Ceremony's "How not to Mess Up an Edit" guide

So you've decided to jump into the wide wide world of fansubbing, and seeing as you have no real skills, you figured that editing would be the best thing to start with. This is somewhat true. As a (hopefully) native speaker of english, you have the most powerful tool that you could possibly need to be successful and respected editor of anime, your native speaker intuition. This is a linguistic term that applies to your innate ability to look at a sentence and immediately tell whether or not its a) grammatical and b) whether or not anyone would ever actually say it. These are the things that are most important in editing. Often you will meet a line that just doesn't make sense, and other times you'll get those tricky sentences that you just can't figure out if you should change or just call it quirky and leave it. The aim of this guide is too help you figure out what to do when you start, and give you some basic guidelines for approaching those sentences without pissing off anyone else who works on the script.

Programs you'll need:

1) A subtitle editor! The program of choice for a lot of fansubbers is ssa, because it's simple and easy to use. .ssa files are often the file type that you'll be editing. These files can be opened in wordpad or similar programs, but I think that its best to use ssa, because you don't have to sort through time and style codes just to find the script, as well as some technical stuff about unicode that anyone working with the script later might experience. Thanks to Sylf, here's a list of programs that you could try: Subtitle editors) SSA, medusa, sabbu, subtitle workshop. Text editors) notepad, wordpad, textpad, editplus, scite and ultraeditor. Find one you like and go for it.

2) A video player! anything works, I think, wmp or zplayer, or whatever as well as the directvobsub filter. To preview what a file looks like with the subtitles without having to encode the file, just put the ssa file in the same folder as it and rename it so it has the same name as the video raw, when you open the video it will have the subtitles. Copy the ssa file and rename the copy, only editing the original! You'll never mess up and post the wrong script this way!

Simple Methodology:

This is a very simple walkthrough of what you should do when you're editing a file. This is the way that I do it, but eventually you'll figure out the way you think is the best. Everyone has their own way, and you'll find yours too.

1) First make sure you have the RIGHT ssa script and the RIGHT raw. A lot of things can go wrong if this step is ignored. It's distracting to watch a script that is timed to a different raw, and that might lead to mistakes. Also, if you edit the wrong script, you're going to have to redo it, and that is just unpleasant. As an extra safety measure, get a crc32 checker and compare the crc code to the code that is provided by the raw provider, if its different, you either failed to download the file properly, or you have a different file.

2) Watch the episode! This is the best part of being a fansubber, you get to see the ep long before everyone else, enjoy it, but pay attention to the script and what's happening! Try to note places where there seem to be sentence that don't make sense in the context of the scene. Note these if you want, or just remember them.

3) Do your first pass. Try to fix all the major grammatical errors, the semantic errors and all those things you picked up on when you watched the ep. Most of the mistakes you pick up here should be the obvious ones. Any lines that don't make sense, say them out loud to yourself, and ask yourself if you'd ever say that. If you wouldn't, it's time to fix it(more on that later). Try to pick up everything that you can here. This is when you should do most of the work. When you're done, SAVE AS and RENAME THE FILE, noting that you just did your first pass.

4) Do a second pass. This should be more or less just reading. Leave a little bit of time between the first and second pass, so that everything you just did is cleared from your mind. This is where you go over the script with a fine-tooth comb, changing punctuation, capitalizing and picking up the little mistakes that are easy to miss when you're fixing the big stuff. Read it like a book, going line by line. This is the tedious part, but the most vital. This is where the mediocre guys are seperated from the best. You might want to try spellchecking the script at this point, too. Some programs will allow you to run a spellcheck on the titles, but others you might have to copy and paste. It is a complex and frustrating procedure, but it will pick up so many little things that you still might miss. When you're confident that the script is clean, RENAME it to whatever your group wants it to be, and post it. You've done your first edit.

*Note that some people might watch the show again with your edit in place, but if you worked hard enough before that, you should be good.*

The Mechanics

There are a few things that you will see over and over again in editing, the same mistakes that are born out of the differences between english and japanese. This section should help you figure out what to do with a bad sentence.

1) The very first thing that you have to know about editing is that THE MEANING OF THESE SENTENCES IS SACRED. The line that you are looking at was translated by someone who has at least a working level of fluency in either English or Japanese, and unless you could do better, do NOT start changing words just because you think that this or that word would sound better. Even if it is just changing an "I'll do it alone" to "I'll do it later", you should try to stay as true to the originally wording as possible. If there are serious problems with some of the words in a sentence, then unless you are 100% sure about the change you are making, just ask a translator to check the word. Anyone could rewrite a good script in perfect english, but only a good editor could use what he or she has to create the right statement.

However, verb tenses are a little different. The way that verbs work in japanese are not the same as the way that verbs work in english, and a lot of native japanese translators will have trouble gettin the right 'feel' into their work because of that. DON'T change the verbs, just the inflectional features that affect them, and still be careful at this.

