Translating an episode

[Yilmas]

Hi, can anyone tell me how long it takes for this community to translate and then upload a new episode of an anime, from the day that the episode is aired?
The anime in question is the "Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi" which should air an episode on the 8th of april, or so the animenewsnetwork.com says...

/Yilmas

[Fuji]

Subbing 1 episode of an anime goes beyond just "translation". First, someone must procure the raw episode in high quality. Say that they are paying for a satellite feed from Japan to record straight to their computer or living in Japan themselves, okay, maybe you could have the raw ripped and available soon after the show.

Well, if you enjoy watching 2 gigabyte episodes, then I guess the person who gets the raw episode can just leave it as is without reformatting and encoding it. But to give you the convenience of watching high quality episodes that are much smaller in file size, the person who gets the raw will encode it. Depending on how much money they spent on their computer, this can take an hour or half a day. If you want to speed up this step of the process, I welcome you to buy hardware upgrades for the raw provider. I think RAM sells for as low as $80 a piece? Donate button is top right hand corner of the page.

Okay, now that the raw is available, time for translation. Well, unfortunately, the human hand types slower than the human mouth speaks. Pure transcription (aka just typing down the dialogue without translating it) would take longer than the 20 minutes of a typical episode, so imagine how long translation will take? Okay, let's take your most experienced, pro-translator who is super fast... their first, unproofread translation can be done in less than 1 hour. Of course, to buy the services of someone at that level, you will be paying them approximately $100 or more per hour. Or, you can get a bonus like the law courts and hire them for a mere $70,000 a year. They'll translate anime for you every day that way. Donate button is top right hand corner of the page.

Okay, okay, you will settle for someone who is NOT a professional translator who is volunteering their free time to slave in front of a computer to slowly and carefully translate this episode for you while you play with your friends and eat ice cream and watch television. Got it. This translation will take about 1-2 days for the faster translators, or 1-2 weeks for the translators who have their own life/jobs/work/family to take care of and are not available to cater to your every beck and whim for free. Of course, if you are always welcome to speed up the process by paying a non-professional freelancer to translate it. It's much cheaper than a pro!! Only about $10-20 an hour... but they are slower, so you'd be looking at a real steal of maybe as cheap as $50 for the cheapest, shoddiest quality freelance translation where you are probably better off just using babelfish. Well, $50 is better than nothing, right? Donate button is top right hand corner of the page.

Now that the translation is done (and we'll assume that the translator threw in the proofreading service for free- this usually takes at least 1 hour on its own), there's the matter of encoding the translation into the video. Oh, you mean you don't want to "watch" Sekaiichi Hatsukoi in a notepad looking at 12 point Times New Roman font? Well, for your convenience of having the pictures and the subtitles all in one place, there's someone who must typeset the episode. This can take 1-3 hours just to write the coding for typesetting and another 1-6 hours to encode it into the video. Of course, you are welcome to speed up the process by paying them. Minimum wage starts at $10-15 an hour for these kinds of freelancing jobs. You can do the math and donate button is top right hand corner of the page.

So adding all that up, the first episode of Sekaiichi Hatsukoi will take roughly $150-500 to get out.

...oh wait, you mean you weren't asking about how much money to donate to these poor, unpaid, not thanked fansubbers for their work (not to mention run this huge forum with its bandwidth costs)?

Well, before I tally up the time it'll take to sub it, maybe I please ask you when was the last time you sat in front of a computer for 24 straight hours not sleeping not eating not showering to do work for which you were not getting paid? Even better, after you finish your work, you can expect to get 10 emails:
- 2 will say "thank you",
- 3 will say "about time! ...err thanks, I guess",
- 1 will say "can you reupload to _____, I can't download from this link", and
- 4 will say "WHEN IS THE NEXT ONE OUT YOU GUYS SUCK YOU ARE SLOW WHAT IS THIS CRAPPY TRANSLATION? CAN'T YOU GUYS DO BETTER FREE WORK FOR ME? OH AND FOR THE NEXT EPISODE THE TRANSLATION BETTER BE OUT 0.00000000001 SECONDS AFTER THE RAW AIRS IN JAPAN OR I'M GOING SEND YOU 10000000 DEATH THREATS. I HATE YOU GUYS. I HATE YOU GUYS. I HATE YOU GUYS. I HATE YOU GUYS. And now, I'm going to do YOU the favor of downloading YOUR work that I DESERVED TO GET A LOT SOONER THAN IT CAME OUT."

No, those 4 people did not donate. (sadface)

I guess what I mean to say is, I'm thankful I'm getting anything for free, so unless you want the fansubbers to not sleep not eat and not have a life, there's really not predicting how long it'll take for the translated episode to come out.

It sucks, but then again, the alternatives are: 1) pay someone $150-500 an episode, 2) learn Japanese yourself for 3 years, or 3) join the fansub team to help out in anyway you can to speed up the process. Of course, your time would be strictly unpaid~~~

(For the record: no, I do not fansub. Anymore. I couldn't handle spending all that time and not getting thanked or paid. Fansubbers are amazing. )

[aarinfantasy]

Fuji! That's really a comprehensive explanation ^_^;;; Thanks~

Usually I will just state it all in one paragraph... because a lot of times I got ungrateful demand by viewers asking me "when is the next ep coming out?! I wanna watch it now!". Donation for my fansub group makes no difference actually for fansub speed, it's all spent on maintaining servers, trackers and also buying media for fansub or forum license etc. So me and the fansub team are not paid... but I did give out Christmas gift to the translators from my own pocket last year as they do not want anything in return from the day they joined because they spent a lot of time more than anyone else in the team to do their stuff. One of the translator has quit last year and a new one joined in last year.

