Introduction and Definition

Class, attention please. As students of anime, you've learned about a wide variety of subjects from Miyazaki Hayao to Lupin III, but one topic you may know very little or quite a bit about is fan subs. Today, we'll be thoroughly exploring multiple aspects surrounding fan subs. Make sure you sharpen your pencils, are ready to take plenty of notes and don't fall asleep on me just yet.

Allow me to lay down one ground rule: the intention is to provide an unbiased look of fan subs to allow you, the student, to understand it well and either create or rethink your own opinion of the subject. However, there is one bias that this lecture will keep in mind: an American-centric view. This is done because fan subs are most commonly created with English subtitles. Anime companies and fans that are most vocal about fan subs are found in the United States (not the fact that this Anime Academy professor happens to live there).

In Kjeldoran's Frequently Used Terms lecture, the entry for fan sub states: "often done to allow non-Japanese viewers to watch and understand unlicensed anime, fan subs are made for fans by fans and making profits off them is expressly prohibited." However, the purpose of this section is to create a more precise definition; Kjeldoran's is good, but for the purposes of this lecture, we need better.

The word "fan sub" is short for fan subtitled; a subtitle can be defined as printed text put onto frames of the work which act as an explanation or translated dialogue. In short, it's a copy of a television show or movie that's typeset with any language. In the context of anime with this definition in mind, a copy subtitled in Japanese by fans is a fan sub just as much as any other anime subtitled by fans in English, French or Arabic. However, fan subs are most commonly made in English; while that isn't the primary language for too many countries, many more have English as their secondary language.

Now, some may say, "if it's dubbed in Japanese and it's subtitled in Japanese, then it's not a fan sub." However, there are plenty of deaf people who know how to read Japanese and wouldn't mind watching a few episodes of anime. By keeping with this (potentially broad) definition, we do not discriminate other languages in the process.

Alleviating Confusion

• Fan dub: the original video remains intact, but the audio is replaced. Despite to the amount of time, costly recording equipment, necessity to recruit voice actors, fandubs are generally unpopular because of problems relating to the voice actors and the translation. Created by independent groups, their hard work often goes unnoticed by many despite providing an alternative for fans that prefer to watch anime in their native language.
• Fan sub parody: Although it fits the definition of fan sub, as well, a fan sub parody has an entirely different intent. Instead of subtitling what is said on the sound track, a fan subber's subtitles makes fun of the anime and whatever else is free game. Think of it as cracking jokes about or related to a movie while you're actually watching it.
• Rippers: With the right tools and know-how, anyone can copy any form of media into other forms. Generally, copies are made of the final source (VHS, DVD, Laser Disc, et la.) and provided to the public. This may sound similar to fan subs, but let's make a distinction: while fan subbers subtitle the anime, rippers only copy a company's final product that's already subtitled and then distribute it.

Although the exact who's and when's have been lost to time, fan subs saw their debut in the 1980s when anime production skyrocketed, yet very few had distribution rights licensed outside of Japan. This made it excruciatingly difficult for foreign fans to experience new anime. Some individuals, who had at least a partial grasp of Japanese, began creating subtitled copies for themselves and their friends. Thus was the birth of fan subs, but in the early days, anime was a very marginalized part of American society. One could say this was the case because mainstream Western values generally held a "cartoons are for children" motif, but another part of this was because anime just wasn't all that prevalent. Stemming from this was the fact that anime fan subs were distributed by means that were expensive, very time consuming, not well publicized and consumed a lot of resources.

First, anime was recorded off of television or Laserdisc onto VHS, or even acquired by purchasing directly on VHS from Japan; these were referred to as "raws." From there, the recording was edited for commercials or whatever the fan subbers felt wasn't necessary, translated from Japanese into English, typeset (sometimes referred to as "timed") so the right subtitles would properly coincide with what was being said and then finalized onto a VHS master tape for duplication. For a fan subbing group, this could possibly take weeks to accomplish, even for a 20-minute episode.

From here, the process was passed onto official or unofficial distributors. Official distributors, usually not the fan subbers themselves, would actually get high quality copies of the master VHS from the fan sub group and then make copies to be distributed to buyers. Unofficial distributors, never the fan subbers, would get fan subs by buying off of official or other unofficial distributors, and even through trading.

There were three methods that people could use to acquire anime: trading, free from a friend or someone who didn't care if he gave his anime away or, most commonly, getting "free" fan subs from distributors.

