Hello, everyone!
Here's a little test I did in my spare time a while back.
It's episode 115 (or 117) of the original Pocket Monsters, fully translated and subbed by me, along with the 4Kids dub synced to it with a Song and Signs sub track and Dubtitles both timed to it. It's the second-to-last episode of the Orange Islands arc, one that's never been translated into English before to my knowledge.
The video source is WinxBloom1980's encodes of the KIDS-Station TV airings that are currently the best we've got as far as how the series looks. R2J DVDs do exist but are very rare and incomplete, WEB-DL sources like Hulu and Amazon are sadly not up to par, and most if not all R1US sources (especially for this part of the series) are also inferior. If requested I will edit this torrent and flag it as a remake, since I did no actual work on the video side as we do not have access to the raw unfiltered KIDS-Station airings. A big thanks for all the work WinxBloom does for Japanese Pokemon. I would also like to thank 10gig/ZeroCool/whatever you prefer, Wicked, and Scoped for helping me figure out what the best and worst sources for both video and audio were for the series.
As for the audio, the Japanese AAC track comes from the TV airing as well. For the dub track, I kept the audio for the OP, ED, Oak Segment, and NEP from the TV airing and left those in, while taking the DisneyXD WEB-DL as a source for the main episode's audio (it was the best sounding we could find as all releases of Orange Islands were very poor in quality), while using the R1US DVD Singles for the eyecatch audio since the WEB-DL omitted them. Because some episodes in the English dub were skipped over, the original eyecatch for this episode did not include Mr. Mime, but rather Omastar, so I went back to a prior episode that had Mr. Mime in the eyecatch, grabbed the audio from the DVD, and spliced it in there. I was debating whether or not to reencode it to AC3 after rendering it uncompressed, but figured that a raw source that sounded this poor really wouldn't benefit from it. Especially considering the audio would have been even bigger than the video file at that point. Kind of ridiculous if you ask me.
Unfortunately, the Professor Oak segments after the ED theme were never dubbed, so they have been kept in Japanese, with both dub subtitle tracks simply keeping them fully subtitled. Same with the NEP. I am pretty sure the US never got those either. Or at least, I haven't seen any.
The subtitle translation for the Japanese audio was done completely 100% by me, with a lot of fact checking and reference going on Bulbapedia. I also had Scoped and professorwho look over my subs before they went out to help me on some translation hiccups I had, so I appreciate that. Sometimes Meowth is really hard to understand...
As far as the translation itself goes, I went with a compromise much like Pokedex did for their short-lived subs. I decided to keep all human and location names in their original Japanese, but opted to use the English localized names for Pokemon, item and attack moves. I know this may not be the ideal way to go for some people, but I feel as if it's a good balance.
The dubtitle Vobsubs from the R1US DVD Singles were OCR'd by iKaos and fixed by me in Aegisub, so thank you for that.
At the current moment I am not sure if I'll have any time to work on more of the series but I'll be sure to look into it based on feedback. Maybe in the future, our SoM team could tackle this beast...
Please let me know what you think.
Thank you! I hope that one day we can get the entire original series translated and subbed!
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