[8/19] Morning Musume。'15 59th single - Oh my wish!/Sukatto My Heart/Ima Sugu Tobikomu Yuuki

[JonCC]

I don't want to hear the excuses that people are too busy with "life" to translate it. If they got time to browse the forums and have time to read and complain about translation mistakes, I'd like to see them do it every week for a year so we don't have to "rely" on UF subs. We'll rely on that person every week, no excuses.

They'd be doing it for free.
Whoever at UF is responsible for these translations is getting paid.
Paid for doing a lousy job. You don't need to understand Japanese to figure that out.
The nonsensical phrasing and countless typos are proof enough.

[Zunu]

I think the UF subs are okay for what they are; a quick and simple means to get the gist of what the song is about. MM don't sing in Spanish or French, where an English speaker can kind of figure out the meaning just from cognates. Since they're singing in Japanese, the average English listener will have a roughly zero percent understanding of the song, and any level of translation is a vast improvement in that.

If "bad" subs can bring a listener to a 75-80% understanding of the lyrics, is it cost or time effective for a professional translator to bring them up to 95-100%, especially since they may not even notice or care? And the people really complaining most (the fluent or near-fluent), are the ones with the least to gain?

[rikkikow]

Japlish / Engrish is cool, and entertaining. Although, it leaves you scratching your head sometimes.

[JonCC]

If "bad" subs can bring a listener to a 75-80% understanding of the lyrics, is it cost or time effective for a professional translator to bring them up to 95-100%, especially since they may not even notice or care? And the people really complaining most (the fluent or near-fluent), are the ones with the least to gain?

The fact that they're hardsubbed and not CC's on Youtube makes them distracting to me when watching the MV.
Knowing that the thing that distracts me is also not fulfilling its primary function as it should just makes it worse (again: to me).

What I'm saying: either make them optional, or have them be decent.
Because right now we have mandatory and crap.

[AyuHikaru]

True, but it's clear they aren't going to suddenly make it better with all the nuances of both the Japanese and English language, so we have to deal with what we got. Like, I said - as soon as UF started putting out their translations all other options completely stopped. I mean most translation sites just use the official translations now. We HAVE to use them. Most Jpop fans don't speak fluent Japanese and it honestly shouldn't be required, so most Jpop fans aren't going to complain unless someone else consistently comes out with better translations that shows WHY the UF team is so bad. We have no reference point.

[Zunu]

Whoever at UF is responsible for these translations is getting paid.

We know this how? I'd just as well imagine that they got some staffer who went to school at UCLA to do this on top of whatever their normal duties. Anyway, there are really only two possibilities. 1) They hired a professional translator or 2) They did not hire a professional translator. If #2, whether they were "paid" or not, they don't really have the qualifications to do this kind of work. If #1, well, that would be an issue of what passes for professional level English translation in Japan, and at a larger level, the problem of translation in general. Let's say they hired a pro level translator, who does a "lousy" translation on the first pass. How would UF even know? If the person they have who's fluent in English the one doing the translating? So who's going to check over the translator's work? Now they have to get another person to not only say the translator is wrong, but to be qualified to offer up a correction. Top level professional translators make well past US $100K/yr.

The fact that they're hardsubbed and not CC's on Youtube makes them distracting to me when watching the MV.

I get distracted with subs in movie theaters too, tbh. There's nearly always a few places where the subber took a liberty I wouldn't have agreed with or simply got it wrong (in my opinion.)

But UF's response to you would probably be...buy the damned disc and you won't have to worry about distractions.

Honestly, I'd love soft subs myself, and hell, why not ruby, roumaji and spanish subs while we're at it. And alternate audio tracks where you could isolate the individual voices or karaoke style, the instruments. And commentary tracks.

[otaku_blue]

I still think that the reason we are even allowed HD PVs is because they hardsub them.
Before that we were still getting 480p videos.

If you want the clean HD you can buy it yourself.

The subs are fine for me. I'm not gonna expect something 100% accurate and I appreciate the effort.

[Celedam]

Just an FYI for everyone, the videos are also available at the iTunes Store. No need to buy more plastic discs that you'll just rip anyhow. For example, from MM's last single…

https://itunes.apple.com/music-video/id981768011
https://itunes.apple.com/music-video/id981769211

[Zunu]

Y-yeah. That too.

(Those iTunes video clips are only $1.49 so I suppose you get what you pay for, but they are horrible quality. I'd call the purchase "worth it" for the sole purpose of continuing to communicating to UF that foreign fans have an interest in their material. But forget about actually watching them...stick to the Google-translate subbed 1080Ps.)

[esm]

I do appreciate being able to get the gist of the lyrics from the existing subs we're getting, and yes, we can buy the videos and find better translations, but Youtube videos are nice and convenient for sharing on social media and accessing from almost any device.