
    • I think using titles like Miss A, Mr. B etc would probably look more natural. That being said it’s more that your editor should have caught this stuff, unless you don’t have one?

      Reply
      • I do have an editor for this release, but he does everything other than translation and sometimes timing. I don’t expect him to catch everything, but I wish he didn’t add some of the mistakes up there ^^;

        Reply
        • The real shame of this is that a lot of these errors could be prevented by decent QC. I’ve never understood gg’s (and by extension, Coalguys’) reasoning behind getting rid of QC on their releases. Even really good editors/timers/tsers/translators/encoders need a little slap sometimes and a “don’t be so silly!” to bring them back down to Earth, and a QCing eye will give you that as well as taking out the silly little errors that happen because hey, we’re all human.

          I usually only get >1000kb .txt QC docs on my edits from most of my QCs but I wouldn’t forego QC at any point because I do sometimes drop in random typos, just like every editor going.

          Reply
          • Translation’s solid, and 1000KB QC docs are a huge waste of time. 8thsin have proven he can type in competent English, and I don’t think fansubbing is a grammar exam.

            2 hour turn around and I’ll take Coalguy’s Ano Natsu anyday.

            Reply
          • Just realised it should have been <1000kb :D

            It may not be a grammar test, Maceart, but why release something that's not the best it can be? With such a small addition as a QC process, you can pretty much make sure typos and bad grammar don't leak into releases, so why not do it?

            Reply
  3. I’m surprised, I thought it would be D considering how big are these mistakes. They aren’t just some some wrongly placed commas or random capitalizations but something much worse.

    ““Gotta get it together.” or “Get yourself together.”

    Choose either one. They work much better separately.”
    I’d mix them and go with “Gotta get myself together.” That was probably what TL/editor/QC had in mind.

    Reply

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