Because it's fun. Why else?

June 9th, 2009 1:06 am

I got this note today.

I read your blog and noticed you promised the frostii team to do mouryou no hako. I also noticed that your schedule is quite busy and you probably don’t really want to translate MnH. This is why I contacted you. #********(channel name masked) is currently acquiring the BD for MnH and we will sub it, regardless of whether or not YOU decide to sub it. You must understand that this is our first project and we are unable to drop it. On the other hand, if frostii does this show, our group may not receive the popularity it might deserve due to a group with a higher rep – our download counts are sure to drop.

Which gives me a good chance to talk about why I torture myself so much and devote so much of my time to fansubbing.

First of all, I like anime.  I’m not crazy about anime like some people I’ve seen.

Then, J→E translation is something I’ve been doing for such a long time, it’s almost natural part of me.  My first translation attempt was around 17 years ago, first couple chapters of Record of Lodoss War.  I just wanted to share what I was reading with friends.  That desire is what got me into fansubbing.

Once I started fansubbing, I got hooked to the process of fansubbing itself.  I like working with all the anime geeks.  I like working with videos.  I like working with fonts and such.  And it gives me some excuse to build web pages and such here and there.

But, really, I wouldn’t have continued for 6+ years without all the fun people I’ve worked with.  (I have yet to meet a sigle one of them.  That should change at one point…)

Now, to respond to the guy who messaged me:

We will also go ahead with our project, regardless of your project status.  If anything, you should have advantage over us, for we know we will take a late start.  I’m trying to finish some of my shows before I pick up a new show (namely K-On, Ippo, and Black Jack).  So you have definite head start.  We want to do it because there are so may people in Frostii who are so eager to do it themselves, that they’re willing to put up with the wait.

And, on the assumption that I probably don’t want to translate MnH: yes, but no.  It’s really not the type of the show I would pick up myself.  But, since the start of Frostii, I’ve done all the stuff I wanted to do (Nodame, Black Jack, Ippo, Lupin, K-On!).  Now I want to give back to the group.  It’ll still be fun for me.  And when people tell me that it’s not an easy show to translate, I can’t turn down the challenge.

Go on, do your own thing.  We will do ours.  And, FYI, I won’t be starting my translation until I come back from Japan next month.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments »

Make a call, and live with it

June 8th, 2009 1:06 pm

The recent dispute of Holo vs Horo spelling yet again reminded me of the story of a minor league baseball umpire that I heard couple of months ago on NPR.

What happens when an umpire has to make a call, like on a base, and they just can’t see it?  They’re just not in the position, and they just don’t know?
It happens frequently. Maybe. I don’t want to say that it happens frequently. It happens from time to time. You just make the call. You have fifty-percent chance of getting it right. You call it, then sell it as if you have seen it. There is no alternative, you know. If you blow it, you blow it. Admitting that you didn’t see it is not an alternative. Once you’ve done it, you’ve completely lost your authority in the game. Every call you make from that point on will be open for questions.

Q: What happens when an umpire has to make a call, like on a base, and they just can’t see it?  They’re just not in the position, and they just don’t know?

A: It happens frequently. Maybe. I don’t want to say that it happens frequently. It happens from time to time. You just make the call. You have fifty-percent chance of getting it right. You call it, then sell it as if you have seen it. There is no alternative, you know. If you blow it, you blow it. Admitting that you didn’t see it is not an alternative. Once you’ve done it, you’ve completely lost your authority in the game. Every call you make from that point on will be open for questions.

Here, of course, people are trying to defend their stances with variety of reasons, everything from spelling on the official product page, what’s printed on the DVD/Blu-Ray disc, how the name is pronounced, etc…  One of the tough thing of being a translator (in this case, I’m including other supporting roles like editors, since they are also making decisions on these matters) is that sometimes, you have to make a call and live with it.  It was probably hard to predict that this Holo vs Horo issue would spark such a discussion prior to the release.  Sometimes, you simply get to labelled by some as being an incompetent translator for these little things.

At least, in this world of fansubbing, we can release a fixed version if we strongly compelled to do so.  Sometimes, we just need to accept the criticism, and live with the mistakes we’ve made in the past, and let them not haunt you.

