I'm writing an essay for univeristy at the moment and am looking for a few tips. The question is about the problems Japanese subs on dramas(and how they can be improved). Obviously I don't expect you to answer the question for me but I want to know aother peoples' opinions.

At the moment the only points I can think of are, The untranslatability of idioms/puns, homour etc, corporate rescritions for official subs, English speaking countries' arrogance towards subtitles media, subs vs dubs.

Not a very good list at the moment but I'm working on it. The amount of written material on this is extremely scarce but any individual thoughts would be appreciated.

What is the actual question? It all sounds incredibly vague at the moment...

The actual questions is, "What do you feel are the main problems involved in producing english subtitiles for Japanese Drama and how can they be overcome?"

Due to the lacking numbers of official versions of english-subbed dramas I think I'm gonna have to refer to fansubs in a lot of it. The problem with that though is the lack of offical material on it that I can reference.

I can only comment on anime and movie subs, since I'm not into dramas, but the main issues I've seen are mostly what you noted.

* Problems with puns/cultural things (mostly solved with with translation notes at the top)

* Slang (Usually it's not too bad, but once in a while I saw a fansubber translate episodes using what seemed to me like obscure British or Australian slang, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it.)

* Mistakes (Made-up foreign soudning names are the worst, because they could be said many ways, I used to hate the few times when a subber would mistakenly translate something, then correct it a few episodes later)

That said, most fansubs I've seen have been very professional, and sometimes even better than official subs.

Here is a pretty good summary of the subs vs dubs debate - http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ma...susDubbing

Can you remember what animes you saw that had the name mistakes in them. Also on the subject of offical vs fansub; is there an offical list anywhere of all the shows that have been dubbed or subbed in english(not fansubs)?

I'd say...

1: Translation of complex things
-example, Osaka dialect

2: Reading takes away focus from the material
-I noticed a huge difference when I turned off subtitles, it's like the world opens up. Doesn't matter what language.

3: Different English dialect in different countries
-Translating to American English, for example, can give an American flair to a British watching the subtitle. It's mostly the general difficulty of translating to keep and preserve nuances.

4: For "soft" subs (where the subtitles aren't encoded on the video), timing issues
-I've downloaded some J-dramas where it wasn't timed properly because the source file was different, so I had to open it up and re-time a fair bit of it.

Those are a couple issues off the top of my head.

Surely a lot of the problems are there with any language and wouldn't require you to reference sources that solely refer to Japanese?

Just a thought, but why not write it like:

P1: Outline of essay. (Keypoints: as below.)
P2: Wide variety of translations by non-profession translation as evidenced in translations by various sub groups (you could quote from the anime, drama, songs, movies you choose).
P3: Difficulties involved in clearly translating regional or slangy language into English and the additional difficulty of words that do not translate well into English.
P4: Difficulties created by varied levels of translators abilities and the difficulty of being both a translator and script writer (both creative in writing and fluent in two languages considering pay situations in the translation field from low budget anime, drama companies - movies are less inclined to this).
Solutions:
P5: standardized training and increasing incentive for skillful individuals to enter the industry through actions such as the greater protection of copyrights, improved financial return to smaller companies, formation of large distribution companies through alliances between content holders that specialize in maximizing financial gain and increasing cost efficiency while bring together resources. Finally, the greater improvement of Japanese to English or reverse dictionaries and the creation of an industry wide cheat sheet for translators that allow easier translation of difficult terms as well as greater and more direct contact between translators and show writers to secure a greater understanding of authors' intent during writing.
^Maybe talk about streamlining translation time through creation of the show for the local market coinciding with the creation of English subtitles for swift distribution overseas and the challenges created by 'free' or low cost companies such as CrunchyRoll driving down translators wages with the addition that it also increases workload through a greater amount of translation done at low cost.
Conclusion

Anyway, it's a bit of a BS question as your lecturer probably knows you'll get caught in the whole subgroups discussion. You could reference from resources online or in print format produced for professional translators. If you really can't find anything good, you'll have to make sure it's well written and reasonably on the ball and reference pretty much anything you can to build up your quota (I imagine he or she set a number of references).

You might want to throw in something about target audiences, who can vary a lot on whether they prefer honorifics left in or not, how much 'localisation' they consider acceptable, tolerance for lots of translator's notes, and so on. I don't know how much of that carries over to drama subs from anime subs...

I used to be an anime fansubber back in the early 2000's, so I have a little bit of experience with the process. I think there are not any problems (translation-wise) which can't be overcome with the right people and the right abilities.
There are a lot of factors to consider, including the target audience, the medium of distribution, and others. And there are many different ways of doing things. If you had 4 fansubs of the same show, and an official sub of that show, then you might see 5 different ways of translating something. Some ways would clearly be better than others. One might even say that some of the ways are "brilliant".
Having someone with a strong and eloquent command of the english (or other target) language is just as important, if not moreso, than having someone who understands the Japanese.

Edit: Oops, I just noticed that this thread is like a month old >.>

Ezikio Wrote:Can you remember what animes you saw that had the name mistakes in them. Also on the subject of offical vs fansub; is there an offical list anywhere of all the shows that have been dubbed or subbed in english(not fansubs)?

The only one I can think of off the top of my head is the series Romeo x Juliet. In it, the Juliet character had a really long full name, which the Wikipedia article lists the official version as "Juliet Fiamatta Ars de Capulet". I've seen "Ars de" part translated as everything from "Arthur" to "Astro". Long foreign sounding names are hard, because they could be said a number of ways, and fansubbers don't have a script to fall back on, so there's a chance they could mishear it, complicating matters.
Probably the most famous weird translation by an official sub in the anime community is in an episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the official sub said "I have a pigtail moe", while the fansub version translated it as "Pigtails turn me on.".