How do people feel about British subtitles?

Just Passing Through

Just Passing Through

The Wildcard
With Manga Entertainment authoring more titles locally, it's also become apparent that they are choosing to ditch the US subtitle tracks for their own translations.

How do you feel about this, whether from Manga, or potentially anyone else?


Personally, I'm so used to US subs, that when a UK sub track shows up with a local colloquialism, it throws me out of the experience.
I was recently watching Tactics, a title from the last time that Manga did this, and in one scene, Kantaro's obviously pleased with the success he's had exorcising a demon, and he says "I'm chuffed" Chuffed? That just seems so wrong!

Of course colloquialisms are one thing, there's the overall quality of the translation to consider too. I've become used to certain words and phrases being left untranslated, as they've entered the common understanding of the anime fan. Onmyoji is one example, but Manga's Tactics subs actually translates it to 'esoteric mysticism'. There's such a thing as being too literal. Of course what Kaze did with Bakuman is a whole other level of fail.

But all things being equal, would you be happy with UK centric subtitles for anime?
 
If the series isn't set in Britain, I don't really like to see British subtitles. There were a couple of Tokyo Ghoul episodes on Wakanim where the subtitles felt as though they'd been made specifically for a British viewing audience, and it really threw me off when watching.

I'm more than happy to keep watching US subtitles on anime.
 
VoxPhantom said:
I'm more than happy to keep watching US subtitles on anime.
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I agree with this but I would like it if they corrected the spelling of some words from American English to British English. Example Farther to Further. That one always throws me off especially if the character speaks to their father in the same episode.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the first few volumes of Naruto released in this country have a UK subtitle track where ramen was translated as 'pot noodle'? while unintentionally funny it is equally horrific! I can just imagine them releasing Railgun (lol) and all the girls going to a cafe for pancakes and PG tips :D

In other words: UK subtitle track = bad.

(plus its more work that doesn't need to be done and slows down the release)
 
All British subs do is provoke me to take lots of screenshots so I can laugh about them with my friends, which I think qualifies as taking me out of the experience.

I also don't see the point. Even if they get the timings and existing subs from the US, why risk introducing more errors reinventing the wheel for the 5 people who will even notice it was ever done? And if they're being forced to make them from scratch in the first place I just feel depressed that so little effort is made to coordinate releases and save everyone time and money. I'd rather they spent the time proofreading and checking the subs they use - whichever version of English they're written in - to avoid weird typos, missing lines and other problems.

There would be a point to British subs if a title had a highly localised English script and the jokes simply weren't understandable to the average Brit at all (like those in the manga Attack on Titan: Junior High, which I am using as my go-to example of horrible, horrible English translations lately). There are also a few cases where an American scriptwriter has attempted to use British English for flavour and mangled it, and in those cases I wouldn't mind the local companies fixing it. I can think of numerous manga translations with this flaw, and I find it very distracting - there was one line in 'British English' in Black Butler which meant the exact opposite of what the translator presumably thought it meant. Argh.

Anyway, those things almost never happen in anime so I'm happy to deal with American English in the subs.

And I agree that highly specific terms such as onmyouji which cannot be acceptably translated within one or two words should be left in Japanese if explaining them makes it difficult to understand the show. Don't cheat the viewer out of understanding what's actually being said - it's what liner notes are for! And you can even market them as extras to make the release seem better!

R

(Aren't farther and further different words? I use both.)
 
I have to admit, when it comes to subs - I don't really notice. But that may be because I mainly stick to the English dubs.

That does remind me though - I was watching Excel Saga recently, and in the English dub, Excel is constantly referred to as 'Senior Excel' by Hyatt (or simply 'Senior') - I'm guessing in the original JP audio this is Senpai, and considering as most English subs leave Senpai untranslated (much like -san or -chan etc. are), it felt really odd hearing 'senior' instead, as when rendered in English, it doesn't really have the same connotations for me.
 
Something in the back of my mind says ADV went through a period of doing things like that with their dubs, but that would have been about ten years ago now I guess.

I don't mind the idea of seeing British idioms in sub scripts, although I can't say I've particularly noticed it in practice. The only time I've ever been aware of it was in one of the early fansubs of the 2012 Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, where someone had really gone to town with the idea, despite clearly not having a complete grasp of the dialect ("they've stolen all our quid!"), although in that case, it did fit both the tone and setting of the show.
 
Rui said:
(Aren't farther and further different words? I use both.)
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teacher.gif
They both mean the same thing however in America farther is written for physical distance and further is more for figurative and nonphysical distances. In the UK further is preferred for all senses of the word and farther is rare.

It still throws me off even though it is still 'grammatically' correct.
 
Didn't we discover last time the mum/mom thing came up that a sizeable minority of the posters here actually do say 'mom'? Regional variations in English across the country make it impossible to keep everyone happy :D

R
 
Generally speaking, for dialogue (in subtitles) I'd prefer some kind of generic non-specific english with no american-isms or british-isms at all. After all, most anime is not set in an english speaking environment so a character saying 'dude' or 'dodgy' is just wrong. I know that's not always possible, for example there's no generic alternative to mum/mom unless you say something that sounds unnatural like saying 'mother' all the time, but in such instances I'd lean toward the british style.
The same applies for the spelling, when there are two different spellings for a generic word such as colour/color I would prefer to see the british spelling on the subtitles, it always annoys me how the americans can't spell :p
Oh, and keep the japan-isms (for lack of a better term) such as senpai, san, kun, etc. I consider them to be the most important part of any subtitle script, they give a deeper understanding of the story which is closer to how japanese viewers would see it (if that makes sense).
 
BanzaiJedi said:
Oh, and keep the japan-isms (for lack of a better term) such as senpai, san, kun, etc. I consider them to be the most important part of any subtitle script, they give a deeper understanding of the story which is closer to how japanese viewers would see it (if that makes sense).
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I wholeheartedly agree with this. I hate subtitles that replace "*surname*-senpai/kun/chan/whatever" with the character's first name, when you can clearly hear that it was their surname and not their first name that was said in the sentence.
 
Personally, I prefer it when words like "mum" and "colour" are spelt properly, but when it comes to British or even American colloquialisms, I often think "Did the character really say that?". To be blunt, if I want to watch an adapted script, I'd watch the dub.
 
That reminds me - Naruto's 'believe it!' instead of 'dattebayo' always used to really annoy me too, because it felt like such a bizarre phrase. Does anyone (even Americans) even say 'believe it?' in real life. As far as I understood it, dattebayo is closer to someone saying ''y'know?'' anyway.
 
I like the idea of British subtitles but considering how terrible Manga releases are nowadays I wish they'd just focus on getting their releases right instead of wasting money on a new subtitle track when one exists already.

Fix chapter markers, fix timing, fix poor audio tracks, fix subtitle limitations, don't release dvd only... then, and only then, should they be piddling about with making their own subs.
 
GolGotha said:
I'm all up for changing 'mom' to 'mum', but unless it's set in England I don't want words like 'chuffed' in my subtitles.
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I'd be happy with "mama" which, 90% of the time, is what the characters are actually saying when the US titles have "mom". It's an English word! Then there was this...

 
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