Anime Fansub Documentary PART 1

This "documentary" was a good watch. Very amusing and for the most part I agree with it.

because the professional subbers are paid to dumb down the translation to make it accessible to as many people as possible. The fan subbers, despite having poorer Japanese, try and keep cultural references and jokes that would otherwise be lost. Of course any one can be a fan subber so any generalisation about fan subbers is just that, a generalisation.

Thats such an incredibly stupid thing to belive. Using readable english is not dumbing down.

DVD subbers will not put in an obscure reference to some kind of breakfast dumpling or a direct translation of a colloquial greeting, instead they will put a western equivalent such as "corn flakes" or "hey man". This is because DVD distributors want to appeal to a broader market than just japanophiles but in doing so, some meaning is inevitably lost in translation. Fan subbers may not have the best linguistic ability but the have less commercial pressures to "dumb down"

damn character count! anyway maybe it was a little bit wrong to put "bad translation" but the quality of the translation decreases because of commercial pressure not because of unskilled translators. For the record I watch both DVD subs and fansubs cos they both have there pros and cons

It's not dumbed down! Seriously, ever heard of the idea that... when you explain a joke, it just isn't funny? Fan-subbers have a hard time with stuff like that because the joke is sometimes completely inaccessible for a non-Japanese audience. The proof of the pudding is when you look around different fan-sub groups. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (and its other series) is on the list of 'dropped projects' for a LOT of them.

missing out a joke because it is deemed not accessible to non Japanese viewers IS dumbing down whether or not it's necessary, good, bad whatever.

Good translators should find a way to render said joke in English, which is often possible (not to mention, it's really cool when you come up with something clever. As for pop culture references and such... well, if it parodies another series, of course you're not meant to get the joke if you haven't seen that series. American shows do this all the time too - I doubt you've got every joke South Park has ever made, either. The joke went over the head of many Japanese, too.

yeah I bet those who watch a movie in Japan don't have little anecdotes to explain every American joke in a live-action movie either.