Common mistakes made by fansubbers
 

Since no one every really just nicely lists the common screws ups by fansubbers I figured it would be nice to do it without being an asshole about it, i.e. "omg your group sucks for not knowing this you noob!" I only have one to start with as I noticed it recently in many fansubs, I hope others will add to the list, nicely.

When adding foreign language character sets into subs, many groups have been forgetting that the common viewer does not have all foreign scripts supported, thus softsubs will give them "blocks", or blank characters. Please consider this when using softsubs as your release format. It is not just new less experienced groups I have seen with this issue, but a few well respected. It is easy to forget that this will happen since fansubbers pretty much all have east/asian text support installed.

Like i said in the top part, please feel free to add to the list if you have anything you have noticed that is a trend of sorts in mistakes. I think this will be helpful to many people as sort of a "things to avoid," guide.

Isn't what you said easily fixed by adding the missing font, or by using fonts that have that character?

I think literal translation is a pretty common mistake made by fansubbers.

Right... But I think being more specific and listing some examples might be more helpful.

I mean, literal translations are perfectly correct 90% of the time.

"Kore wa pen desu" most definitely translates to "This is a pen."

I thought Vista and Win7 came with Asian language support as standard, without any additional installation required.

One thing I see a lot in fansubs that have soft-subbed typesetting is people not bothering to use Aegisub's sort by time feature, so overlapping subs appearing out of order in the script display incorrectly due to some bug in VSFilter. (And this only happens when the script is muxed into the MKV, so you can't catch it while checking the subs externally.) The affected lines look like there's two of the same line on top of each other, but then it pops back to normal once the overlapping line disappears.

Getting into fansubbing is a common mistake I see.

This.

Also giving a damn about what 4chan or the internet in general wants or thinks is a common one.

I agree. Just look at the blocking and overfiltering!

Whoever encoded that should be shot.

I couldn't help but think of this.


And so help me God next time I see honorifics in an anime set in England.

***removed***

it's rare to see me agreeing with bayoab on anything, but yes, this

Yes.
Lacking support for Asian languages and more takes an enormous amount of effort on modern versions of Windows. You get those fonts and rendering support whether you want it or not. (Note: XP is not modern.)
It should also take some effort to get rid of such support on modern Linux distributions.

Setting encoding to 0 - ANSI in ASS styles for no particular reason when they could be left default can break fonts on non English versions of Win.

Wrong use of "Then" and "Than". i.e. I'm better "then" you. Should be - I'm better "than" you.

High School grade mistake. Japanese schools are 3 year schools. If the anime set in America this does not apply(most animes take place in Japan though) Thus:
1st Year = Sophomore not freshman.
2nd Year = Junior
3rd Year = Senior (No idea how they get this right if they call a 1st Year a freshman but they do for some reason.)

Or by including the fonts in the soft-sub mkv file.

Well the issue deals with compatibility in general. You have to think about making the fansub compatible across multiple platforms and configurations. This type of issue has arisen in the past with other things. I know I have made my fair share of mistakes such as this over the years by not considering how a mac users system may render things, or a linux user. The hope with bring awareness up on this is that fansubs created can be enjoyed by all who wish to view them without the viewer having to go through many extra steps just to watch a as the group meant it to be viewed to begin with.

This did not work in the versions I saw the error in. the computer I am viewing on has no east asian support as it is a development computer with different purposes so it doesn't need tons of text support. But just adding a font is not going to help with something like this unless the font added is set up to default to the asian character set I believe. I could be wrong though because I personally have never attempted to fix such an issue as I myself never noticed when I was actively fansubbing.

Beg your pardon, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sophomore and freshman for first year is also the correct term.

Just use first, second, third year student instead of these terms.


I've had good experience with using UTF-8 supported font to display east-asian characters and special symbols in softsubs on computers that have no east-asian language support.

These terms bring up too much confusion. Just don't even use them at all. Use "First Year", "Second Year", and "Third Year". Avoid all of the confusion that goes along w/ trying to equate Japanese Schools with American/Western Schools.

Yes, in a four year curriculum(I'm quite aware of that). But in Japan(and in my high school before they changed it back in 1984) a first year would be considered a sophomore. Freshman still exist/existed, they are/were just in their last year of junior high(like in my years of school).

Add to that - the same mistake often leads those groups to skip sophomore altogether. Thus they skip from being a freshman to junior suddenly, in one year.

But, as you state, it is better to just use the 1st, 2nd and 3rd year terms. That's what we do in our subs to avoid this altogether.