This is another site for you asian drama fans. As I mentioned in one of my previous blog entries, I've been watching quite a bit of JDrama on streaming sites recently. Until now, it's either been crunchyroll or mysoju. However, from what I've experienced so far, these sites pale in comparison to aznv. It offers streams for a number of dramas. Also, unlike other sites like crunchyroll, they haven't given in to TBS and removed their dramas. And I haven't encountered ANY broken streams yet (mysoju is plagued with these).
Also, this site offers m3u files for streaming as opposed to the standard flash player. I'm able to play them perfectly fine using VLC on Linux, Yeah I know, VLC is considered a sin among fansubbers but it's the only choice as mplayer or anything else on my system refused to play these files. So don't believe the notice on the front page about only working on Windows.
So all you drama fans with lousy internet connections, enjoy!
Monday, April 28, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
明日が見えない夜 (ashita ga mienai yoru)
As I explained in my last post, I've recently been reading posts at Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum . One of the useful points I've encountered is the non-direct, actual translation of "明日が見えない夜" ("ashita ga mienai yoru"). It actually means "hopeless night", as apparently, if you can "see tommorow" you have hope (for tommorow), hence if you can't see tommorow, you are hopeless.
If you've translated/listened to Japanese songs before you're likely to have heard the phrase before. I myself am guilty of taking phrases like this too literaly, I'm also beginning to see that translating literally is not always the best way.
/random tidbit
If you've translated/listened to Japanese songs before you're likely to have heard the phrase before. I myself am guilty of taking phrases like this too literaly, I'm also beginning to see that translating literally is not always the best way.
/random tidbit
No high-speed blues
Argh, you can count on the crap internet of NZ to ruin my holidays. Yes that's right, I've been capped to dialup speeds after blowing my small 20GB data cap. This may be uncommon to some, especially to those in countries like the US with better broadband. But over here, not only do they give us broadband with sub-par speeds, they limit our data cap too. And people over in the US with comcast are complaining...
Anyway, atleast I only have to survive 2 more days with 64kbps. Speaking of which, I've done quite well. I was even able to fansub, thanks to martino who now encodes the workraws for Shugo Chara in mkv with aac audio which produces ~30MB files that I can download in a few hours on dialup. I've also been brushing up my Japanese skills more(not that I haven't been with TLCing anime) by prowling Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum . It's an awesome sites with heaps of tips, even if you're at an advanced level (I'm definately not though...).
Anyway, atleast I only have to survive 2 more days with 64kbps. Speaking of which, I've done quite well. I was even able to fansub, thanks to martino who now encodes the workraws for Shugo Chara in mkv with aac audio which produces ~30MB files that I can download in a few hours on dialup. I've also been brushing up my Japanese skills more(not that I haven't been with TLCing anime) by prowling Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar Forum . It's an awesome sites with heaps of tips, even if you're at an advanced level (I'm definately not though...).
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Streaming Sites
Well, recently I've been alot more into JDrama rather than anime, and I found an index site with links to streams from various sites: mysoju.com . I know alot of people don't like streaming videos due to their crap quality, but sites like this make a difference to those like me (who live in New Zealand and have slow internet with data caps). While this site is useful, it does have it's disadvantages (for example I've started watching a series for which they have links to all the eps, only to find that say after a few eps the rest are broken).
Crunchyroll.com is another cool site(which actually hosts the videos) , but it would be alot better if stupid TBS (tokyo broadcasting system) didn't go and request the deletion of their drama's. Why can't they be like Fuji TV and ignore piracy of their stuff on streaming sites? I mean, the site is already blocked for people in Japan so it's not like they're gonna watch it on crunchy instead of say buying the dvd or watching it on tv. And, I don't know about anyone else but if what I want to watch is not on a streaming site, I'd just download using bittorrent. Further decreasing the chances of me buying the DVD. Also, another good point about crunchyroll is that they now offer high quality H264 streaming for free!
Also, on the note of streaming sites: Veoh sucks. Sure they have alot of content I want, but it's stupid how they want me to download or use VeohTV to watch their videos. If VeohTV actually worked on Linux I would use it, but it doesn't. But that's not the only problem I have with them, their servers absolutely suck during peak times (maybe it's just for me cos I don't live in the US though...). Crunchyroll/Youtube loads alot faster and I don't notice that much difference in quality. And I'd rather have reduced quality than a video that buffers every few seconds.