There are many reasons we can make these “mistakes.”  In fansub, often it does come from language or hearing incompetence.  (Afterall, majority of translators are not native Japanese speakers.  Also, Japanese language has many homonyms, which makes translation even harder.)  Other times, inaccuracy can stem from inconsistent spellings listed, even within one official web site.  Or the line being so dang hard to hear. (Often happens in the opening/ending songs.  I still remember how difficult the first episode of Last Exile was, throughout the episode.)  Or, sometimes we try to make some judgement calls, trying to strike the best balance between the length of a translated line and the total accuracy of the translation.

In my case, I found some aspects of translation got harder as I got more experience, because I start thinking of all the different possibilities of translating any single word.  Some people may not like the word/phrase I picked.  But, usually, there’s a good reason why I phrased any line certain way.  If you ever wish to dispute anything, I’ll be open to discussions (within certain limit, as I want to leave lots of time for other activities, including more future translation works).

I think I have much lower tolerence against cussing and cursing compared to these pro baseball umpires though.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Why do skunks cross the road?

June 8th, 2009 1:06 am

I guess I played really hard yesterday.  It was very tough to get up this morning, and I still needed a nap in the afternoon.  But before the nap, my daughter and I went to watch Disney’s Up.  That was a sweet movie.  It makes me want to find Elly of my life again.  And I think my daughter really liked the funny part of the movie.  I hope she’s starting to catch on to the part I’m enjoying too.

It’s the day my daughter goes back to Kansas City.  So I took her back there.  Then, on my way back, I got pounded by a very heavy rain—so heavy that I couldn’t see where I was going for a minute.  Then, when the rain was over, I almost hit a skunk.  Urgh! Why do those skunks have to cross the road?!  Luckily for both the skunk and my car, he slid right under my car, and didn’t get squished.  Man, that’s two scary driving experience in one night.

I had to round off the evening with couple loads of laundry.  I finished the translation of the latest episode of K-On! while at it.  Translation log #732.  Oh, I did wash yet another key chain drive today.  Yup, it’s still working.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Work hard, play hard, sleep hard

June 7th, 2009 1:06 am

I’ve been working hard for last two weeks.  Today was the “play hard” day.

We started our day at the zoo.  It was a rather warm day, but it was still fun.  Our local zoo just opened their brand new exhibit, tigers.  I thought the exhibit would be crazy crowded, but it was surprisingly empty.  It was a really good visit overall.  Animals were on the move more than usual, which doesn’t happen very often.  There were still plenty of lazy animals that we could find, including red panda, kangaroos, giant ant eater, etc…

Speaking of red panda, that was my other excitement of the day.  When this zoo brought penguins, I was excited too.  Yes, the penguins!  The Linux mascot!  (Yes, I know, the Linux mascot is an emperor penguin… but still, it’s penguin nonetheless.)  This time, they broat the red panda, aka firefox!  The bad part was that I could hardly see it.  I had to take the picture of it, bring it home, load the photo in Photoshop, and adjust the image to actually see the little panda.

After the zoo came the pool.  It’s so good to be living in an apartment that has its own pool.

And we rounded off the day with the two latest episodes of Black Jack.  Now I need to get ready for her usual question, when the next episode of Black Jack will be ready.  I wish I had the answer.

With all of that, plus half episode translation of K-On, I’m really tired now.  It’s time to go sleep hard.  Oyasuminasai.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Translation log #731

June 5th, 2009 11:06 pm

It’s been a really long week.  I really didn’t have much time to relax all week.  So, when I got out of work this evening, it felt really, really great.  But there’s not much time to just lay back to relax.  Now I get to play a family man.

Every other weekend, I make a 3.5 hour drive to pick up my daughter, and spend a weekend with her.  So that’s what I did straight after work today.  That was a really long drive after the long week.  At least that’s done for now.  We got home safe, and we’re going to have some fun.

So, my own personal time will be very limited this weekend.  It’s not a bad thing for me.  It’s a bad thing for the rest of the Frostii team :p .  But hey, at least I turned in another translation in.  Ippo episode 22 translation is finally done.  So, the release of this episode will be a bit delayed this week.  And I haven’t even touched this week’s K-On! yet.  Nor have I had any time for Black Jack either.  Other team members are making progress on Black Jack, so hope is far from being lost.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

YMMV

June 3rd, 2009 1:06 am

I couldn’t do anything much this evening.  Getting home close to 10PM does that to me.  I wasn’t bar hopping.  I was working overtime again.  Unpaid.  (I’ve got to rant on that later – not the “unpaid” portion, but about why I had to work so late.) I did accomplish one thing – I purchased Japan Rail Pass in preparation for my visit to Japan.  As I will have to travel from Narita Airport to Nagoya, and back, that alone will cost me some chunk of change.  And because we have more travel plan, this rail pass will really be a good bargain, even if we spend significant amount of time just lounging at home.  Anyway.

