Thanks so much for your response! Apologies for it taking a little extra time to reply, but I wanted to collect my thoughts (and some concrete examples) before jotting things down.
For all I know, there have been multiple people/groups doing translations. I know that anything I've seen on YouTube in the past has been the worst of what I've seen. It seems some of that has been scrubbed, so I'm referring here to downloaded versions. I literally have no idea who does what in what capacity for what people/groups and what goes where, so this is as otherwise "blind" as I can grab it.
I want to say up front and guarantee that I didn't do a whole lot of work here to gather these screenshots. That was intentional, and by design. I wanted to VERY QUICKLY flip through entirely random episodes from entirely different folders and see what I quickly scrub to. I didn't pick and choose; I literally just quickly flipped to seeing dialogue and screencapped.
Here are some of these quick examples I saw right off the bat:
There are
a lot of capitalization issues throughout the subtitles (saiyan, demigra), and there are plenty of typos I've seen (Kaioshin in particular here). There are also a ton of completely nonsensical sentences. One of these examples here is the second half of a sentence, but I promise that having the first part doesn't help the context at all.
I barely did any work to find these. They were regular and constant.
So with that in mind, I dipped to more recent content,
Meteor Mission in particular. I transcribed the full first episode's translation that I saw... and it was pretty OK! Seems there were leaps and bounds gained here. That said, there are still a few things I wanted to call out here:
In particular, a good style guide is not to break up sentences across multiple screens with commas. If anything, it's a better practice to do so with ellipses. For example, there's:
Also, the other Goku,
you were fighting earlier, went along with the others for recovery and patrolling.
For starters, there's no reason this couldn't have all just been on screen in its entirety the whole time. That said, if it HAD to be broken up, I'd do something like (and I'd rewrite this whole thing anyway, since it's super awkward):
Also, the other Goku (that) you were fighting earlier...
...went along with the others for recovery and patrolling.
There's "Bon appetti" at some point which should be "Bon appétit" (note the mark and the typo).
For other capitalization issues, I see a line like "The scroll of Time, let us borrow your power!" and wonder why "Scroll" isn't capitalized since it's a proper noun. I wouldn't even start it with "The" here, either -- just something like, "Scroll of Time, let us borrow your power!"
There are a few other things from this episode in particular that I would critique, but they're mostly additional examples of the same things noted above (lots of weird comma breaks and some awkward sentences).
I don't know if you're doing the translation without any external editing, but there should always be another set of eyes dedicated to actually reading and comprehending the translation before it gets solidified. That's my role, for example, here at
Kanzenshuu -- I do a pass of every translation and challenge back sentences that don't read smoothly, and fix any typos that may be submitted in there.
I hope that's a somewhat-comprehensive overview of where I'm coming from!
