On Reddit and YouTube, you often see a large number of people praising full stream translations and massively downvoting any comment trying to argue the ethics of reuploading the entire stream, translated or not. One repeat offender of uploading full-stream translations is CMT, who is known for accepting commissions for them at a rate of ~$6 a minute and uploading them to their own channel with multiple mid-roll ads.

Their first full-stream translation that got taken down was from Tamaki, back when Tamaki explicitly told his fans not to clip his streams because of Content ID issues. He’s an independent VTuber, meaning it’s quite expensive for him to deal with Content ID issues on YouTube—a risk that he can only avoid by trusting his fans to not clip or reupload his content elsewhere. Even then, CMT took on a full-stream translation commission of a collab stream between Tamaki and Mamatsuri. This not only violated Tamaki’s wishes, but also Hololive’s guidelines, as written when someone uploaded full-stream translations of Kanata’s 3D debut, got striked by Cover, and proceeded to try to skirt the problem by uploading several parts of the stream in a playlist. I believe Tamaki has since changed his policy to allow short clips, but he is still against full-stream translations unless it’s through official channels.

The second one was more recent—a collab between Matsuri and Kiara that was taken down by Cover themselves. You’re free to form your own opinions concerning these series of events, but to me, it shows that CMT hasn’t learned their lesson and still doesn’t really care about endangering the financial well-being of the people they’re translating and would much rather earn a quick buck taking commissions and making low quality translation clips.

What could they have done differently? Well, before accepting the commissions, they should’ve first contacted Hololive to see if they had permission to accept those commissions first, since any commercial use of the characters must pass by Cover Corp. first (Article 4 Section 2.6). Then, they should’ve contacted all parties associated with the stream (Tamaki and Matsuri in the first case, Kiara and Matsuri in the 2nd case) to see if they’d be willing to accept community captions on their stream.

Yes, this is a long process, but this is the right process. One thing I can’t stress enough is that we’re not helping Cover Corp. out by clipping and translating streams; they’re giving us permission to clip and translate streams. You can argue the benefits Cover Corp. reaped from translated videos all you want, but the fact remains that the girls work under Cover Corp. and anything they stream is protected under Cover’s copyright. And as long as we have their permission, we, as fans, have a duty to abide by their wishes.

To me, the fact that CMT didn’t even attempt to put their translations up for the CC verification process is a huge red flag. What bigger honor is there as a translator and as a fan to have one of your translations appear on the official channels of your favorite VTubers? Unless, of course, you translate the VTubers of Hololive because they’re the “hot new thing” you can milk for money and attention. I’m not here to condemn translators for wanting to earn some money off of their translations, as I’m guilty of monetizing some of my videos as well.

I’m also not accusing CMT or other speedsubbers of not being fans, since I’m not them, and I don’t know what they do besides what they put on their channel, but when they accept commissions for translations AND post those commissions on their own channel (fully monetized with mid-roll ads, mind you), I do have to question their intentions. Putting aside the fact that anyone who receives commissions, be it artists or musicians, don’t double dip by monetizing the works created as a result of those commissions, I’m baffled by CMT for taking commissions at their translating skill level as well as the people who paid money for their subpar translations.

One exception that I think the whole community should know about is OtakMori, who has had several problematic videos as well as the audacity to speedsub Aloe’s apology video—something Cover had stated they’ll translate themselves in order to ensure there’s no chaos from a mistranslated video. In response, Cover took down OtakMori’s video, with one of their social media representatives, and someone who I can personally attest to as highly proficient in Japanese and English, T-chan, pointing out the quality of their translations. I’m not quite sure how OtakMori is still profiting off of Hololive and their talents’ success given his attitude towards T-chan’s statement as well as his attitude towards VTubers as a whole. Moreover, his massive ego prevents him from accepting corrections even when he completely mistranslates something. (URL to the GTL screenshot in the tweet)

I don’t know about the majority of this community, but I personally don’t trust someone who doesn’t even regularly support the talents to be able to accurately translate them. Translation is as much about knowing the person who’s speaking as it is about the words being spoken. And it can only get as good as the time and effort you want to put into it, whether it’s shown in the translation or not. I personally spend a fair amount of time researching the speaker, the context, what’s being talked about, etc., before I even attempt to translate them or the things they talk about.

So far, I’ve never seen a translation group that translates all the girls, uploads multiple times a day, and still has decent translations. Broken grammar, multiple mistranslated lines, difference in tone and nuance, missing context, misinterpretation of the subject—these are all problems that exist in almost every video from the larger channels I’ve seen, including VTube Tengoku, CMT, BestScenes Vtuber, HoloLive etc Cuts, HLM, etc. I could write a ten-page paper analyzing the mistakes on any single translation clip of theirs.

I can see why Hololive and Cover Corp. don’t want to take action against incompetent translators, both because of the backlash they would receive from the English-speaking community as well as the free advertisement they get from them anyways. But mistranslations do indeed violate the fan work guidelines. Notably, Article 4 Sections 2.2 and 2.3.

Section 2.2: “Not to impair the goodwill or dignity of the characters;”

All the channels with broken grammar already break this guideline by implying the girls are inarticulate in the expression of their native language. Other things like adding curse words where there weren’t any also break this guideline since it implies the girls are more crude in their speech than they actually are.

Section 2.3: “Not to use them for activities or purposes that are considered to be unlawful, or for abusive expression and anti-social activities or purposes, or for the sake of certain creed or religion, or political statements;”

This one isn’t broken particularly often, but it’s worth mentioning that translator bias can and will break this guideline, especially if that translator is someone who is new to translating and isn’t used to speaking for someone else rather than expressing their own thoughts.

So if Hololive doesn’t, or more accurately, can’t take action, I think it’s about time this community stops sitting on their asses praising nonexistent gods dubbed as translators. Am I telling you guys not to watch these channels? Yes, but that’s not something I can control. I don’t expect this to do much in the larger scheme of things, but I hope this provides a different perspective regarding the big TL channels and full-stream translations. And with that, I leave you guys with some things to think about: What are your standards? At which point do you stop and question the accuracy of the translated media you consume?