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No. 40801
[Edit]
For archival reasons, I've been going back over past subs back from when groups such as ddy were more active (and you could usually expect to see alternate subs for seasons). I think my general conclusion is that people have no idea how to evaluate anything
A decent chunk of sub groups just repackaged official subs with minor (but nonetheless positive) edits, and they get worshipped like they're the second coming of christ when the effort involved is about an hour's work. On the other hand you have some subgroups that put in an immense amount of effort with their subs and somehow end up getting pissed on (GG's joshiraku subs are my go-to example. I have no idea what they did to receive so much heat, those aren't low-effort subs considering they included both out-of-band TL notes and inline comments in the ass file). Then you have the groups that decide that "real" translations shouldn't make any reference to japanese terms at all, and so will mercilessly strip off any foreign word (sensei? No that's your "bossman". Yakuza? Nope, "gangster"). [*]
[*] Maybe someday given unbounded time I'll go back and re-edit the translations for my favorite shows. Sabagebu and Flying Witch are good low hanging fruit here, Anime-Koi did a pretty decent job on most of the lines (actually brining it closer to the original JP clause order) but missed on a few others which were worse than the original. And flying-witch had two separate groups (other than the official) make a pass, that'll surely be a fun diff party!
Probably the most annoying thing is that releases don't document the general changes they made, and most people aren't going to bother diffing subs so that's how these cargo cults develop (as an example, the commie subs for Yuyushiki are excessively demonized when as I think I might have written somewhere before they ultimately fixed a few isolated bad word translations, stripped honorifics, and maybe clobbered 1 [honorific-related] joke in total, which while not good is also not the order-of-magnitude fuckup you'd expect from hearing crowd sentiment).
As for localized vs. unlocalized, I think it's a false dichotomy. Unless you're translating poetry in 80% of cases you can usually do a literal translation preserving word choice (and often clause order) without impacting readability. It's only the remaining 20% of cases where the issue of localization comes into place (untranslatable puns or idioms, tradeoff between verbosity, cultural knowledge the viewer might not be familiar with) but there's no point discusisng the nuances there because a lot of groups seem all-to-eager to rewrite perfectly good lines that fall into that 80%.
(Also I think it's worth noting if you are or have ever been interested in subs, skimming through the TL shootouts in the crymore.net blog are a great way to pass the time. Though a bit nitpicky at times, I find most of the analysis there pretty valuable in demonstrating how even subtle phrasing differences in English can lend different nuance [even if I don't always agree with the suggested stylistic edits]. Also I find it interesting that even after this free editing, many groups haven't incorporated the feedback into revised subs).
I've also noticed that there's a general trend for corporate subs (CR et al.) to have become more localized in recent years. They can still be quite passable (or even excellent) most of the time, but the variance seems to have increased (and it's somehow always ends up being the worst on the exact show you wanted to watch).
I think on the whole though, the current crop of fansub groups is a net negative in that it places the community at a local minimum which it's likely to stay at for the foreseeable future: namely whatever few sub groups exist take official subs, munge them a bit, slap on some typesetting, and (most importantly!) plaster their release name on it. Whether that munging is good or bad is like throwing darts, but given that official subs are usually mostly decent and the current crop of subbers seem inclined to less-literal translations, I'll usually bet on it being worse than the original.
The real tragedy is that this means it's often only popular shows (which usually don't need fansubs) which end up getting them, and rarer shows get left out. The other tragedy is that in theory the fact that timing and a first round of rough translation has already been done by the corporate overlords should mean that it's possible for even an amateur – with a working knowledge of japanese grammar, access to a JP dictionary, and healthy poetic spirit but judicious editorial restraint – to smooth out the rough edges in the raw corporate subs, but in practice perfectly good lines get chucked out in the attempt to make the sub "one's own."
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