[Fish Sandwich]

I wanted to get around to talking about this faster than half a year after they put it out, but Earthly Subs took another stab at translating Faiz, and seeing as I've made a habit out of complaining about Faiz's available English translations on this forum in the past, I feel some level of obligation to give my opinion on it. (The rest of post comes with the disclaimer that I'm doing this all from my usual proverbial armchair, by the way.)

Faiz is really actively dialogue-driven to a level I'm not sure any other Rider show is, so for a long time, it's bothered me to no end that all the available fansubs of it are either A)the ancient work of TV-Nihon, back when they deserved basically every bit of criticism you'll see of them, or B)using that work as the starting point, and generally inheriting all the less obvious but more important problems.

As such, it was extremely exciting to see Earthly saying they did the proper full-on retranslation of this series I've wanted to see for years now. So the big question then, is whether or not much has actually changed.




Just to be clear about the level of scrutiny I gave to this, I admittedly wasn't doing a lot of side-by-side comparison. I'm relying on memory mostly, so I couldn't always recall what mistakes started with TV-N, or were made by Agony, or by Earthly with their earlier scrub... but like, this stuff haunts me enough that I still remember *somebody's* wrong version of tons of lines, many of which I never even directly called attention to on here, let alone all the ones I have called out in the past, which I at least checked against those old posts.

On the other hand, the reason this took so long in spite of that is because my initial intention to quickly skim back through certain scenes to get an overall feel for things rapidly turned into me "skimming" back through literally the entire show, skipping over openings and what silent chunks of scenes I could. Which basically means I just watched Faiz again.

All of that happened because I was, honestly, quite impressed by the work I was seeing. I have some caveats I'll get to in a second, but without any doubt in my mind, this is a massive upgrade over anything else I've seen for this series.

You've gotta understand, I went in just hoping for all the very glaringly Just Plain Incorrect lines to be cleaned up, and not only were a huge amount of those finally sorted out, this is also a translation that understands translating a work of fiction is not the same thing as translating like, a road sign.

There's character voice in these subs! Kaido actually reads like he sounds! And so do most of the other characters! I didn't at all expect that level of consideration to be made, but that's by far the most consistent and commendable thing about Earthly's work here. Stuff like that, or matching the rhythm of dramatic... pauses, and all those little things that really bring out the flavor of the drama, somebody was actually paying attention to. You even get the option to have insert themes subtitled, and those translations are themselves working on the same level of quality.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows, even now, unfortunately. A lot of the wrong lines that were less important are still just as wrong as always, and some of the attempts at localization -- while they at least seem like the translator understood the original line -- don't always meet the higher standards I suddenly feel okay holding these subs to, but honestly? It's not the biggest deal in the world. Pretty much all the errors that would seriously impact a viewer's understanding of the characters ARE cleaned up, and while I occasionally felt it didn't always work out as well as it could, the dialogue sure as heck reads way better than it ever has.

To put it in the terms of my favorite corporate president in Kamen Rider, if TV-Nihon's original subs were the lowest of the low, and something like what Shout Factory occasionally blesses us with is the best of the best, then Earthly's new Faiz translation comfortably sits at the absolute best of average. But that evaluation is being strict on it simply because the areas that are still sloppy stand in such stark contrast to how much was done with such obvious immense care. It'd really only take cleaning up the remaining errors to push it into the lowest end of the best, if not higher.

So like, if you even slightly like Faiz having watched it with earlier subs, I feel pretty strongly you'll like the show way more going back to it with Earthly. It's a competent translation that's well worth your time, even if I can't help but still wish for absolute perfection anyway. Guess I just like this show too much!