Post Release Feedback, Future Releases, Details on Bringing a Project to Light

Hey everyone,

By now, a number of you have been able to get your hands on our latest release, Transformers: Legends of the Microns. Once again, we're very happy to have helped bring closure to another Japanese Transformers series in the community.

Through browsing the various forums out there, we've been reading the feedback from many folks, and again it's wonderful to hear the positive feedback. We also don't mind to hear some criticism as it helps us think more on what we should do for our future releases.

Several folks have posted questions about what series are we going to do next. As with Car Robots and Legends of the Microns it was completely due to circumstance and timing that these series were done. The begging question for most folks out there is are we going to do Beast Wars The Second and Beast Wars Neo. I wish I could give a simple yes answer. But it's not that easy to do either of these series. For one, they use a lot of regional dialect, that I myself am not familiar with, and cultural terms that will take some time to translate. It also will depend on the kind of commitment we have from our team to do this. With Car Robots, we were lucky that we had help from so many different people who chipped in their time to script for us out of their busy lives. Even with scripts, it took countless hours and days of translating to get just 1 episode completed.

For those who've never taken a shot at translating and timing a series, it does take a long time to do it properly. Many times, you'll translate something and then realize weeks later that there's a better way of translating and will go back to change it. This back and forth is what takes up a lot of time. As translators, we don't simply translate once and leave it, we're always coming back to tweak it so that it sounds natural and it makes sense. Then top that off with small grammar errors and realizing that something was mistimed by accident, and then the next thing you realize is that hours have added up! This only gives you a brief overview of what we deal with here when trying to bring a series out. Hopefully, though it makes you appreciate the kind of commitment that gets brought in when doing these series. If we can get that kind of commitment again, we can get shows like Beast Wars The Second and Beast Wars Neo done.

On the subject of translating Transformers Prime and Transformers Animated, I can definitely say this will not be happening. The reason is, is because Prime finished in Japan at the end of season 2 and it was basically left for dead. There's no reason to translate this since the show was originally a US run production and the version we got was the definitive version. As far Transformers Animated, the show isn't that much different in Japanese other than the Opening and Ending animations, the songs and a few characters names that went with it. I don't feel it justifies a translation since again, what we got here was the way it originally was intended to be seen.

Anyway, if you have any questions or comments we're always willing to answer them via the comments section on this blog or via our Facebook page. If you're interested in helping us out, whether it be scripting, translating or timing, we're only a message away.

We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season and we're happy that 2014 brought several series to the fans out there to enjoy. Take care everyone, and we'll see what 2015 has in store for us!

All the best,
Karyuudo