» Translation Review: [HorribleSubs] Sailor Moon Crystal

Translation Review: [HorribleSubs] Sailor Moon Crystal – 01 (CR/Nico) This entry was posted by Futsuu.

A Nico/CR simultaneous broadcast of the reboot of one of the biggest franchises ever and quite possibly one of the biggest shows in years.

Surely the subs will be good, right?

…Right?

<@usagi> me irl

“Mom, you idiot!”

I kid, I kid. But there are a lot of lines in this release that ignore the audio in favour of… something. I’d be here all day if I tried to list all of them in this review, so I’m going to ignore stuff that’s acceptable/borderline okay (like this line here), and focus on the egregious errors. Still, do keep in mind that stuff like this exists.

Here’s an example of a translation that might work standalone, but not in context.

The first “ouch” is all right, but not the second one because it ties into Usagi’s response to her mother’s question.

“Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not!”

“I’m in pain!”

Who talks like this? A healthy dose of contractions would really help these subs.

Ugh, these overlaps.

And not every hai is a yes.

Bad…

Surprise! The songs are translated!

The translation’s decent for the most part, only there’s shit like this.

And while I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and chalk it down to HS styling, this wouldn’t have been an issue if they’d timed and split the lines properly.

But they didn’t. The timing’s atrocious throughout the episode.

And so’s the editing.

“No way!”

Rather, uh, interesting choice of translation for youma. And that great’s misplaced.

“Come forth, Evil that serves our great master.”

I think they tried to avoid using just “Come” and “Go” in successive lines, but I’m not entirely sure they succeeded.

“Now go.”

There are hardly any signs in the episode and they still didn’t get them all. Good job.

It says Juuban Municipal Junior High (you may know it as Crossroads Junior High), btw.

Also, the teacher clearly knows she’s late.

“Late again?”

Innocent doesn’t really fit there.

“poor little”, maybe.

I… I don’t know what to say.

“This is Ms. Sakurada Haruna, our homeroom teacher.”

“Nicknamed ‘Haruda’, she teaches English.”

“Which just happens to be my worst subject.”

Okay, I laughed.

Nuke the “to me”. He thinks he’s giving her advice, but it ends up sounding like he’s bragging.

“You really know how to get on people’s nerves.”

The point is that she’s taking offense to his calling exams child’s play when so many people struggle with them.

“He’s the last person I wanted to lose to/score higher than me.”

“Did you hear that another jewelry shop got robbed?”

“It’s been happening a lot lately.”

Kind of an important detail, you know.

~~We don’t know if there were multiple robbers involved, and~~ With the changes I suggested to the previous two lines, it’d end up sounding like she caught all of them.

Replace with something vague.

Instead of famous, use “who’s currently all the rage” or something.

At least they didn’t go with ally of justice.

These two lines are spoken by the same person.

“and there’s stuff even we could afford.”

Oh, come on. It’s obvious that she’s talking to Naru’s friends in the first line, so why make it sound like she’s talking to her in the second?

Not to mention it could be misread as their friends instead of Naru’s.

“It’s a hairstyle!” -> “They’re buns!”

But whatever. Not like it matters, right?

Well, shit.

“Why can’t I beat this scrub?”

“Taking a detour in uniform again, Usagi?

That aside, DOES IT LOOK LIKE SHE’S ON HER WAY HOME? USE YOUR EYES HOLY SHIT.

“There’s a trick to this.”

Loitering/hanging, not wandering.

Consistency be damned.

“The continuation of the dream I had this morning?”

But you can’t translate.

“Can I really have this?”

“that the police can’t handle”.

Find.

…

Brooch is the word you’re looking for.

What the flippity fuck?

If this reads like “Stop crying right now”, then it’s not supposed to.

Even if it doesn’t, making things clearer wouldn’t hurt.

“Now’s your chance!”

“How dare you” or something.

Now they translate the sign.

It’s actually a pretty good example of how poor this release is.

Conclusion: the Evil has come out

Accuracy: 4/10, Flow: 3/10, Atmosphere: 3/10

The translation was bad, the timing worse, and the editing nonexistent.

For such a major release, this was an utter disappointment. And considering how easy the show is to translate, this kind of effort is totally unacceptable.

Do yourself a favour and wait for an edit.

Tags: crunchyroll, prosub, review, sailor moon crystal, summer 2014, translation

This entry was posted by Futsuu.

23 thoughts on “Translation Review: [HorribleSubs] Sailor Moon Crystal – 01 (CR/Nico)”

Klaus on 2014-07-05 at 16:00 said:

Broach is an acceptable spelling variant of brooch.

Reply ↓
- herkz on 2014-07-05 at 16:11 said:
  
  Definition of BROACH
  
  1: brooch
  
  Probably unwise to use.
  
