Anime Amateur Subtitling

Prof. Dr. Abed Shahooth Khalaf

Audiovisual Translation

Dept. Of English

Anime Amateur Subtitling is the formation of certain groups of fans or amateur translators (fansubbers) who have created logs and websites to carry out the subtitling of movies into their respective languages. Fansubbing originated in Japan in the 1980s referring to a “subtitled version of a Japanese anime program” (Diaz-Cintas and Sánchez 2006, p. 37).

Despite legality concerns, “the popularity of fansubbing has grown exponentially, with an ever-increasing number of people creating their amateur subtitles” (ibid, p. 44). Bogucki (2009) describes this act of nonprofessional movie subtitling as “amateur subtitling”. However, Sajna (2013, p.3) makes a distinction between ‘fansubbers’ and ‘funsubbers or funtranslators’ because ‘funsubbers’ alone aspire to be professional. It is argued that the emergence of the fansubbing fandom is associated with the great developments in the world of today, particularly the significant progress in the means of communication and the invention of user friendly and cheap means of communication such as the Internet. Hence, with the availability of free of charge subtitling software, Japanese anime fans started producing subtitles for such programs in other languages for other anime fans and disseminating them on the Internet. This idea has attracted other fans in other domains and “other language combinations and genres, including films” (Diaz-Cintas & Sánchez, 2006, p. 45). According to Lee (2011), fansubtitling became common in “US films and TV shows” and “South Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese films and TV drama series . . .” (p. 1132). Amateur subtitlers voluntarily carry out the task of subtitling movies to the eager movie fans who do not stand the delay of the official release of their favorite movies. This state of affairs has led scholars such as Fernández-Costales (2012, p. 9) to describe this subtitling phenomenon as "the practice of subtitling audiovisual material by fans for fans." Amateur subtitlers are usually anonymous figures using nicknames and sharing pirate subtitling files of foreign movies. They download the scripts of these movies form certain websites such as (http://www.subscenes.com., and http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search), translate the dialogues and then impose the subtitles on the movie slots at the time a character takes turn. Hence, viewers can read these subtitles in their native language and understand the development of events. 

Amateur subtitlers are driven by their desire to satisfy their peer fans' needs for experiencing the foreign cultural peculiarities. They do not care about economic gains, just to make the subtitles internationally available. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that amateur subtitlers provide subtitles for movies on demand (Lee, 2011).  

However, amateur subtitlers are of low linguistic competence (La Forge & Tonin, 2014; Bogucki, 2009). They practice film subtitling as a sort of fun; a hobby (Luczaj, Holy-Luczaj & Cwiek-Rogalska, 2014; Lee, 2011) they share with movie fans. Besides, amateur subtitling lacks censorship on the subtitles in addition to a lack of expertise and formal training in translation skills, which can jeopardize the quality of the amateur subtitlers' performance due to typo, grammatical and stylistic mistakes that creep into the products. (Pérez-González, 2012b).     

Amateur subtitlers join the Internet subtitling community because they have the desire "to make a contribution in an area of particular interest and to popularize it in other countries, making it accessible to a broader range of viewers/readers who belong to different linguistic communities." (Bogucki 2009, p. 49). They are infatuated by what is so called ‘infotainment’ coming from undertaking amateur subtitling whereby translators gain information in addition to entertainment (Pérez-González (2012a).