/end of my rant
And yes contrary to the title of my blog this post is not about fansubbing, creating more than one blog is too annoying so I'll just vent my thoughts into this one :D
Crunchyroll.com is another cool site(which actually hosts the videos) , but it would be alot better if stupid TBS (tokyo broadcasting system) didn't go and request the deletion of their drama's. Why can't they be like Fuji TV and ignore piracy of their stuff on streaming sites? I mean, the site is already blocked for people in Japan so it's not like they're gonna watch it on crunchy instead of say buying the dvd or watching it on tv. And, I don't know about anyone else but if what I want to watch is not on a streaming site, I'd just download using bittorrent. Further decreasing the chances of me buying the DVD. Also, another good point about crunchyroll is that they now offer high quality H264 streaming for free!
Also, on the note of streaming sites: Veoh sucks. Sure they have alot of content I want, but it's stupid how they want me to download or use VeohTV to watch their videos. If VeohTV actually worked on Linux I would use it, but it doesn't. But that's not the only problem I have with them, their servers absolutely suck during peak times (maybe it's just for me cos I don't live in the US though...). Crunchyroll/Youtube loads alot faster and I don't notice that much difference in quality. And I'd rather have reduced quality than a video that buffers every few seconds.
/end of my rant
And yes contrary to the title of my blog this post is not about fansubbing, creating more than one blog is too annoying so I'll just vent my thoughts into this one :D
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
A new dictionary
Ok, so if you read my post about translating anime staff credits, you'll have read my mumblings on the greatness of WWWJDIC. I still think it's one of the greatest dictionaries out there and I still use it extensively, but I've found something alot better (well it depends on your point of view). What is this fabled dictionary that is better than JDIC? It's the Yahoo Japan Dictionary: http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/ . Surprised to see that it's all in Japanese? I recommend using the Rikai-chan plugin for Firefox (here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2471 ).
This useful plugin highlights any Japanese words you hover over in Firefox and shows its translation / kanji reading (don't worry you can enable/disable Rikai-chan with the right-click menu so it won't inconvenience you when reading english text :D ). You might think it a bit odd and counter-productive to use a Japanese-Japanese dictionary but atleast in my case, I've found it a great help. So go ahead, try it now!
This useful plugin highlights any Japanese words you hover over in Firefox and shows its translation / kanji reading (don't worry you can enable/disable Rikai-chan with the right-click menu so it won't inconvenience you when reading english text :D ). You might think it a bit odd and counter-productive to use a Japanese-Japanese dictionary but atleast in my case, I've found it a great help. So go ahead, try it now!
Status update
Well I've finally decided to stop being lazy and actually translate something. Yeah it's a bit late, and if you've been following Formula's releases you would know about it already. It's called: "Yotsunoha" (more info here: http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=5275 ). This is the first chance I've had to TL something since like Mid-2007. Speaking of which, kansai-ben is soo annoying (in case you didn't know, kansai is a dialect of Japanese) . I'm having enough trouble translating normal Japanese let alone super-weird kansai-ben - well ok, it's not that weird and alot of people in Japan do speak it, it's just that I'm not accustomed to it.
The next OVA airs on March 28th so be sure to dl it :D
As before, I'm still TLCing Shugo Chara, and in addition to that I'm now TLCing Les Miserables. And I take back what I said in my last post (about people hating Shugo), Shugo Chara seems to have a huge fan base, so much that people actually whine about when the next ep comes out (I didn't expect that considering how small a group we are, more like we were a few months ago).
The next OVA airs on March 28th so be sure to dl it :D
As before, I'm still TLCing Shugo Chara, and in addition to that I'm now TLCing Les Miserables. And I take back what I said in my last post (about people hating Shugo), Shugo Chara seems to have a huge fan base, so much that people actually whine about when the next ep comes out (I didn't expect that considering how small a group we are, more like we were a few months ago).
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Anime Staff Credit Translation Tips
I've recently been asked (well not me personally- more like an open request for anyone in the group that knows Japanese) to translate the staff credits for Shugo Chara. However, this somewhat daunting task (especially for me whose Kanji knowledge is by far lacking) is not new to me as I did the same for the "Tales of Symphonia OVA" series. So I decided to share with you (my readers-which at the time of writing is probably close to zero) my tips and tricks on translating anime credits. Note that this is written for people like myself who are new to translating (but not too new- I assume you do have atleast JLPT lvl 3 or so knowledge)- it'll be particularly helpful for those who have little knowledge of kanji.
