PocketMonsters Fansubs is a fansub group dedicated to subbing the various Pocket Monsters anime series. Our primary project is providing subtitled releases of episodes from the TV series currently airing in Japan, as well as theatrical movies and major TV specials as they come out. This project started with Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl 94 back in 2008, and we have subbed every core TV episode from that point and up.
In addition, we have several side projects dedicated to the earlier material from the Pocket Monsters, Pocket Monsters Advanced Generation and Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl TV series. These projects have their own translators, and do not negatively affect the rate the current episodes are subbed at, but they are treated with less importance and urgency, and are not the main focus of the group.
Release Schedule
While it would be preferable to produce subtitled episodes shortly after their initial airing, the majority of the staff are old farts with full jobs, families and/or studies to focus on and do not have infinite spare time. We do our best to get quality releases out in a reasonably timely manner, but do not, and will not have any sort of "official schedule".
Please do not ask when a certain release will be out.
Sub Process
Unlike most anime released in Japan these days, Pocket Monsters does
not have officially released subs on a service like Crunchyroll. Most
current anime releases from fan groups rip subs from services like Crunchyroll and re-edit these, allowing them to easily rerelease a few hours after they air.
Since this isn't the case with Pocket Monsters, we have to do all the work from scratch, which significantly increases the workload and
therefore takes longer than working off official subs.
Pocket Monsters airs Over-the-Air on TV Tokyo with Japanese Closed Captions. We pretime the closed captions to our work raw making it easier for the translators to fill in the dialogue while having easy access to both caption and audio for any given line at any time. This is a slightly different process than the one most other fansubs groups use, but it makes the process significantly easier for the translator.
Once the initial translation has been completed, the episode gets encoded, and the editor, translation checker and quality checkers review and edit the script, while also looking for things like line timing errors, line style errors, typesetting errors, karaoke errors, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, encoding glitches, audio in-sync, consistency errors, and any other errors that would reduce the overall quality of the release.
The subbing process:
Pocket Monsters airs Over-the-Air on TV Tokyo with Japanese Closed Captions. We pretime the closed captions to our work raw making it easier for the translators to fill in the dialogue while having easy access to both caption and audio for any given line at any time. This is a slightly different process than the one most other fansubs groups use, but it makes the process significantly easier for the translator.
Once the initial translation has been completed, the episode gets encoded, and the editor, translation checker and quality checkers review and edit the script, while also looking for things like line timing errors, line style errors, typesetting errors, karaoke errors, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, encoding glitches, audio in-sync, consistency errors, and any other errors that would reduce the overall quality of the release.
The subbing process:
Capture Raw .TS -> Strip Closed Captions -> Work Raw -> Timing -> Typesetting -> Translation ->
HQ encode -> Editing/TLC/QC -> Remux -> Release
BitTorrent Only Releases
PocketMonsters provides our releases via BitTorrent but we ask that people do not reupload our releases on video hosting services, DDL sites or alter our releases.
These are free fansubs. Do not sell, collect ad revenue, redistribute, copy, auction, transcribe, reuse, repost, dubtitle or otherwise repurpose this sub for any reason. Please do not upload the releases to any DDL or streaming sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, LiveVideo, FaceBook Video, Mega or similar sites.
Subs Style
PocketMonsters subs have a basic style that we use for our releases which is consistent throughout our many years worth of releases and is largely tailored after the general preferences of fans of the Japanese version of the anime. Names of characters and Pokémon are kept in Japanese, while location names, etc are handled in a way that best represents the intention of the original name. Broad, more stylistic names are kept in Japanese, while purely descriptive names are translated as best possible. If the official English games uses a name that works as a straight translation of the Japanese, this name will typically be used to lessen confusion.
On-screen text will normally be typeset and translated, however if it is read aloud, the dialogue will be subtitled as normal and there will be no extraneous translation of the text provided. Likewise, on-screen text in English (most prominently the "To be continued" text at the end of an episode) will not have subtitles for dialogue that purely repeats what it says.
Insert songs played during episodes will be presented with karaoke and lyric translations whenever possible, but the font size will be reduced in order to not detract from any subtitles for normal dialogue during these scenes.
Due to the fact that it is almost impossible to know for certain the gender of some Pokémon, they are referred to by genderless pronouns unless there is specific reason not to. This reduces the ability for gender specific subtitle complains when referring to Pokémon.
