[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by AdemoS

Not necessarily, many groups [Solar Fansubs and AniKraze to name two] translate a good amount of the credits. And taking those Romanized names into Google Translate, is a fairly useful starting point for researching a impressive staff member.

I have no idea what you think you will accomplish by using Google translate on a romanized staff member name but I'm pretty sure the result will be nothing useful.

To a certain extent it is possible to find English resources about the more well-known directors, voice actors, storyline writers etc etc; mostly fan collected or fan translated material. For this purpose it could arguably be useful to have translated credits. But as previously discussed, having them in an online easily searchable database is enormously more convenient and useful than having them plastered over the video in a most assuredly non-indexed and non-searchable form. Such a database already exists: ANN. Instead of googling around, you instantly get the person in question's name (with proper romanization), the kanji with which it is written in Japanese, ready for copypasting into search engines if you are so inclined, and a convenient list of what said person has worked on. Plastering translated credits all over our precious video gives you none of this except a romanization that cannot be copypasted but has to be typed manually into the nearest search engine. To summarize: it's inefficient, error-prone and goes to extreme lengths to avoid all the good things about the internet.

Originally Posted by AdemoS

Many reasons.

The question was rhetoric.

Originally Posted by AdemoS

Fortunately, this isn't as common is it could be. Since many shows, end their episodes with the beginning of the ED music. [ex: FMA, Gundam Seed] So splicing would create a noticeable hiccup in audio.

I think it's more common than you think. Also you've obviously never encoded anything or you'd know that you never splice audio if you can avoid it; splicing only the video and adjusting karaoke timing if necessary is orders of magnitude simpler.

Originally Posted by anime_layer

It's not only a question of understanding but also a question of respect.

Ending credits can easily be compared to the fansubber's credits they often take much care to place them right next to important positions in the opening credits and often show they completely disregard that there is something like original credits that could actually be read.

I couldn't care less who translated, timed or typesetted a show. It has to be good enough and everything else is irrelevant to me. In this vein I could argue that fansubber's credits should be removed since they just clog up the screen.

But I don't think that would be right. Fansubbers put a lot of effort into subbing and it's right that they get credit for that. But that applies even more for the creators of the anime that put a trendemous effort into production and often don't earn enough to support a decent living. Cutting away the ending credits like they're just dead freight really isn't right towards all the people that deserve credit for what they've done. Even if most people can't read it or don't care about it.

And so we are (very predictably, I might add) back in the ethics debate again. I've tried to bash people over the head with their blatantly obvious logical inconsistencies in this matter for years without much success, and while it has been a fun ride I won't do it in full again here. Suffice to say that this:

Originally Posted by anime_layer

Fansubbers put a lot of effort into subbing and it's right that they get credit for that. But that applies even more for the creators of the anime that put a trendemous effort into production and often don't earn enough to support a decent living. Cutting away the ending credits like they're just dead freight really isn't right towards all the people that deserve credit for what they've done. Even if most people can't read it or don't care about it.

is a rather laughable argument. It's a bit weird that you're so obsessed with paying your respects to the people who, as you say, frequently don't earn enough to support a decent living, while you're so obviously and blatantly disrespecting their legal rights to their own intellectual property by watching their works without paying the price they've set. I would think that if you really did respect them and their wishes, you wouldn't watch fansubs, but obviously such a honorable site as AnimeSuki and obviously its most honorable and respectable site staff would never lower themselves to such questionable activities and either don't watch fansubs at all or buy R2 DVD's of everything they watch (since Really Ethical people don't watch licensed fansubs).

To sum up the thinly veiled insults of your intelligence and capabilities of logical reasoning and also wrap up the argument: it's not about respect. What is the point of crediting someone whose name might just as well be meaningless gibberish to the average viewer, even if it's correctly romanized; and whom noone but very very few viewers will ever care about or know who it is? You might just as well make up credits at random. No, the primary point of credits (beyond the 5-10 most well-known people) is not to inform the viewer of who did what and thus write their names down in history, but rather for the satisfaction of the credited person; a way to recognize that he or she has done a good job, and that the work in question is something they can be proud of as the work of their own hands. Thus, credits are not intended for the viewer but rather for the creators themselves, and hence translating credits is meaningless. The same applies to fansub credits, and hence it is none of your business to determine whether it's right or not for fansubbers to include credits. Some wish to credit themselves for various reasons, others don't. For the viewers, it doesn't matter in the slightest, but for the fansubbers it's relevant.

To summarize the summary, translating credits is at best an empty gesture to somewhat try to appease your guilty conscience, and ultimately yet another form of the all too common hypocrisy that is prevalent among Ethical Fansubbers and their supporters. End of longwinded argument.