Read the passage and answer the questions given below it.
My best Japanese teacher was a stranger called Kaze, whose face I never saw. In 2009 he timed subtitles for a fansub group, one of the loose online crews that translated each new Naruto episode within hours of its Tokyo airing, fitted each line to the speech and gave it free to viewers abroad with no legal way to watch. I was fourteen, in Kanpur, on a family computer that needed forty minutes per download.
I remember the notes more than the plots. Yellow text at the top of the screen would explain that senpai meant an older student or colleague, and that English had no neat word for it. The group was fastidious about such things. Two members once argued in its chat until three in the morning over whether a girl’s word for her elder brother should become “big brother” or stay Japanese. The one who wanted to keep the Japanese won. The episode came out late.
Without anyone planning it, those quarrels taught a generation of us what school rarely did: translation is a chain of choices, and every choice costs something. Keep the word and the viewer has to work; smooth it into English and the line goes down easily but sounds slightly false. We grew suspicious of any translation that looked effortless.
I do not want to romanticise this. The subtitles were often clumsy, sometimes plainly wrong, and the enterprise sat in a legal grey zone the studios had every reason to resent. Most groups faded once streaming services began offering official subtitles within a day. Those are cleaner. They are also quieter, because the translator is meant to vanish. I miss the visible seams, the stranger at 2 a.m. admitting in yellow letters that this one did not quite carry over.
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
(A) The writer first turned to fansubs mainly in order to learn Japanese.
(B) The writer feels that leaving a word untranslated has a cost of its own.
(C) Most fansub groups closed because viewers grew tired of their clumsy subtitles.
(D) The writer accepts that the studios had fair grounds to object to fansubs.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → (B) and (D) only
Each statement is checked against the passage.
(A) The writer first turned to fansubs mainly in order to learn Japanese. — Incorrect.
- Fansubs were for viewers abroad “with no legal way to watch”.
- The writer came to watch the show.
- The lessons came “without anyone planning it”.
(B) The writer feels that leaving a word untranslated has a cost of its own. — Correct.
- “Keep the word and the viewer has to work.” Every choice in translation “costs something”.
- Keeping the word costs the viewer some effort.
(C) Most fansub groups closed because viewers grew tired of their clumsy subtitles. — Incorrect.
- Most groups faded “once streaming services began offering official subtitles”.
- The passage does not say viewers grew tired of them.
(D) The writer accepts that the studios had fair grounds to object to fansubs. — Correct.
- The writer says the studios “had every reason to resent” the fansubs.
- To resent means to feel angry about something that seems unfair.