I just found a piece of news that the release date of Release Candidate for Firefox 3.5 seem to be delayed “again.” Compare that to the impressive Release Candidate release of NetBeans that I mentioned yesterday.  This makes me apprecaite me even more how good of a job that the NetBeans project team did.  We can’t compare two projects side by side.   Different audience, different platform, different project size, etc…  But I’m sure both teams have some kind of release schedule.  But can you imagine how hard it is to meet such deadline?  Another example—when was the last time you saw Microsoft Windows being released on time compared to their initial predicted release date?  Then compare that with Ubuntu, who make their releases every six months, on the dot.  Where is that difference coming from?  Granted, Ubuntu team is mostly packaging a punch of software made by other peoplo, while Microsoft is actually writing their own code.  But still, the difference is huge.  I’m sure every major software projects have their project plans.  But keeping up with the project?  Is it really “your milage may vary” thing?

Now, a completely another topic.

I’m a lazy man.  I suffer from that fact from time to time.  When I do laundry, I’m often too lazy to check every pockets of every clothes I’m washing.  More than several times, I found my thumb drives at the bottom of the laundry machine after the wash cycle.  I’ve been damn lucky so far that all of them continued to work after they’ve been washed like that.  Then, one day almost three months ago, I found my iPod nano in the laundry machine.  Now, that was painful.  No, it didn’t work.  Then, not two weeks later, I saw a story of another man who washed his iPod Touch.  That’s got to hurt really bad.  Apparently his iPod didn’t recover either.  He bit his lip and paid to get his iPod repaired.  I bit my lip and decided to live without my iPod.  For some strange reason, I decided to plug my dead iPod again.  No, actually, my iPod.  Not dead.  Yes! It’s still alive!  So.  These tiny portable electronic device may survive laundry cycles.  But your milage may really vary.

Now I need to stop being so lazy.  Sing with me, will ya?  ♪~Please don’t say you are lazy~♪

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

NetBeans 6.7 RC1 posted

June 2nd, 2009 1:06 am

I’ve been searching for the ultimate code editor for quite a few years now.  Ever since I’ve seen the syntax highlighting feature of Borland Pascal way back in 1996, I’ve been hooked to the good programming editor.  Couple of years after that, I also played around with Visual Basic 5.  That IDE has code completion—something else that I thought is heaven-sent.

Most of the time, I’ve been more hooked with good syntax highlighting feature than any other features, such as debugger, code completion, etc.  For a long time, I favored light-weight programs.  (For a long time, I was pretty poor, never could afford the fast PC, thus ended up hating bloated software and Java-based software.)  I’ve stuck with TextPad for really long time.  I’ve also liked VIM almost as long. (But not GVim, for some reason.)  I really liked UltraEdit for a while.  SciTE is one of my newer favorites.  Last year, I took a Java class at local community college.  There, I learned how to use Eclipse for good.  I knew Eclipse was good, but it was only last year that I finally get myself play seriously with it.  Indeed, it was good.  Actually, being a PHP programmer, I also played around with Aptana Studio for a while.  It was Eclipse based.  And they really did a lot of cool stuff with it.  For a period of time, I was really trying to push myself to use Eclipse with PDT, Aptana, and some other plugins.  (And I still use Eclipse.  But only for Perl, using EPIC.  EPIC actually is really cool, especially with Perl critic.)

Now.  To the meat of this post.

My latest love is NetBeans 6.7.  The PHP feature in NetBeans is pretty new.  It was only introduced last year, with the release of version 6.1.  It wasn’t very impressive yet.  6.5 made it really good.  But when I started checking out the latest nightly builds earlier this year, that’s when I realized its potential.  This thing is cooking!  And the CSS and JavaScript editors are also awesome.

The bad part about following the latest release so closely, while watching their development plan, was that they let me down by falling behind the target release date on some of the mile stones and betas.  I think the beta version was late by almost two weeks.  So I was expecting that the first RC would be late as well.  Well, what do you know!  They are back on the initial schedule!  Hot damn!  Either they have some super-skilled project manager, or someone was working 24/7 for two weeks straight.  They really did a good job.

