Soldats began as a secret society in the Noir anime series. Technically, it is the French word for "soldier," but for our purposes, it starts with the anime. You can research the word itself on your own.

After seeing some of Noir, Amateras decided he wanted a secret society of his own. He founded a digisubbing group named Slow... err... Soldats, whose original purpose was, of course, to fansub Noir. Years later... wait, we're still here?!

What does all of this mean? Basically, we look for animated Japanese videos in the original language and make them available with English subtitles. This process involves translating the raw Japanese, editing the translation into coherent and appropriate English, timing the subtitles to appear on the screen at the right time, and selecting fonts and subtitle styles that don't make the viewers want to burn their eyes. Then the file is encoded into a form that is both more portable than the original raw and more watchable than those terrifying fansubs that some people may have seen on VHS back in the day.

Ideally, we end up with crisp video, a translation that is true to the original Japanese dialogue, and subtitles that fit the anime in both style and language. Then we pass the file along to the quality checkers, who tell everyone else what they did wrong and insist that it not be released until every detail is fixed. They're utterly heartless, but we're proud of the end result.

All of this is done for free in our spare time, because we enjoy anime and want to share these series with people outside of Japan. We never sell our releases; while they're available, you can download them for free (check our IRC and BitTorrent sections). However, as soon as a company purchases the rights to distribute a title in the United States (also known as "licensing" a title), we drop the project and ask people to stop serving the fansubs.

We want to support the companies that are working to promote anime in North America, so if you can't find one of our projects because it has been licensed, we encourage you to buy the official Region 1 releases.