2) Closely related to this is things that we refer to as articles 'a' and 'the' and the plural. Japanese does not use these, and in some cases, you'll see mistakes in this, do not hesitate to correct them. It may seem pretty easy to figure these out, but take a sentence like this: "I have fought in battle" This is a grammatical sentence in english, but it leaves a lot to be desired, is the character talking about one battle? many battles? or is this definitely the right sentence? This is one of the reasons that you MUST ALWAYS WATCH THE SHOW YOU ARE EDITING, or at least the episode you're working on. Blind editing leads to a lot of mistakes. When you're reading a line, if you have any doubt about a noun, if it would be better if it was more specific, add in an article. If you do that and it doesn't look right, leave it; if its an improvement, then Bob's your uncle.

3) In english syntax, we have a rule called the extended projection principle that basically states that EVERY english clause has to have a subject. This is not the case in japanese, they have deletion rules that allows a speaker to only state new information that's being brought into a sentence, while anglophones just stress that new information. So watch for sentences that just have a verb complex or a predicate, with no subject, or clauses without objects, and all sorts of seemingly random missing elements. When you see things like this, ADD PRONOUNS. This is how english speakers shorten speech, where the japanese delete. It is pretty easy to figure out what they're talking about, and once again, if you're confused, ask a TL, they'll know. They always know.

4) There's also another big difference between English and Japanese in the way that they use pronouns. As I just mentioned, in Japanese, anything we would give a pronoun to is just deleted, but often they might use the proper name of the person that they are talking to. In this case, most people will just switch the name for a pronoun, despite how obvious it is that the character is saying somebody's name. It is possible to leave it in, but when something read like "It sure is nice when X-chan is with him." and the only people in the conversation is the speaker and X-chan, then it sounds ungodly odd.

5) Contractions are a big part of informal speech. If you listen to yourself or your friends when they're talking, you'll notice that they rarely say 'you would' instead of "you'd" and so on. This is something to take into consideration. Ask whoever is in charge of the project how they want this done, everyone will have an opinion, and you should work together with the people on the project to figure out if you want to write as we speak, or as we read. If you do go with contractions, you shouldn't just change every single sentence so that they are riddled with them, but read each one to yourself, putting stress on different words, checking if the contraction sounds better or not. Often the contraction will be right, but there are times when the contracted "is" would be getting the stress in the sentence, and the contraction ruins that. "Wanna" and "gonna" fall into the same category. They look funny when written down, but are more correct in the light of how we speak, so again check with your group before you decide to do this or not.

6) Close to the question of contractions is the problem of punctuation. Everyone loves to throw in commas, but when you're reading, that's a sign to take a pause, and that can mess up the flow or readability of a line. I tend to ignore a lot of obvious commas, and only use them to seperate clauses and nouns in address. You'll see a lot of "I did too" and whether or not you put in a comma there is your own choice, but it doesn't make a difference either way, and it will slow down the reading of the line. Again, consult with your group about this issue.

7) Clause inversions are something you'll have to get used to when editing. Sentences like this one "If X could improve his looks, he'd become more popular with the ladies." are extremely common because of the way that the japanese language handles provisional statements. Your first reaction will often be to change the sentence to read "X'd become more popular with the ladies if he could improve his looks", but instead of changing them all, just change those sentence that completely lose their meaning. This is again a matter of taste, but often this is harmless and the script will be a bit more "authentic" if you leave these in. I like to aim for 50/50, and only arbitrarily change the long ones.

8) You should also note that YOU ARE NOT INFALLIBLE. Just because you can speak english, don't slack off. You must always keep in mind the most basic things that every english teacher would have rammed down your throat. Then is used for time and things like that, while than is to compare. Its is the possessive form and it's is the contraction for it is. There is a place, their is the plural possessive. These are simple things that could still ruin the best scripts, so look out for them. If these kind of things confuse you, I recommend going out to your local bookstore and picking up any sort of style guide. I would recommend Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference, possibly the best of such books.

9) Once again, trust your instinct. You should speak better english than the people who are translating. If you don't, then this is not the job for you. If you hesitate about the meaning of a sentence, then it is usually wrong. However, keep in mind that the original meaning should be kept as close as possible AT ALL COSTS, even YOUR LIFE.

*These are not all the mistakes that you will find, just the ones that I can think of right now as being common. If you meet a new problem, just follow 7) and best of luck.*

I hope that this has helped you out as you step into the wide wide world of being a fansub editor. Remember that most fansub groups pair their editors, and that even if you make a little mistake, there will be somebody else looking at the script to fix just that kind of thing. You should also be able to get any other assistance that you need from any more experienced editor in the group that you're working with, when you're new don't be afraid to ask. Enjoy it, and work hard!

-Ceremony.

*Special thanks to Sylf for editing this, proving that even editors need to be edited, as well as Ellspurs84 and IceAlchemist for getting all uppity about including Medusa, and Cheez for checking over too!*