  Reply ↓
ShizukaFlame on 2014-07-06 at 02:23 said:

Lol, this is great. I could tell a lot of the subtitles were inaccurate, and kept cringing at them.

Reply ↓
Airy on 2014-07-06 at 07:58 said:

Thank you for this! I don’t speak Japanese properly but I understand enough fragments that I was squinting at the screen thinking ‘I’m sure what I’m reading is not quite what I’m hearing.’ I’ll still be watching on Hulu as the episodes come out, but I look forward to seeing alternative versions.

Reply ↓
Elly on 2014-07-06 at 13:25 said:

Will you be continuing to do reviews for each episode of Sailor Moon Crystal? I have decided that my group won’t be fansubbing this because the legal risk is too high, but, I think many Sailor Moon fans would be curious to know about the errors / problems that exist in the official release.

Reply ↓
- herkz on 2014-07-06 at 16:48 said:
  
  I doubt he will.
  
  Reply ↓
- Futsuu on 2014-07-06 at 21:19 said:
  
  Not going to happen, sorry.
  
  If I were willing to put in that much time and effort for each episode, I’d just translate the whole thing myself.
  
  Reply ↓
S. Shin on 2014-07-06 at 19:10 said:

[And considering how easy the show is to translate, this kind of effort is totally unacceptable.]
You are spot on, I am not fluent by any means, but the subject is so familiar to me that I hardly even looked at the subs. Looking at your review now it’s kind of shocking how bad they were. If I had only watched the dub version up to this point it would indeed have been a big disappointment.

Reply ↓
- herkz on 2014-07-06 at 19:47 said:
  
  I think he means because it’s based on a shoujo manga, not because most people already know about Sailor Moon.
  
  Reply ↓
  - Futsuu on 2014-07-06 at 21:17 said:
    
    Yeah. The dialogue’s not complicated at all, which means anyone even halfway competent at Japanese and English could’ve produced a decent script.
    
    These guys clearly weren’t.
    
    Reply ↓
bluesun on 2014-07-06 at 20:22 said:

‘We don’t know if there were multiple robbers involved’
Except the newspaper before the OP says 全員逮捕 so we do.

Also, the awkward capitalisation and linebreaking in the songs seems to be a Crunchyroll reformatting error, as in Niconico there’s a linebreak before each Capitalised word, but Crunchyroll just made the lines equal length.

Reply ↓
- Futsuu on 2014-07-06 at 21:15 said:
  
  Good point. I stand corrected.
  
  I believe what I said after that still stands, though.
  
  And yeah, I saw a screenshot of the Niconico stream with the linebreaks, which is why I was willing to chalk it down to HS’s styling. However, I just checked and the actual CR stream has the same issue, so it’s clearly their fault.
  
  Either way, like I said, this wouldn’t be an issue if they’d timed the songs properly, i.e. split them into separate timed lines.
  
  Reply ↓
  - bluesun on 2014-07-06 at 22:04 said:
    
    Yup, I’m not disagreeing with that, or really anything else in this review, just wanted to point out there was evidence of multiple robbers.
    
    Reply ↓
    - Futsuu on 2014-07-06 at 22:14 said:
      
      Fair eeough. Post updated.
      
      Reply ↓
Helios on 2014-07-06 at 23:23 said:

im french and French subtitled version in English is better than on some points I did comparisons such as the first scene, okay the word baka is not mentioned but the rest of the dialogue it’s perfect!

Reply ↓
KD on 2014-07-07 at 13:04 said:

Where/ can you find updated translations? I understand very, very little Japanese and rely heavily on the translations.

Reply ↓
- herkz on 2014-07-07 at 16:38 said:
  
  What?
  
  Reply ↓
Diana on 2014-07-11 at 03:59 said:

Thank you! I thought I was the only one who was annoyed by this. At the least, they could have had someone review the subtitles before airing this. I read that they were backed up and barely finished in time for the premiere but these subs are ridiculous. I guess it’s better than nothing though…

Reply ↓
- herkz on 2014-07-11 at 13:42 said:
  
  Having someone review the subs wouldn’t help, because they basically need retranslated. It was probably translated by some Japanese person with no oversight.
  
  Reply ↓
Vanessa on 2014-07-12 at 23:45 said:

Could break down the opening song more? I’m very curious to know how accurate that is. My level Japanese tells me it’s way off. Perhaps the ending song is, too?

Reply ↓
- herkz on 2014-07-13 at 02:25 said:
  
  It’s mostly accurate.
  
  Reply ↓
Anon on 2014-08-18 at 21:30 said:

After all the Hanamonogatari drama, what are the chances of fnord making a review of DameDesuYo’s release? I pinpointed some mistakes myself, mistakes a trusted group shouldn’t commit, but I’m sure fnord noticed much more.

Reply ↓
- herkz on 2014-08-19 at 02:36 said:
  
  low because he doesn’t care enough to do that
  
  Reply ↓