I still [hope] that a game fan translation community will spring up [and grow into what] anime fansubbing was twenty years ago: first as niche activity of fanatics, then as an underground sensation, and finally as the impetus that helps [to break the genre] into [the English] mainstream. [Similar to] the [evolving] process of mainstreaming anime over here in [Region 1 areas including Canada], [this] isn’t going to happen overnight.
Unfortunately, this will never happen. Having been a small part of both the anime fansub scene and the game fansub scene, I’ll throw in my $0.02:
The reason why anime fansubs are so frequent nowadays is because it’s pretty simple to throw one together. All the “jobs” besides translating are learned through trial and error, and just about anyone can “QC” an upcoming release. All the tools are already provided to a fansub group, such as SubStation Alpha, VirtualDub and TextSub. Therefore, if you have a translator and a bunch of friends who don’t have anything better to do, you can make a fansub.
However, that’s not true with game fansubbing. Every game has a different encryption method for their files. As a result, the translator is not the only experienced “job” that is required. You now need someone who can hack into the file format, and you also need someone who can retouch system graphics into their English equivalents. This makes the barrier of entry notably higher than a making an anime fansub.
If you’ve got all those people, now you have to make the poor translator go through thousands of lines instead of the average 300-350 lines in a 25-minute anime episode. An editor filled with an equal amount of angst will have to look it over. QCing no longer means watching a show several times and nitpicking all the fine detail … it involves paying attention to those thousands of lines and running the game on a plethora of systems to make sure it’s running all right. Finally, distribution of patches only really encourages piracy of the R2s and does not help spread the word around contrary to popular belief. This is one such flaw I find with the “Kanon” translation project – everyone who is supporting it has already heard of the hype through other means, mostly because of the fansubs that preceded the project. Anyone who can play the patched game already has the Japanese version, which means they’re already a bishoujo game fan. In order for a game fansub to actually increase the awareness of bishoujo gaming, the game fansubs have to be directed at people who wouldn’t otherwise be bishoujo game fans. Those people are the ones who can make a difference.
In order to do that, a more equivalent approach would be to release the entire patched game as a standalone, but with the games growing over 1GB in size and beyond, it’ll be hard to distribute even with the help of BitTorrent (Then again, who would have thought five years ago that a 175MB anime fansub download would be the common method?). People might (and probably will) cry foul over this idea, but in actuality the ideals are not particularly different than an anime fansub. The game has been hacked so that all the Japanese has been replaced by English text, which means the original condition of the game has been altered. This is what anime fansub groups bank on – since they usually use TV raws with their large subtitles permanently blocking up a portion of the screen, they hope that their fansub is not a replacement for a commercial release. The same can apply to a game fansub. However, the fansub groups aren’t trying to fool anyone: In the end, they’re both illegal and no one’s trying to change that fact. It’s the ethical factor that drives most anime fansub groups to what they do. Can this also be true for game fansubbing? Since game fansubbing will never be the phenomenon that anime fansubbing is, no one can say for sure. However, I believe that standalone releases are still better than patches because standalone releases will impact the public on a wider scale than patches. Check the number of hits on a fansub download site versus a site such as scriptclub.org … the results are obvious.
Please note that a good number of fansub groups are simply a bunch of teenagers with lots of free time. Those people can’t obtain bishoujo games legally in the first place. Some are in it only for the number of downloads their fansub will chalk up on BitTorrent, so those people won’t have the patience to deal with a game fansub. Also note that many translators in the anime fansub scene cannot actually read the language; they can only interpret casual dialogue that is muttered. Translators for most manga fansub groups rely on furigana or even worse, Chinese/Korean adaptations in order to produce their results. Most editors I’ve seen do not edit an anime fansub or have any knowledge of Japanese that would assist them in providing suggestions – they just run the script through a spellchecker and if it “seems” good enough, it’s accepted (For example, not too many anime fansub editors can suggest the aesthetic changes to your post I made above). Plus you need people for all the unique positions that aren’t required for anime fansubbing but are required for game fansubbing as I’ve stated above.
Therefore, the number of people who are actually capable of doing a game fansub decreases to a fittingly small amount, and that small amount won’t increase dramatically any time soon. The number of people in that pool who would want to game fansub is even smaller. And thus, game fansubbing will never become the force that anime fansubbing is today.