Saint Seiya (ADV DVDs)

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takenoko
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Saint Seiya (ADV DVDs)

Post by takenoko »

So I was rifling through my stuff the other night, and realized I had bought all these DVDs over the years that I had never gotten around to watching. I started with Seiya, since most of my DVDs are apparently incomplete sets that I bought for the cheap. So if I'm going to watch an incomplete series, might as well start with the one where it's definitely not getting anymore (ADV stopped at volume 12, I think?)

First thing I see, really ugly subtitles covering everything. Hard coded subtitles that are a part of the video. They write Saint Seiya in curly letters over the logo, then they cover up the opening with English translations of the credits with a font size that's so large, it covers up most of the video. The translations are hardcoded to the video, so they could have put a little more effort into making them look nice or less obtrusive.

It's so terrible that they include the opening video without the hardcoded staff credits as a bonus (still has the Japanese subtitles). The weird thing is that after each episode, there's a segment where they append a video of the English and Japanese staff credits, making this ugly process completely unnecessarily.

Also, it's been a while since I've seen yellow subs. I have nothing against them, but I'm glad we mostly use white subtitles.

Overall, the translations felt like they did a good job at conveying all the crazy terminology and stuff that happens in the series. With the exploding cosmos in Saints and other stuff, but it's those little details that bug me whenever I see anything commercially translated.

Like Shiryuu has an attack Rozan Shou Ryuu Ha which is translated to Rising Dragon Punch. First, Street Fighter 2. Second, Rozan should be part of the attack name, they mention it in the episode as the place where Shiryuu learned the technique.

I think after this, someone shouts "What an amazing fighter!" when the actual line was "What an amazing technique!" because the line is supposed to convey how cool the move was. It's near misses like this that makes me wonder if an editor came in and rewrote stuff without checking with the original translator first.

There also weren't any honorifics, which I prefer to see in a subbed show. There's an English audio track for people who want it to be Americanized, so why not have the subs be a little more Japanese accurate?

Thinking about this more, it'd be pretty easy to create a track with the honorifics, then copy and paste that subtitle script, global delete the honorifics, and you can have a subtitle track for people who don't like honorifics. Subtitle scripts are just text, so it's not like it'd be hard to do or prohibitively resource costly.

Anyway, I always like watching stuff like this with the background thought "How would I handle this line if it were for our group?" or even more simply "How could I phrase this to better convey the original Japanese meaning?" I'd love to hand in a list of suggested changes to an anime studio. I just wonder what kind of restrictions commercial companies have to deal with when they work on stuff like this.

Personally, with ADV Films out of business, I'd just grab some fansubs of Saint Seiya than pay money for these DVDs. The translations will get you where you need to go, but it's just not a very clean presentation, and it definitely loses points when the details are scrutinized.
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Re: Saint Seiya (ADV DVDs)

Post by Joosche »

The animation studio shouldn't supervise this?

In my country Saint Seiya was aired in the middle of the 90's, so the only way to consume this was subbed (fansubs in this time was extremely unusual) and a lot mistakes happened, but I love how they treated the names of the attacks.

The Rozan Shou Ryuu Ha attack from Shiryuu was called here as 'Cólera do Dragão' - 'Wrath of the Dragon' and Rozan Kō Ryū Ha was subbed as 'Último Dragão' - 'Last Dragon'. I think the right for the translation would be putting Wrath as part of the name of the second attack. But for the context of the scene, was just awesome.
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Re: Saint Seiya (ADV DVDs)

Post by takenoko »

It's pretty weird how the quality of the translations just shot up after episode 20. There's still mistakes though, like in episode 33 or 34 they put down Shunrei's name instead of Shiryuu's.

Anyway, I'm about to run out of episodes. Anyone want to recommend a fansub group for me for episodes 41+?
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