In a nutshell, I LOVE to release subs as soon as possible because I do the timing and encoding most of the time which are all mid and end process (it can take me 3-6 hours, not including the 2 hours for me to upload). Only the translating and editing part are not done by me, and relying on two other people - translator and editor. Personally working with them, they do fast work but only depends on their time. They can do everything in one day, but the translator has experienced one episode to take many days... this is mainly because she has work and school.

So for Sekaiichi Hatsukoi which everyone raves about, please visit Crunchyroll or check out our Host Link section if anyone post their fansub release. They have a total upperhand for a good video release because they get direct raw source from the production company and you all have the option to watch it from them at least. It's not like only AarinFantasy team will be the only one releasing a fansub version this time~ I guess this will all make everyone happy
And do give them support too as what you pay to them, I believe some of that will be spent to pay the producers of Sekaiichi Hatsukoi, or they already paid the producers (not sure how it works).

I have no intention to go against them or anything, as of today I am still considering and will discuss again with the translator one more time to see if we will really commit to proceed with it. It's just we wanna do it because the translator like the show a lot and it will be only for sharing exclusively here in the forum~ That will be our plan so far. Otherwise, I really want you all to support Crunchyroll on it.

[Yilmas]

First of, im sorry to make you 2 write such long posts, perhaps I didn't write the question in a correct way, in a way that you wouldn't get the feeling that I was trying to critisize the work of this fantistic crew.
I do very well understand the process behind this, and that it's very time consuming, and most of the time you aren't getting enough thanks and donations.

But I did get the message about the timeframe, in which we should exspect to see something in about 1-3weeks...

Well, before I tally up the time it'll take to sub it, maybe I please ask you when was the last time you sat in front of a computer for 24 straight hours not sleeping not eating not showering to do work for which you were not getting paid? Even better, after you finish your work, you can expect to get 10 emails:
- 2 will say "thank you",
- 3 will say "about time! ...err thanks, I guess",
- 1 will say "can you reupload to _____, I can't download from this link", and
- 4 will say "WHEN IS THE NEXT ONE OUT YOU GUYS SUCK YOU ARE SLOW WHAT IS THIS CRAPPY TRANSLATION? CAN'T YOU GUYS DO BETTER FREE WORK FOR ME? OH AND FOR THE NEXT EPISODE THE TRANSLATION BETTER BE OUT 0.00000000001 SECONDS AFTER THE RAW AIRS IN JAPAN OR I'M GOING SEND YOU 10000000 DEATH THREATS. I HATE YOU GUYS. I HATE YOU GUYS. I HATE YOU GUYS. I HATE YOU GUYS. And now, I'm going to do YOU the favor of downloading YOUR work that I DESERVED TO GET A LOT SOONER THAN IT CAME OUT."

Im quessing this was more for the generel people. Because I myself do know the exact feeling you are describing, I might not be involved in fansubbing. But I do a lot of work on transforming php code into c# and by that making open source programs/solutions that are licensed under the GNU/PL. I could easily say that for each release I make I get the same mails you've just described.

So instead of giving you guys a simple thanks for the subs so far, like most ppl probably do with an empty thanks, I've just donated to the site.

[aarinfantasy]

Hi Yilmas, no worries... just wanna give u some insight of what my team have to go through too. Thanks for the donation although you really don't have to and after I said it won't make any difference to fansubbing speed >.<;;;

I will just say again for my team, it's usually simpler than most advance fansub team (I have a VERY small team), because to be honest I am not as pro or as good as them. I just know how to do most of the basics and while at that it all depends on the translator's speed So what I can say is as long as translator send to me a script on a day and after editing, I can get it done by the same day for release.

Hope what we say doesn't really came our as lashing on people but I can understand why Fuji's saying that way too and it applies to many fansub group in general. But each group works differently too.
To me, as long as people do not keep chasing the team for the next episode, is already good enough. I started the whole thing just to give myself (as a fan) and others to understand what's being said in an anime.

So actually it's good you asked so that other people who wanted to ask this question but didn't want to, can actually understand more about how my team works.

EDIT: I will discuss again with the translator on planning out at least how long it will take for an ep of Sekaiichi, so I cannot give a definite answer, sorry >.<

[Yilmas]

Considering how much time I've spent watching animes through this side, that donation was a small payment, compared to how much money saved. So the donation is well spent in my mind...

The only reason why I brought this up, is because the anime in question is a very popular and highly exspected show, when considering the fact of the creators previous hit, Junjou Romantica.. Just as you said, theres a lot of ppl waiting for this one.
And hell, we can all just watch the ova a couple of times more, considering how cute it is, so we can probably wait a month or so, until the eps gets released

[aarinfantasy]

Well it definitely will not be delayed even if our team is very late to release it because there's an alternate option to download it... which is from Crunchyroll and they confirmed to be doing Sekaiichi Hatsukoi. Good quality video is expected from them of course with English subs. So everyone is happy about this news.

Also, I will be open for their releases here if they are faster of course. So you guys can just post it in the Host Links.

[Yilmas]

Very nice indeed

[aarinfantasy]

Hi Yilmas and everyone who is expecting our fansub of the show, please read this:
http://aarinfantasy.com/forum/f140/t...ml#post3577209

Thanks.