Bootlegs?

skanks · Post by **skanks** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 10:35 pm

Heya, I know what they are, i made the mistake of purchasing bootleg titles for Trigun and Lain. The snotty bastards actually put securty stickers on it, and having know nothing about anime back then i purchased them.

Found a dealer in Perth, the Vietiamese bitch assured me they were the real deal, but looking at them for long enough i found an email address and some things that didn't look right. What made me suddenly decide they were fake was Azu Manga Diaoh was only on 3 dvds.

I was considering purchasing things i had not seen there? I've still got fansubs i haven't seen at home but they are all bad quality picture. The only thing is the bootlegs i got shit me because the subbing was patheticaly inaccurate and sometime just skipped entire sections where you can imagine the subber was probably snorting more cocain.

Are all bootlegs this shite? If I bought the bootlegs i would treat them the same as fansubs, IE to watch the series and see if its worth buying.

skanks · Post by **skanks** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 10:37 pm

I didn't make that quite clear did I?

What I'm asking is?
Are all bootlegs badly subbed, and if not, would it be advised to purchase them while waiting for the offical releases to come out?

Propyro · Post by **Propyro** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 10:45 pm

i have no idea, as far as i know i ahven't gotten my hands on any boot legs ... but from what your saying, and from other peoples complaining it sounds like boot legs are the spawn of satan, and only fansubs can surpass them on occasion ... well thats at least what i picked up from you guys...

CaTaClYsM · Post by **CaTaClYsM** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 11:00 pm

when I see a difference in subbing I ALWAYS go with the domestic subs unless proven otherwise. The problem with fansubs is that they don't usually understand japanese that well. The problem with HK DVD's is that they don't know english very well. So the results of a translation for any given anime can vary widely depending on who did the translating.

Propyro · Post by **Propyro** » Sat Apr 05, 2003 11:10 pm

CaTaClYsM wrote: The problem with fansubs is that they don't usually understand japanese that well. The problem with HK DVD's is that they don't know english very well.

well isn't that a nice situation to be in if theres no domestic sub available ... lol

kthulhu · Post by **kthulhu** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 1:24 am

CaTaClYsM wrote:The problem with HK DVD's is that they don't know english very well.

The problem with HK bootlegs is that don't know both English and Japanese very well, and in addition feel the need to change the script and names more often than not

.

KLin · Post by **KLin** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 1:47 am

Also, some professional and fansub translators at times take liberties with the dialogue so that it sounds more natural and that also may make it to be not one hundred percent accurate. In the case of like Nadesico, this liberty detracts a lot from the humor. I've also seen a few simple typos and mispelling in domestic releases even. Also, Taiwanese Bootleggers tend to translate with better grammar than Hong Kong Bootleggers. I might be biased, my folks and relatives being Taiwanese after all but when you see silly stuff like every single pronoun being 'he' even when 99 percent of the characters in the Anime are female in Hong Kong bootlegs it makes you wonder what the translator is smoking. Most bootlegs seem to translate into Chinese first as Japanese and Chinese are similar languages, then translate from the Chinese to English. I think that the pronoun problem is more likely to occur in HK rather than Taiwan bootlegs as on Mainland China, they don't use traditional Chinese characters and very possibly only use one form of the 'ta' pronoun to indicate a character. Whereas traditional Chinese differentiates between a male and female 'ta.'

On that note, I have yet to see a bootleg that is completely error free in translations, and they certainly don't translate signs and text written on the scenery but there are a few bootlegs that are a little bit below the level as some of the average to below-average fansubs. Of course, it's very possible that those bootlegs just copied the text from those fansubs. 0_0 So yeah, unless you absolutely have no choice don't support bootlegs because not only is it an inferior product, but they are ripping you off in a major way as well.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 10:50 am

I like the the bootlegs where they give the characters chinese names like Xinghua

Krypton-Knight · Post by **Krypton-Knight** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 3:42 pm

yeah bootleg translations are funked up at times. I accidently bought a vampire D bootleg, the presentation on the disc , and the cover where nice, but the subs were inconsistent, or in some places completly off

Senna · Post by **Senna** » Sun Apr 06, 2003 9:32 pm

The only real exposure I've had to a bootleg is one that my best friend borrowed from her neighbor's friend (confused yet?). She didn't realize it was a bootleg at first, but the quality of the tape (it was a VHS) was rather bad and nearly every time there was silence an e-mail address or website address would pop up. It was almost kind of funny.

The translation seemed pretty accurate (I had already seen official translations), but I only saw one of the fifteen episodes on the tape, so . . . who knows about the rest?