-There is a great resource on the fansub wiki (here:http://www.fansubbers.org) that tells you the kanji for the different positions in the anime industry (this was particularly indispensable to me). However it is a bit lacking so I have spruced it up a bit, you can find my version here:
*to be added soon, I'm still working on it, use the fansub wiki version for now: http://fansubbers.org/index.php/KB/Aindustry*
-Learn the SKIP code system- this is a system for looking up kanji and is much faster and efficient than looking up by stroke order. I wont re-invent the wheel, you can find a guide on how to use this system here:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/SKIP.html
Once you have learned how to use it (shouldn't be too hard- I got the general hang of it after reading it once or so) ditch whatever paper dictionary you may have and use the kanji lookup tool of WWWJDIC(http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1B) instead. Although some may argue that an online dictionary is "not good enough"- I have found looking up words in WWWJDIC while translating to be much easier than fiddling around with a paper dictionary :D . If you can't find the Kanji using the SKIP code, then go to the "Multiradical Kanji" section of WWWJDIC and then select the radicals of the kanji you are searching for and click on the "find" button.
-Ok, so you found out which kanji that is used in the name you want to translate, so how do you find its reading? Easy! Just go to ANN and copy and paste the kanji for the person's name into the search bar and you are likely to get a page for that person which includes the name in Romaji :D. Now if the person you are searching for is new or not widely know they probably wont have a page on ANN, so also search on the Japanese Wikipedia (ja.wikipedia.org) and of course Google to try and get that name!
If you still can't find the name then you might have to do some guess work using WWWJDIC. Another useful function that the online dictionary provides is the ability to look up Japanese names :D Just enter the person's name and chose "enamdict" under: "using Dictionary:".
-Here's an extra tip: do not search for all the kanji in a person's name if you don't have to! I often only lookup the kanji of the last name first. I then enter the following in Google:
""
And then more often than not I will get the person's full name and then just copy and paste into ANN or WWWJDIC as described above. If you can't find it in Google, try the following site: http://www.yurichan.nerv.org (note: the site is in Japanese)
That's it~ Hopefully you have some (more) insight on how to translate anime credits now
Happy translating!
-shadow-of-sin
-There is a great resource on the fansub wiki (here:http://www.fansubbers.org) that tells you the kanji for the different positions in the anime industry (this was particularly indispensable to me). However it is a bit lacking so I have spruced it up a bit, you can find my version here:
*to be added soon, I'm still working on it, use the fansub wiki version for now: http://fansubbers.org/index.php/KB/Aindustry*
-Learn the SKIP code system- this is a system for looking up kanji and is much faster and efficient than looking up by stroke order. I wont re-invent the wheel, you can find a guide on how to use this system here:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/SKIP.html
Once you have learned how to use it (shouldn't be too hard- I got the general hang of it after reading it once or so) ditch whatever paper dictionary you may have and use the kanji lookup tool of WWWJDIC(http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1B) instead. Although some may argue that an online dictionary is "not good enough"- I have found looking up words in WWWJDIC while translating to be much easier than fiddling around with a paper dictionary :D . If you can't find the Kanji using the SKIP code, then go to the "Multiradical Kanji" section of WWWJDIC and then select the radicals of the kanji you are searching for and click on the "find" button.
-Ok, so you found out which kanji that is used in the name you want to translate, so how do you find its reading? Easy! Just go to ANN and copy and paste the kanji for the person's name into the search bar and you are likely to get a page for that person which includes the name in Romaji :D. Now if the person you are searching for is new or not widely know they probably wont have a page on ANN, so also search on the Japanese Wikipedia (ja.wikipedia.org) and of course Google to try and get that name!
If you still can't find the name then you might have to do some guess work using WWWJDIC. Another useful function that the online dictionary provides is the ability to look up Japanese names :D Just enter the person's name and chose "enamdict" under: "using Dictionary:".
-Here's an extra tip: do not search for all the kanji in a person's name if you don't have to! I often only lookup the kanji of the last name first. I then enter the following in Google:
And then more often than not I will get the person's full name and then just copy and paste into ANN or WWWJDIC as described above. If you can't find it in Google, try the following site: http://www.yurichan.nerv.org (note: the site is in Japanese)
That's it~ Hopefully you have some (more) insight on how to translate anime credits now
Happy translating!
-shadow-of-sin
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