Fan Subs that Fan Stuck: How Anime Fans Embraced Fansub Terminology | Metaglossia: The Translation World | Scoop.it
From www.animeherald.com - September 14, 2:23 PM
Written By Kennedy (Red Bard)Edited By Samantha Ferreira September 14, 2024

A huge thanks to our Negikitsu for requesting this article! We can’t do it without you.

All fansub images are used as demonstrative aids; Anime Herald does not condone piracy

As many longtime One Piece fans will tell you, the English language release of the money-printing, global megahit series had a bumpy start. By the time Funimation got the English language rights to One Piece in 2007, the anime had been airing in Japan for nearly eight years and had recently surpassed 300 episodes. It was the backlog to end all backlogs. And, prior to Funimation, the English language rights to One Piece were bafflingly owned by 4Kids Entertainment. While today their heavily butchered version of One Piece has achieved “so bad it’s good” status, at the time it was hard to see it as anything less than a total disgrace to its source material. So if you wanted to watch One Piece in all its violent, uncensored glory (and why wouldn’t you?) odds are that you almost certainly watched the series with the help of Kaizoku Fansubs (KF), by far the most prominent One Piece fansubbing group in the days before Funimation acquired its license.

If you were to go back and watch any of the roughly 300 episodes of KF’s One Piece, probably the first thing you’d notice about it is that the group left a lot of untranslated Japanese words in their translation. When people were doing things like, say, lifting heavy objects, it wasn’t unusual to hear them say something like, “Yosha” as they did so. And the Straw Hat pirates weren’t a crew, but they were nakama. But, for as much as this stands out today, peppering English translations with Japanese words was very much the norm for fansubbing groups of the 2000s, which one could easily argue was the golden age of the fansub. At the time, official anime releases were still slow and expensive, and official simulcasts weren’t yet a thing, but internet usage—and by extension of that, digital piracy—was on the rise.

So while boku would think it’d be sugoi if you could keep a kawaii pin in that for now, for the time being, let’s get back to One Piece. Despite the expectations many anime fans in the west likely would’ve had during the 2000s, as many fans attribute 4Kids’ adaptation as a major factor in the slow growth of the series in North America, One Piece’s popularity would soar—even in the west—in the following years. And whether this continually growing number of One Piece fans discovered the title via KF (whether it was the subs themselves or their website, which had a robust One Piece-centric forum); noticed KF when going through older One Piece episodes, discussions, clips, fan materials, etc.; or simply talked with other One Piece fans who did, the reality remained that KF was so pervasive in the English language fan community for so long that their influence couldn’t help but linger. Their legacy would live on even after they slowly dissolved throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s. 

And while there are plenty of other places you can still find it today (when people call the villain of the Skypiea arc “Enel” rather than “Eneru” for example), nowhere is the ghost of KF more visible than the continued usage of the word “nakama” in One Piece fan circles. The word continues to be so prevalent that even Netflix utilized it in their marketing for their live-action One Piece series in 2023.

The complete history of fansubs is a long and complicated one that’ll completely derail this article. But, for the sake of the topic at hand, what you need to know is the following: when anime fandoms started emerging in the west, translations of the series they were interested in weren’t always available—officially or otherwise. At first, this resulted in fans like Robert Fenelon trying to explain/narrate what they thought was happening in certain shows/movies to an audience, as they all watched these shows/movies together. Others, like C. Sue Shambaugh, sent out photocopies of their translations. But soon, aided by the increased availability and accessibility of the VCR, subtitles made by fans—fansubbing—moved on to the scene. The disc, and especially the increased widespread usage of the internet (to say nothing of the massive boost in popularity anime got in the west during the ‘90s), further increased the prominence of fansubs in later years. 

But why were fansubs so prominent in the past, and barely existent today? Simply put, it’s because fansubs were born from a necessity. Oftentimes, fans didn’t have the means to watch anime that wasn’t being sold at their local video store without them. To be frank, that necessity no longer exists in the world today. The anime industry is larger than ever. 

Today, plenty of new series get licensed before they even start airing. And official, English language translations—and increasingly often, even dubs—are released at breakneck speeds. The streaming ecosystem is dysfunctional in more ways than I can list without swerving completely off-topic—especially in regards to anime—but even so, anime has become a massive part of the streaming landscape. Anime has never been as accessible to as many people as it is today. The reality we occupy stands in sharp contrast to that of even twenty years ago, when official anime releases were slow and, unless they were airing on TV, expensive.

For more detail on the history of fansubs, I recommend professional translator and former fan translator Sarah Moon’s video essay For Fans, BY Fans | Anime in the West (which, full disclosure, yours truly also made a brief segment for), the first segment of which is about the history of fansubs and how anime was watched in English. 

