MX Media LLC Blog Archive

Good morning, everyone. This is Managing Founder and translator, Ken Hoinsky, interrupting your scheduled broadcast with an important report on, uh… anime.

I have had the rare opportunity to have worked on both the simulcast release of a show and later on the DVD/Blu-rays of the same title. I’ve noticed some interesting things with the workflow.

Today I am going to talk to you about Kurokami The Animation.

I had the pleasure of personally translating this show more or less weekly going back to late 2008 and through the first half of this year.  This was a very unique project because it was released on television, dubbed, in three different countries on the same day every week. To my knowledge, nothing on that scale had been attempted before.

As you can imagine with a project like this, myself, our subtitling team,  the folks at Sunrise and Bandai Entertainment, and the excellent dub actors and ADR guys at NYAV Post, were all working off of incomplete materials for much of the workflow.

Though this complicates matters, it doesn’t make it impossible* to pull off.

(*Assuming translating on airplanes and getting up to send scripts in at 4AM, etc., is within your definition of “possible.”)

But I’m not here to post on the process of creating a simuldub, that can be another time. Today I want to talk to you about what it is like to work on an incomplete project for a simulcast and then later work on the same project for the DVD/Blu-ray release.

You’ve got re-animating, re-recording, re-timing, re-writing, re-authoring, re-syncing… Basically re-everything to do.

It’s very interesting, as a translator, to see how what is on screen, or more importantly in this case, what is not on screen colors your translations.

This morning I was going over the resynced subtitles for an episode of Kurokami that will end up on the American DVD release. In the initial unfinished video, it looked like a character had her hand on a man’s chest while she was saying a line. As it turns out in the finished video, she doesn’t put her hand on his chest until after delivering the line. (whoops)

You will probably see much whining about the ambiguity of the Japanese language on this blog, but a slight change in a gesture like this can alter the meaning of a line anywhere from slightly to radically.

The moral of the story is: Don’t ever assume you know what’s going on screen unless you absolutely have to.

Oh, the joys of translation.