For the past three years, a lone anime fan has been faithfully subtitling episodes of the wildly popular anime series Naruto — and now it’s follow-up Baruto — for a growing Burmese-language audience.
Each Monday, fans of the series head to the Naruto World-Myanmar Facebook page, where the man who spent the weekend painstakingly doing the translations posts the latest episode.
The page’s humble beginnings in 2015 stand in stark contrast to the 70,000 strong online community it boasts today. The man behind the subtitling, who asked to be identified only as Nico, this week told Coconuts Yangon how it all got started.
“Actually, one of my friends founded the page 4 or 5 years ago,” he said. “I started working here in 2017, writing articles about Naruto but also to promote cosplay events in Yangon that I organized.”
Cosplay events, which have drawn thousands, are just one element of a broader community of anime fans that’s grown exponentially since Myanmar shifted to civilian rule in 2011 and relaxed access to entertainment from abroad.
Other Facebook pages dedicated to anime and Japanese movies with Burmese subtitles have gained tens of thousands of fans right alongside Naruto World-Myanmar.
Half a decade after his page began, however, Nico is the only member of the team left to create the Burmese subtitles for new episodes of Baruto, a spin-off of the original anime, and upload content about Naruto to the Facebook page.
“Unfortunately, the other two members left, and I was only one admin left here. The anime Baruto came out soon [after], and I started translating new episodes every week,” he said.
In case you’re wondering, no, Nico doesn’t speak Japanese, but the fact that episodes with English-language subtitling already exist makes for an easy workaround.
“Actually I never really learned Japanese. I have watched anime for years, so most of the words are familiar to me,” he said. “I’m generally translating from English to Burmese. But whenever I feel like the English subtitles are wrong, I use Google to translate what I hear from Japanese dub.”
For each video, Nico tracks down the raw video file online, then adds subtitles using a subtitle editor. After inputting the subtitles, he encodes the fresh video file, and Burmese-speaking Baruto fans have their weekly fix.
The process takes up to 5-7 hours, but Nico said he can finish an episode off in as little as two hours if he’s in a rush.
While some of his appreciative fans — the site averages about 3,000 downloads a week — have offered cash in return for the subtitling efforts, it was decided early on that it was a path they’d never pursue.
“Some have offered, but we decided not to get paid. It would be a burden for us. I do this work with nothing but my passion,” he said. Editor: Given the potential copyright issues at play, it’s probably just as well.
Nico said he knows of at least 20 other people who are currently creating Burmese subtitles for anime videos, adding that Baruto is one of about 15 series he’s personally translated.
In addition to maintaining the Naruto Facebook page, Nico is part of MCE-023, an organization that puts together cosplay events in Yangon. He also organizes birthday events for anime characters that are a hit in Yangon. Yes, you read that correctly.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1918933278400172&type=1&l=3e1107674d
As he juggles all these endeavors in his free time, Nico said it’s all with a clear goal in mind — getting more people in Myanmar to see anime as a legitimate form of entertainment.
“Yangon’s anime community has nearly 700,000 people. I want more people to know about this culture and treat it equally like other forms of entertainment.”
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