So now that I'm all caught up on episodes to the most recent episode 104, my verdict is that R-H has the best translation by far. I think spelling escaped them when it came to names at times, but it can't be helped when you're trying to romanize new character or item names. After episode 102, the typesetting got A LOT better. Episode 90-101 had pretty generic subtitle font for the majority of the episode and only changed it for the opening and ending themes (or ocassionally during the episode), but because it all looked very displaced, the typesetting was kind of annoying for my eyes to look at. It's like when you're in charge of editing and typesetting for manga scanlations, you don't want to use too many font sizes otherwise the page just looks messy. Even if you have the best translation, the quality level drops from not having a clean page edit. So the same goes for subbing. Good typesetting is a must, in my opinion. Then again, I'm awfully picky when it comes to fansubs. If I hate it, I rather watch raws 'cause no words at the bottom of the screen will distract me and the episode will be clean.
The new group, Phantom, that just came out with episode 104 is so-so. The translations are not wrong, but they're pretty literal. A problem that happens with me when I translate manga is that I end up translating the English out pretty literally, but I go back to make it less rigid so it sounds more like spoken English rather than textbook English. It's not easy, but it's something that translators should do and if English isn't their native tongue, then the proofreader (who has Japanese language & culture knowledge) should work on it. Right now, I think what Phantom needs to work on is their timing for the subs, and also make sure that they're catching their grammar mistakes. Also, while the font is not bad, the size and number of lines per dialogue pretty much dominates the visuals so you'd be watching text over someone's mouth (and maybe even nose) at times. So like many other groups before them, typesetting is something Phantom needs to work on to give better, more cleaner versions.
Now, people of these groups are probably going to get all hissy at me for critiquing them so much, saying things like "You should be glad that there are even groups willing to sub out there!" But I did say that if the fansub groups suck, I'll just download raws. It's not like I don't understand Japanese. I may not be 100% fluent in it, but I understand a good majority of it. Even now, I download raws for series that are currently being aired in Japan 'cause I'm not patient enough to wait for subs -- unless the sub group releases quicker than when I get the raws.
Still, regardless of whatever I download, I don't believe that releasing inaccurate translations is a good way of promoting a group, and not trying to make subs look more professional is saying something about the mentality about one's work -- this does not account for the groups that are constantly experimenting for ways to improve. I think that if people are releasing subs, they want to be noticed for the hard work they're doing 'cause it's not easy to translate, proofread, time, encode, quality check, etc., -- it's very time-consuming -- so if they want more people to download from them, they'll need to really improve their version qualities.
With that said, I'll be returning to my episode and then pining for episode 105 to air in a few days.
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