The Japanese honorifics -san, -kun, -chan and -sama are left as is in the subtitles. Please see the Wikipedia article on this subject for further information on their usage. All other honorifics and similar suffixes are translated as best possible. For our subs, we generally only use honorifics when the main group of characters encounters someone they haven't met before. Joy-san and Junsa-san are the most common characters they meet in which we use honorifics for as they are often meeting new Joy-san's and Junsa-san. Even though they know their names, because they had not met that specific person (clones or some weird genetic abnormality), it would be considered polite to address them with their appropriate honorific. We also drop the 'hakase' and replace it with "Professor".
For the most part, the Pokémon names used in our subtitles are the officially trademarked spellings of the original Japanese names, which also appear on many licensed products aimed at the Japanese market. If the official trademarked spelling is not known, we will use a spelling based on the name's etymology as we understand it. This may get replaced with the official trademarked spelling in later releases once it becomes known. We may also occasionally opt not to us the trademarked spelling in case a particular other spelling is very prominent or we feel the official spelling doesn't get the core concept of the name across well enough. For example, Rafflesia's trademarked romaji is Ruffresia. Since it's named directly after the Rafflesia plant, this obviously does not make sense but the name is still considered official as it is used on merchandise and promotional material.
To avoid confusion, all Pokémon moves in our releases will use the name from the official English video games. The extreme majority of these English names are perfectly accurate translations of their Japanese name, or reasonable attempts at localizing hard-to-translate Japanese concepts with no true English equivalents. As far as the remaining moves are concerned, their Japanese names are too far removed from their English ones to be recognizable, and we find it more important that the viewers understand which move is being used instead of seeing an exact translation of the name of a move they won't understand which is.
Nyarth usually finishes all his lines with 'nyaa'. This is just a cat noise that he makes and does not have any significant meaning. Since we do not subtitle noises or sound effects, we do not add it to any of his dialog. Same goes for his use of "Nya" as a first-person pronoun, which should just be translated as "I/me/my". Note that this only applies to the standard "noises" he peppers his speech with, intentional puns like "nyagotiator" and "itadakinyarth" and are kept/adapted into English if possible.
Dubtitles
PocketMonsters Subs is completely against dubtitling. When we started subbing Pokémon many years ago, we asked the Pokémon community what style would be the most acceptable for subtitling the series and from those discussions, the basis of PocketMonsters subs style was created. As we subtitle an episode, we want to make sure that it is accurate and literal to the original Japanese version but sound natural in English. The English dub version of Pokémon adds their own style and sayings to the series which often does not match what is originally said in the Japanese version. Many of those lines are often completely changed in the English dub due to Japanese cultural nuances, puns or proverbs. By changing or removing saying from the original Japanese version to include English dub lines like "Looks like Team Rocket's blasting off again!" would be dubtitling. Also using English dub names like Ash instead of Satoshi is dubtitling. While many of the English dub lines are very popular and quite well known to English dub viewers, it is not what is said in the Japanese version of the show and including them would be an inaccurate translation.
As the Japanese version airs often months in advance of the English dub, the character of the day's names and unique anime locations are not revealed so there is no way to replace those. This is a main reason for not dubtitling the series as mixing and matching some Japanese romanized names with known English dub terms just gets confusing for the viewers.
We do comparisons from the Japanese original and the English dub to showcase the differences and they are listed as part of our translation notes. This allows the viewers to see the differences between the two versions.
Generation 6 Attack Name Changes
The 6th Generation Pokémon games X and Y introduced name changes to attacks/moves. Many of these changes are just correcting spaces that were not included because of the technical limitations in the previous games. For subs that are in the 6th Generation and higher, we will use the changed attack names. For our subs from the original series to BW, we will continue to use the older names. This is to stay consistent with our previous releases and to also stay consistent with generation attack name conventions.
Join the Team
We are always looking for people that have subbing skills to join us. If you can time, translate, wish to quality check or are good at karaokes, feel free to contact us at: pocketmonstersfansubs@gmail.com.
If enjoy our work but you can't help subbing but would still like to contribute and help us out in some way, we have a lot of sections on our reference site that we could use a bit of help with. We are always looking for people that can help out with writing: Character bios, news articles, opinion articles, reference pages, database work, TCG database, episode notes, translation notes, episode segments, ect. Any help would be appreciated.
Pokémon is Copyright © 1995-2020 Nintendo / Creatures Inc. / GAME FREAK inc. / TV Tokyo
