Ask a Fansubber (almost) anything

[Squiggy]

Why hello there,

I'm a fansubber; means I put subtitles on japanese animation series and movies.
I've been working with them for about six years now and touched almost every "role" besides translating since I don't really understand much Japanese.

I run a project myself and have been involved with 20+ groups until today, accumulating to over 1300 episodes I've worked on, spanning across over 100 series.
Most fansubbers will face you with an asshole attitude when being asked how they do stuff - which is frankly very interesting stuff - but I'm still sane to a degree, so I won't give you the middle finger if asked how to typeset, encode from a Bluray/DVD, fixing video issues or where my waifu is from.
Due to legal issues, I can't link to torrents or places where you can download anime but other than that, I'm open to almost any question.

 

[Chaosy]

I find it a bit confusing.
You say you're a fansubber but you don't know japanese? how can you put subtitles then?

Okay. REAL question:
What motivates you to do that? as far as I know you get nothing out of it, and I can't imagine it being fun. Some that translate manga asks for donations but I have never seen a fansub do that.

 

[Squiggy]

I find it a bit confusing.
You say you're a fansubber but you don't know japanese? how can you put subtitles then?

Okay. REAL question:
What motivates you to do that? as far as I know you get nothing out of it, and I can't imagine it being fun. Some that translate manga asks for donations but I have never seen a fansub do that.

Most fansubs are done by groups, so multiple people work on the scripts.
In those cases, the work gets divided into translation (and/or) translation checking, editing the script, timing the subtitles, typesetting them, do a pass or multiple passes on quality control (ensure there are no errors left) and lastly, distribution.
Often, there are multiple persons assigned to these roles, especially when it comes to typesetting and quality control but also, vice versa, there are people who manage to do multiple roles alone.
It all depends on who's available at which time of the day for what show he/she's interested in and who assigned himself to a certain task.

My motivation is simple: I work by the principle of "sharing is caring".
I often see mediocre releases of series I like, done in low resolutions or overall bad script quality and my motivation concerning those is to improve them.
While working on fansubs can be extremely tedious, especially if you're like me and do everything apart from the actual translation (I either borrow translators or use TV scripts) but it's definitely more fun watching a properly done script as opposed to ugly Arial font and subtitles bleeding over to the next scene.
Also, since I've seen almost all TV series except for Arrow and Loooooost, I get bored fairly quickly and need to gather new material to entertain myself with.
Concerning the encoding procedure, it's almost the same but with the thought in mind that doing actual video "restoration" and improving video quality is in my opinion a valuable skill that greatly adds to digital media jobs.
I do have a donation feature on my site so people can support me financially.
"But you don't pay?!"
Exactly, but a server costs money and if you do distro for other groups out of pure generosity, you gain nothing by doing so.
I need to keep my releases alive and doing that from home isn't a good idea due to legalties.
Last but not least, it enables me to almost completely release a series I wish to watch with my own autistic standards.

 

[chobibo]

How long does it take to sub a single episode, say for example a 25~20 minute video? Also, have you worked on mangas before? Thanks.

 

[Squiggy]

How long does it take to sub a single episode, say for example a 25~20 minute video? Also, have you worked on mangas before? Thanks.

That greatly varies, depending on the workload.
If I had to give a rough timeframe, it can be anything from 5min to several hours.
There are cases which only require me to shift subtitles and check them on the fly and there are cases where I'm left with nothing but DVD vobsubs that need to be retimed, typeset, edited and QCd - that is when the latter applies.
A rough outline of such a case can be seen here:

The video includes everything from typing the subtitles, timing them, editing them on the fly and typesetting within two hours.
There also have been cases where I only was assigned to typeset and the show turned out to have 150-200 signs per episode (fucking acchi kocchi), making me work for six hours or more.

I drew my own manga once from the age of 12 to 18 but that one sadly got lost ins some unknown void.
I haven't taken part in scanlation as I find scnlations boring.
We're in the age of moving pictures and all~