Fansubs: The New Wave

Scene from BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, episode 1

TED.com officially announced today a project that will crowdsource translations of every TED video in more than forty of the world’s most-vocalized languages. The splash page is viewable here.

The video above is a Japanese translation of Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ demo of Photosynth, one of the more interesting yet much shorter videos available at the TED website. As you can see, the subtitles work pretty well and the timing is for the most part up to par. The only petulant remarks I can make about meticulous details would be: 1) there’s no furigana… but that only applies to Japanese anyway, and 2) the subtitles cover up the images when the projector is shown… but that’s unavoidable, and it’s not that important a matter.

The important issue to take away from TED’s audacious project is something that Ethan Zuckerman summed up quite nicely on Twitter: “TED’s approach to translating video is a first step towards translating the web.” He links to an article of his own that gives a brief background to TED’s translation project. Of course, my stance on the issue of social translation is that fansubs in the anime community have been doing it for years, so it’s not necessarily something “new.” At the same time, however, the social element has never really been an active component of fansubbing. But there was an attempt, one that might have had huge repercussions for the anime industry.

When I attended Otakon in the summer of 2008, I decided off the cuff to drop in on Crunchyroll‘s industry panel, held on Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm in Workshop 1. There’s a lot of information that was passed around at Otakon 2008 in regards to fansubbing and translation — the Fansubs and Industry panel probably the most discussed (note: you can watch the panel via that link to Anime News Network) — but Vu Nguyen announced that Crunchyroll had plans to release tools for the creation of community-driven subtitles.

Keep in mind, the announcement took place before Crunchyroll went “legal.” At the time, the website still hosted anime and Asian dramas that may or may not have been licensed. Putting that aside, though, Crunchyroll provided fans a platform on which to watch subtitled anime and a community through which dialogue could take place about that anime.

However, those subtitles were usually in English. In fact, most subtitles of anime roaming the Net are translated in English, though a good number have been written in other languages, such as French and Spanish (I’m not quite sure the balance of statistics between languages or how many languages are frequently used as goals for translation). Clearly language is a barrier to the wide dissemination of anime to potential fans around the world. Another limitation to translation is the structure of the fansub community. Basically, it takes the form of a team of translators and producers, working together toward a final result, coordinated by a central figurehead.

Social translation solves these two impediments on some level. First, there’s a better chance that more languages will be translated. A problem, of course, is that the translator needs to be bilingual (Japanese and X for anime, or English and Y for the TED talks). Second, tools are provided to take down the infrastructure of translation teams, instead putting the power into the hands of an individual.

I spoke with Vu after the Crunchyroll panel to go over a few details of the project. He first explained that the tools were easy to use. A user relied on the time codes of the English fansub to translate from Japanese to his (probably native) language. One issue that arises here is that the translator could be using the English fansubs to translate, instead of the original Japanese voice overs, but ultimately this is probably unavoidable. Still, it provides a somewhat accurate translation in a language that would otherwise probably not ever be translated. Vu also noted that the translations would be checked by some staff (he didn’t have many details, as the project was still in development) to ensure a certain level of accuracy (mainly to avoid the Nico Nico Douga effect of random text in place of actual subtitles).

I had meant to follow up with Vu in an interview for Youtomb, but then I shipped off to Japan last fall. I sent him an email to inquire further about the project, about which I could find no information this spring. He replied back in April:

As for the community subtitling project, we did launch it at some point for user uploaded content. I agree that it is one of the more ambitious projects. But Crunchyroll made a transition to fully licensed, so all of the content online has a licensing agreement in place and our challenge has been in getting the content holders to agree to allow fans to contribute subtitles. There’s IP issues (to which I think we have a good solution), quality issues (which I think content holders need to overcome), and security concerns (for new, yet to be aired content, there’s almost no way we can provide fans any work to translate prior to the air date, so we can’t use fans for simulcasts). We’re still chipping away at this, but I’m not sure how close we are to accomplishing it, and I’m hesitant to discuss too many details… until we make more progression on our side.

So, it seems that Crunchyroll is still in the process of creating some sort of social translation community around their already thriving membership. I wonder if TED’s project will further propel the CR ambitions further.

And I really hope it develops into something similar. If you didn’t read through the TED blog’s announcement, it details that each video translation will have an accompanying text transcript, in which a viewer can click on a sentence and immediately be brought to that spot in the video. If the fansub community or a CR social translation project were to pursue a similar initiative, this would have epic benefits for the anime research community. The availability of transcripts would be akin to throwing it back old school to the early days of American anime clubs, where a member would stand up at the front of the room and read a translation of the script as the Japanese-language animation played in the background. However, such a project takes that extinct practice and revamps it, providing researchers not only with a transcript but also the accompanying video, with which they can easily do a text search on the page and be transported to X point in the video clip, to examine the art relative to the speech. Of course, such a project begs all sorts of questions, particularly video hosting: is it possible to keep a database of videos that could be accessed while bypassing numerous legal and financial barriers?

The question, though, is certainly not one of fansubbing as a practice. At the recent Media in Transition conference at MIT, a Thursday night panel was hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program’s colloquium series called Global Media (the podcast can be listened to here). Most of the panelists agreed that, all over the world, fansubbing is thriving in genres from Bollywood to American bootlegs to tella novellas (to such an extent that it probably can’t be stopped). It seemed that the panelists were more concerned protecting local works and saw more benefits in the circulation of their works than in the loss of monetary content. For Japanese animation, this might mean that Japan should be focusing on their home turf. But we can’t ignore that companies in the US have been set up to distribute anime, which is the main factor that complicates the Japanese market and its profits.

Ultimately, there are only benefits for TED, who own their own videos because it is their personal content. They do not have to deal with complications with copyright or monetization. As far as the anime industry, it’s a completely different set of matters. As Vu stated, simulcasts are out of the question for fan-curated translations, and getting around questions of intellectual property is going to require some deep thought.

We’ll have to wait and see where this ends up. But if you’re interested in continuing the conversation, I’ll be at the Open Video Conference in New York on June 19 and 20 to give a talk about the the history and culture of Japanese animation in the US and its past/future implications. Come check it out, especially for the other talks (which are obviously going to be way more interesting than mine).