So, after seeing this release, I was so excited and made some modifications to this site.  It’s all minor changes.  But I think the changes to the comment section should be noticeable.

I’m not done searching yet though.  As of now, I still use TextPad, SciTE, Eclipse, and NetBeans almost daily.  TextPad and SciTE also come in handy for fansubbing work as well.  Dream Weaver also come in handy from time to time.  But I’ve yet to see the ultimate IDE that satisfy all of my need for Perl, PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  I’m not asking much, am I?

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Working on weekends

May 31st, 2009 12:05 am

Things are crazy at work.  Hard deadlines are everywhere.  Every projects that pops up are “very important.”  It’s not easy being in IT—everyone wants so much from you.  We don’t have projects of low or medium urgency.  We only have urgent, very urgent, and ultra urgent projects.  Urgh.

Not everything is bad in life though.  I finished translating K-On! episode 9 today.  (translation #730)  Also, there was some progress in Black Jack ground.  More release is drawing near!

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Lazy? Maybe burned out

May 30th, 2009 9:05 am

Earlier this week, I wrote something about being lazy.  Maybe I’m wrong.  With so much stuff going on, maybe I’m getting lightly burned out.  It does take a lot to keep up with translation of two weekly shows.  And I do more on top of them.  And the day time job’s been crazy this week.  Let’s hope that I won’t get completely burned out.

Here’s some news.

According to this info site, this season of Ippo will only be 26 episodes long.  That means the season will end as soon as the current match is over.  That’s a bit shocking.  I’ll be free from one series much sooner than I expected.  With K-On! coming to the end at the end of June as well, I’ll really be free.

…or not.  I’m already slated for several other shows.  As I once mentioned, I’ll be translating the theatrical version of Major when it comes out.  Also, I’ve promised Frostii team that I would pick up Mouryou no Hako when I wrap up some of my current series.  Then, just today, I’ve been requested to pinch-hit for the remaining episodes of Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora.  Another possibility is some latter episodes of Sengoku Basara, as the current translator is stepping down after completing episode 4.  And I’m sure that the annual summer Lupin special will air again this year.  And there is a Nodame OVA coming in August.  And the third season of Nodame in October.

That’s really a full plate already.


On another topic, it’s been a while since I last posted the general status of Frostii projects.  Here they go:

  • K-On, Eden, Ippo – No need to talk about the series that’s making timely releases.  They’re all moving along fine.
  • Black Jack – episodes 49 through 52 are being edited now.  I haven’t translated any more since this post.
  • Charady – next 4 episodes have been translated and timed.  I’m not sure why it’s going so slow all of sudden.  I know that the translator was busy for a while, but beyond that… I dunno.
  • Gosenzosama, Yoshimune – No progress since the last status update.  The project lead for Yoshimune just poked me today about the status on the latest episode, so maybe this will start moving again.
  • Lupin vs Conan – we had to switch the encoder.  That means there are certain amount of rework involved.  We are waiting on the audio encoder to provide us with the proper audio track before we can adjust the script timing.  We’ve been waiting for almost a week on him.
  • Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto – The third version of Release Candidate for episode 8 has been provided.  This really better be it.  After that, episode 9 translation will be waiting on me until July.  I should be able to plow through the last 4 episodes once I get to them.
  • Nodame Cantabile – Episodes 6 through 8 are done.  Episodes 9 through 11 are in various stages of Release Candidate checking.  After those are complete, we encode the small resolution version, check those, then we can finally release everything!  Also, I have the OVA (due out in August) on pre-order.
  • Ristorante Paradiso – Episode 5 is in quality check, one of the last stages of our process.  Episode 6 has been translated.  Looks like we’re switching the encoder for this show as well.  At least this series is moving, just slowly.
  • Sengoku Basara – awaiting on the translation on episode 4, and searching for next translator for episodes 5 and up.  This hold up is going to be a long one.
  • Spice and Wolf OVA – everything is ready to be encoded.  And it’s stuck there.  We’re frantically poking the encoder.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Short evening

May 29th, 2009 2:05 am

Stayed at work until almost 10PM tonight.   Came home, finished Ippo episode 21 translation (translation #729), practiced some piano, played about an hour of Zelda Phantom Hourglass that just came in the mail today…  That was the whole evening for today.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »