#the good old days of deciding whether you wanted to spend hours torrenting an ep from the group that was the fastest

[quoththemaiden]

Having originally watched Prince of Tennis via fansubs years before it was licensed, it's hilarious watching the professional translators flail over things fansubbers could take in stride.

When you're a fansubber, you can take the English loanword tension and just translate it as... "tension." It's not quite right, but there's no actual English language equivalent, so it's fine. Everyone hears tension, you write "tension," people figure out what it actually means via context, life is great.

When you're a professional subtitler, you have to try to convey the meaning more accurately. Unfortunately for you, there's no word in English that conveys quite the same thing as the loanword tension. You can't just leave it as "tension," because tension is a bad thing. Instead you're stuck saying ridiculous things like "He's trying to concentrate" when the character is clearly trying to get his tension up and everyone knows it's just a giant mess.

And then you get to "Echizen, service play" and translate it as "Echizen to serve," at which point you've clearly thrown up your hands and are hoping that people either can't parse Japanese accents enough to know what the ref is saying or they're entirely on board with you translating meaning with no regard to loanwords, because you're all-in at this point and there's no going back.