So, it’s definitely jarring and worthy of a double take to see the word “nakama” used in marketing by a giant corporation. But it also isn’t entirely unpredictable—let alone, well, alone. In fact, in 2024, you could write a fairly long list of other such words and phrases that have similarly entered the collective vocabulary of English-language anime fans. And a number of terms from that list have become well known enough to have also made it into marketing, not to mention official subs and dubs. Moreover, several of these words and phrases have earned the bluntest signifier that they’ve truly permeated and taken hold: acceptance and usage in non-anime fan communities. 

To list just a few of the more prominent examples of such words and phrases, this includes, but certainly isn’t limited to: senpai; shinigami; tsundere; bento; and the usage of Japanese honorifics even when everything else is English language. 

The word “shinigami,” in particular, is an interesting case study in what I’m referring to. In a nutshell, a shinigami is a Japanese god of death. Among plenty of other anime, they’re regularly brought up in Bleach and Death Note. But there’s a good chance you already knew exactly what a shinigami was without my having to tell you, because there’s a good chance you learned that from Death Note. In addition to being one of the most popular anime of all time (as of the time of writing, it’s the second most popular anime on MyAnimeList), its official dub—which first aired on US TV in 2007—refers to the shinigami as, well, shinigami. Fansubs had used “shinigami” for years, even before Death Note. Professional translator and former fan translator Sarah Moon, for example, heavily utilized “shinigami” in her 2001 fan translation for Descendants of Darkness (an excerpt of which is pictured below). “I think, frankly, I just did that because it sounded cool,” says Moon about why she left the word shinigami as shinigami, “Like, I just thought it sounded really cool.”

But in official releases, the plain use of the word “shinigami” wasn’t nearly so normalized. For example, the official release of Bleach, which started airing in the US in 2006, refers to “shinigami” as “soul reapers.” What factors, specifically, led to the choice for leaving the word “shinigami” as-is in Death Note’s official English language release—especially the question of whether or not it had anything to do with the usage of the term in fansubs (for Death Note or otherwise)—could be a deeply interesting question for anyone who was involved in its translation/dubbing process.

Per veteran anime translator and former fan translator Katrina Leonoudakis, most of the words that have lingered in anime fan communities are loan words—words that don’t readily have an English language equivalent such as “sushi” or “tsunami”, so they were simply used as-is. She further elaborated that such words were often used in fan translations due to a common misconception (especially among monolinguals) that translation is about finding a one-to-one matching of words, rather than a matching of ideas through words—a misconception that translation is a science, rather than an art. The trend, therefore, was to simply not translate these loan words. And because this was so normalized, communities decided over time which loan words were cool, and which ones were cringe. 

On the topic of cringe, there’s another element with a seat at this table, and that’s the zeal of younger anime fans—which can often come off to other (less fun) people as cringy. Despite the Wall Street Journal acting as though this is a relatively new phenomenon, anyone who was a teenager and an anime fan in the ‘90s or 2000s knows that, while this probably isn’t as common today (and please correct me if I’m wrong, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a middle schooler), there was a considerable patch of time where young anime fans loved to sprinkle Japanese words intermittently throughout their otherwise English sentences, thereby promoting the use of these loan words and, by extension of that, anime. Moon told Anime Herald that in-group lingo—such as loan words in anime—can make the experience of watching anime feel more special, and can make anime-watchers as a group feel more unified. It’s hardly a shock, therefore, why this mixing of languages in sentences has been so prominent, especially for younger anime fans during a time where anime was a niche hobby.

But not necessarily every fansub-ism that’s stuck around is a loan word. There are, for example, a number of legacy terms that fit this bill, as well as English-language phrases that saw recurring use in fansubs, but generally speaking aren’t widely (if at all) used, otherwise. Starting with the former, for better or for worse, Higurashi When They Cry’s “Nii-nii” stands out as, without question, the most obvious example of this.

Based on Ryukishi07’s horror visual novel series of the same name, the first Higurashi anime originally aired in Japan in Spring 2006. Geneon’s English-language release of the series shipped to retailers in June 2007. Additionally, the series was fansubbed by a number of different groups. 

There’s a specific character in the series, Satoko Houjou, who has an older brother named Satoshi. Without delving into spoilery territory, what you need to know about them is that Satoko refers to Satoshi as her “nii-nii”—a childish way of saying “onii-san,” which means “older brother.” Even if you’ve only watched a few anime in Japanese, there’s a good chance you’ve heard characters say “onii-san” several times—it was then, and still is today, one of the more commonly known Japanese words among English language viewers.

If, in the mid/late 2000s, someone was into anime enough to be watching a niche title like Higurashi, odds are good that they were already familiar with what “onii-san” means, and can therefore easily infer what “nii-nii” means. Ipso facto, it was fine to leave “nii-nii” as “nii-nii.” And while it’s to be expected that fansubbers reached this conclusion and left the term as-is, Geneon’s decision to also use it is more striking, and solidified “nii-nii”’s status as a legacy term. For reference, a legacy term is a specific way of translating (or in the case of “nii-nii,” not translating) certain recurring words and phrases in a series, especially in previous versions and translations of it that’ve become embedded into the series’ fandom, and therefore also get used later if the need arises. For example, if a work gets a new piece of media after a while, if a new translator takes over an existing project, and so on. 

