Quick glossary of fansubbing terms and general gSS workflow

Yeah I don’t know either, but it gives me an excuse to use the “Bro” tag.

Since a lot of people seem to be refreshing my blog to get an idea of subbing progress, I guess I’ll give you all a small glimpse at what goes on. It’s nothing too in depth, unlike that “newbie’s guide” that I saw a while back. Just enough to give you an idea what the hell I mean by QC or TL.

Capping and Encoding
For us this is basically one step. We cap the .ts (transport stream) directly and skip having to deal with Japanese P2P programs in an attempt to get raws. Our encoder, when he isn’t slaying online dragons, getting drunk or generally larking about, gives us a low quality workraw which is used for pretty much everything. Thanks to the magic of softsubbing, the final encoding can be done here and in fact it’s usually the first thing that’s complete.

Translating (TL)
Translating, occurs shortly after airing. It’s helped by having CCs but a workraw is useful for getting context.

Timing & Typesetting (TS)
The translated dialogue is then timed to the actual words being said by the characters in the video. Typesetting is done for text that appears on screen such as episode titles. Gundam 00 is fairly light on important tsing, while a show like Maria+Holic relies on the words written on screen as part of the gags.

EDIT/TLC/QC Clusterfuck
In a normal group, editing of the script occurs sometime before timing. It’s basically cleaning up grammar and making sentences flow better. We don’t have a dedicated editor so we just have three to four people, including the translator, go over the entire script in what is essentially multiplayer notepad. Editing, translation checking (TLC) and script quality checking (QC) are essentially done at the same time. This is usually the rate-limiting step of our process.

Release Candidate (RC)
When the script is done, everything is muxed into an mkv file. Recently I’ve gotten some buddies who are also my greatest critics an RC copy where they will proceed to rip apart the script and point out any problems because it is the only way they can achieve orgasm. Bushido lines are systematically taken apart and reconstructed to maximize homolust while staying (somewhat) true to the original translation. You can thank Good Haro for the TL checking on Bushido lines, since she’s a fat, lonely yaoi fangirl.

Release (and Despair)
Hopefully nothing has gone horribly wrong at this point and we release. Lately we’ve been getting it out within 24 hours but our original “12 hours after airing” target has been missed quite a bit now!