The final option forks into two directions: SASE or direct purchase. SASE is short for "self-addressed stamped envelope." Essentially, you sent blank VHS tapes, address labels, envelopes and money for return shipping along with your order to the distributor; the distributor then copied your desired anime onto your blank VHS tapes and mailed them back. The second option simply required you to mail the distributor money (typically to cover the cost of the cassette and shipping) along with your order. From there, the distributor copied the anime to VHS tapes and then mails your order back.

Because of these methods, concerns arose between fans and fan subbers:

• "Free" fan subs. Actually, this is a misnomer; nothing is ever free, and fan subs of old weren't an exception. It must be understood that the fan subbers and distributors incur enormous costs (some that cannot be measured) throughout the process, and when "free" is said, it means "“the cost of creating this fan sub is not passed onto you." Simply put, your money was being put towards the cost of getting the fan sub from the distributor to you rather than you paying for the entire long and arduous process. However, this still caused many arguments to spawn based upon the optimal price that distributors should charge consumers for fan subs, and there were even quite a few distributors themselves who were less than honest in their business practices and overcharged buyers in order to make a profit.
• Getting what you paid for. Simply put, you wouldn't always receive tapes of anime that you had paid for; you would mail money and required information to a distributor and receive nothing. Sometimes, this would happen because someone along the line of middlemen decided to just take the money and run, and other times, it was mere carelessness on an individual's behalf. And fans had no way to prevent this from happening or to get their money back because calling the police or a lawyer about not getting your fan sub wasn't an option. I'll explain why in the next section.
• Questionable source material quality. Fans wanted to watch anime and read the subtitles, not see a blurry screen of seemingly random colors. Audio was also a concern, but not so much because most viewers didn't know enough Japanese to understand what was being said. Thus, the original material used to make the fan subs was cause for debate. Was it taped from television, or was it taken from a VHS, SVHS or Laserdisc? Was it a direct transfer copy or just a copy of a copy? Such questions mattered because you were paying money for your fan sub, hence you wanted the best you could get for your buck.
• Sponsors. As has already been stated, fan subs weren't truly free let alone cheap, and a lot of fan subbers used their own money for translations, equipment and whatever other costs were deemed necessary to get the job done. Sometimes, these costs were offset by sponsors, individuals who would provide monetary donations directly to the fan subbers. This sparked controversy because many people believed that sponsors were essentially buying off fan subbers, who would often provide their sponsors with preferential treatment like a VHS Master Copy of a particular anime or even putting project requests ahead of others.

Fan Subs After the Digisub Revolution

With the advent of faster computers and the exponential growth of the Internet in the 1990s, digisubs were born. While still typically referred to as fan subs, digisub is short for "digitally fan subtitled." Breaking this down further, digisubs are basically electronic copies of fan subs; where once they took up room as a VHS tape in your video cabinet or shelf, they now take up room in your hard drive on your computer.

Beginning with a raw taken from a media source (DVD, VHS, Laserdisc or television), fan subbers then go through numerous steps that aren't different than what they went through in years past: the Japanese audio track is translated into English, edited to get rid of useless parts like commercials, timed for the translated script and opening/ending theme karaoke, encoded into a smaller file size, viewed by quality controllers to make sure there are no mistakes in the script or anything else that could go wrong and then released for consumption by many hungry anime fans. The only clear differences are that the entire process is accomplished on a computer and there's no loss of quality.

As a result, fan subs made the transformation from slow, expensive, time-consuming and low quality to fast, practically free, easier to create and high quality. Well, not all at once. Anime fans from all over could get onto the Internet and download anime of their choice, but with the limits of technology came limits in download speeds, audio/video quality and creation time. However, as the end of the 20th century neared and passed, such limitations began fading. Download speeds increased as faster connections became commonplace, audio and video quality rapidly improved as better codecs (a supplement which interprets a file format into a viewable/listenable medium) were developed and improved programs were created which streamlined the subtitling process. What was once the quality of a bad 1960s television program that took several hours or days to acquire changed into a near-DVD quality commodity that took only minutes to get.

Foregoing the obvious increase in quality, a key issue was removed from the equation: money. Previously, money was cause for debate as fan subbers would spend thousands of dollars just fan subbing a moderate-length anime, yet fans would haggle over the price they had to pay. Now, the only price anime fans had to pay were for their own electricity and Internet fees. However, fan subbers themselves are still racked with costs with regards to their websites, and while they may have numerous distribution methods (P2P networks, IRC, BitTorrent, etc.) at their disposal, none are free.

With the vast popularity and ease of digisubs, traditional fan subs have all but faded from existence. However, these pioneers will never be forgotten as some of their work still remains intact and has even made the transition to digital form.

Continue to Fan Subs: Part II...