The official Johnny's phone app, J-Web, has followed suit after Johnny's net went multi-lingual and supports English, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) and Korean for their paid J-Web services. You have to muddle through the Japanese version to get to where you can sign up to subscribe to the service, but when you make it there it will prompt you to pick a language and you can sign up. (With a valid credit card and provided that you have a smart phone in the first place of course.) The fee is 315 yen per month but you not only get access to the mobile app in your language of choice but the blogs, which are one of J-Web's exclusives, are translated.
It is nice to see Johnny's continue to branch out internationally as an international fan. I went ahead and subscribed to the service and I am still exploring it. I have already checked out some of the blog entries and while they did not go back and translate everything I think they did well with how far back they did go and it is not like the Japanese version has all of them either.
I know there has been some complaints from parts of fandom about people deciding to no longer translate and share the J-Web blog entries. Personally I think it is better to no longer share them as fan translations to me are to help spread the fandom by sharing something that is not officially available in the language it is being translated into. So if there are groups translating it into languages such as French, Spanish, Thai, etc, then I see no problem with those. But the English translations should stop as it is available. Of course not everyone can afford it, I can understand that, but Johnny's is known to be very protective and I want to see them expand more overseas so we can better things, like concerts (no harm in dreaming, right?), but that will not happen unless ventures like this prove profitable. Besides blog translations are hardly the only way to enjoy the fandom if money is an issue.
Of course I am still hoping that Johnny's may make the leap and create an official Youtube channel. Even if all they put up are the short versions of PVs it would at least be a source of video streams that can be shared. I know I would not have been able to get into Johnny's if it were not for all the videos that used to be on Youtube and I think it would help get more people into the groups if they had such access.
It is nice to see Johnny's continue to branch out internationally as an international fan. I went ahead and subscribed to the service and I am still exploring it. I have already checked out some of the blog entries and while they did not go back and translate everything I think they did well with how far back they did go and it is not like the Japanese version has all of them either.
I know there has been some complaints from parts of fandom about people deciding to no longer translate and share the J-Web blog entries. Personally I think it is better to no longer share them as fan translations to me are to help spread the fandom by sharing something that is not officially available in the language it is being translated into. So if there are groups translating it into languages such as French, Spanish, Thai, etc, then I see no problem with those. But the English translations should stop as it is available. Of course not everyone can afford it, I can understand that, but Johnny's is known to be very protective and I want to see them expand more overseas so we can better things, like concerts (no harm in dreaming, right?), but that will not happen unless ventures like this prove profitable. Besides blog translations are hardly the only way to enjoy the fandom if money is an issue.
Of course I am still hoping that Johnny's may make the leap and create an official Youtube channel. Even if all they put up are the short versions of PVs it would at least be a source of video streams that can be shared. I know I would not have been able to get into Johnny's if it were not for all the videos that used to be on Youtube and I think it would help get more people into the groups if they had such access.