Fast forward to 2020 and 2021, with the releases of Higurashi Gou and Higurashi Sotsu—the first new Higurashi anime to air in nearly a decade. Despite their rough track record with Higurashi, Funimation acquired the rights to these series. And in charge of the translation was none other than Katrina Leonoudakis. “It was a vestige of an older age of not translating words like onii-chan—we just don’t do that anymore, and most translation style guides at anime companies like Crunchyroll say to translate or work around them,” said Leonoudakis, “But because the word is specifically called out in dialogue, it has to be translated in a kiddish way. I could have left it as is since it was legacy, but I chose to update it because I thought hardcore fans wouldn’t care.” And thus, Satoshi became Satoko’s big brudder. And while this is a good translation of nii-nii—which is to say, this is a childish way to say “big brother”—not everyone was happy with this, to say it lightly.

Leonoudakis received a lot of backlash and harassment over this translation choice. And reading through many of the criticisms she received, a common thread is that of the people who didn’t seem like they were harassing her for the sake of feeling like they had an excuse to harass a translator (and to be clear: despite what they believed, they didn’t), they seemed upset at the fact that it just wasn’t nii-nii. Whether you watched the original Higurashi anime by way of fansubs or Geneon, Satoshi has never not been Satoko’s nii-nii. The translation itself wasn’t wrong in the strictest sense, but it still felt off.

Ultimately, Leonoudakis came to realize that nii-nii is a legacy term, and as such, it should’ve been left alone from the start. Per Leonoudakis’ request, the subs were soon changed to reflect that—or at least, they were on Funimation/Crunchyroll. As of time of writing (and unbeknownst to Leonoudakis until I was writing this) the subs still say “Big Brudder” on Hulu. “The fix should have been applied by Funimation back when it was active, but they must have missed it on the other platform. With Funimation now absorbed into Crunchyroll, it’s doubtful that fix will ever make it to Hulu,” she told Anime Herald, “The ghost of my bad decision will haunt me forever, it seems.”

Nowadays, Leonoudakis looks back on this episode of her life as a learning experience—in particular about legacy terms and audiences. “I think I got a little bit carried away thinking like, ‘oh, new people will be watching this,’” Leonoudakis says about the matter, “When in reality this is like the 6th fucking season of Higurashi, no one’s fucking watching it except for us [people who were already fans of Higurashi]. So the language has to be made for us.”

As for English phrases that fansubbers leaned heavily on, arguably the most prominent examples of this are phrases that several anime fans will find familiar such as, “I won’t forgive you”, “[Person A] confessed to [Person B]”, and “it can’t be helped.” These phrases don’t usually feel terribly natural to say in English, and as translations, can charitably be described as stiff. Nonetheless, whether because it was the best they could do at the time, or because they saw everyone else using these phrases so they assumed they worked just fine/that fans expected to see these phrases, many fan translators—often amateurs at the time (a number of them would go on to become professionals and are still in the industry today)—utilized these phrases often enough that they’ve endured, despite not always being strong translations. 

The frequent translation of  “許さない” (yurusanai) as “I won’t forgive you,” in particular, strikes a nerve for Moon and Leonoudakis. “[“許さない” (yurusanai)] doesn’t always mean ‘I won’t forgive you’ because forgiveness is for something that someone has already done wrong, whereas “許す” (yurusu) is more like, it could be permitting someone to do something that they have not done yet, verses forgiving someone for something that they have done,” says Moon, “So, you shouldn’t always translate it as, ‘I’m not gonna forgive you’ or ‘that’s unforgivable.’” Leonoudakis agreed that many fansubbers didn’t seem to understand the nuance of what “許さない” (yurusanai) means—or perhaps more specifically, what it doesn’t mean—and she therefore doesn’t consider it to be a lingering fansub-ism in the same class as, say, loan words.

On one hand, the continued use of these fansub-isms has the potential to alienate and confuse people who are either new to anime entirely, or whose interest in anime is more casual. And in a media landscape where anime is mainstream enough that Luffy can be in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and Goku is on Reese’s Puffs cereal, this audience is worth taking into consideration, especially for titles more likely to reach them. On the other, there’s something to be said about how in a series where a translator/licensor/distributor/anyone else involved in a series’ English language release can reasonably expect an audience to be familiar with certain terms—probably series on the more niche side, and/or older series—using them can make life easier and help to more simply get across ideas that might otherwise require more time, energy, keikaku-ing1, and precious on-screen real estate to communicate. The continued usage of these fansub-isms, in other words, is neither an inherently good or bad thing. Instead, they’ve become more akin to a tool that can be used case-by-case, based on its potential usefulness. Or if you prefer, they’re a subtle nod at a formative era of fandom history.