[eloisant]

Well, no. Fansubs are usually very poor quality translation. Not only do hey leave English mistakes in the subs, but they leave half of the stuff in Japanese (chan, sempai, sensei, etc.) because those are words their audience understand anyway.

Well, sorry but "sensei" just means "doctor", "professor" or "teacher" depending on the context, it's not some mysterious magic title that can't be translated.

[aidenn0]

Translation is hard. Honorifics end up being a place where fansubbers just give up.

On the other hand, consider a series in which character A calls character B "B kun" while character C calls character B "B sempai".

Most of the time it doesn't matter enough to try and bother with a good way of translating that, but sometimes it comes up in the plot, perhaps several episodes into the show.

Choosing to leave those untranslated isn't anything new, nor unique to fansubs. The Early '90s AnimeEigo translation of the Aa! Megamisamaa OVA left them untranslated in some cases, with a note on the top of the screen.

Yes, fansubs could use better copy-editing, but so could some professional subs. The biggeset offender is that I have seen several instances of English loan-words left in their rōmaji spelling rather than their proper English spellings in commercial subtitles.

Some of the higher production value translations will go for a very literal subtitle translation and a highly figurative dub translation. An example of this is the "Tenchi Forever" restaurant scene translation where The dub is roughly:

    Waiter: "Would you like coffee after your meal?"
    Diner:  "No"

and the subtitle is

    Waiter: "Would you like tea with that"
    Diner:   "Yes"

(That one particularly sticks out in my mind since if you watch with sub+dub at the same time you have someone speaking "no" with a subtitle of "yes")

[Pxtl]

Idunno, sometimes the translations do lose some context. I've lost interest in anime since then, but when I was younger I saw a fansub of Princess Mononoke before I saw the official sub... and yeah, leaving some of the monster's names untranslated made more sense. Calling the creatures the Deer God and the Demon instead of Tatagami and Shishigami created a bunch of connotative problems. AFAIK, those aren't even real words in Japanese, so translating them wasn't necessary - they were names, titles, not things needing translating. By translating Tatagami into "demon" they created the impression that the beast was evil instead of angry and cursed. By calling the Shishigami the "Deer God" it created the impression that it was the god of the Deer instead of the god of the forest itself.

The folks watching it with me found the Disney sub confusing when I had no trouble keeping up with the original.

So there's a balancing act, and I'll agree that otakus are too quick to leave stuff untranslated, commercial translators are too agressive at picking a word that doesn't fit.