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Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

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Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#71

Post by theogravity »

kcexn wrote: post #56
makeitdouble wrote: post #32

I really wish we could have had a subs/dubs marketplace. There was no way to make it a proper business when anime was becoming popular on the net, but it would solve an infinite number of problems. Could it be done now that the distribution channels are more mature in Japan ? - Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the transla…

My first thought here is that an open market for translations would just create lots of really bad, free translations and make discovering good translations impossible. Ultimately, there will be a concern that it devalues the translation process, leading to translators getting paid less, not more.

It's already happening. There are visual novel groups that take pateron sponsorship to run the script through machine translation. It's now done in giant batches. They're released for free and I am not able to speak of the quality as I've never tried them, but when I see reviews on steam for a VN that has been machine translated, it never results in a good review.

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#72

Post by totallymike »

silicon5 wrote: post #28
totallymike wrote: post #10

For at least the past year, subtitles under dubs have been horrendous. I’ve watched a handful of Gundam series over this period, and while the subtitles under the Japanese audio are usually fine, the captions that run under the English audio more often than not get every single proper noun completely wrong, and half the dialog in general. A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese…

Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era. The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romaniza…

This is a problem as well, but what I see often is what seems to be the cheapest speech recognition software they could find auto-transcribing the dub, and it falls over any time it meets a name or word it can’t guess out of like to 1,000 most common words in the English language.

Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#73

Post by totallymike »

GolDDranks wrote: post #66
silicon5 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era. The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romaniza…

It gets even worse, when the original mangaka typoes the name, and people follow a single typo like a religion. This happened with Kaoru Mori's "Emma", where a common English surname "Jones" was accidentally spelled "Jounse" by the author, and used in translations without questioning it too much, only later found to be written correctly "Jones" in a later chapter by the author herself.

I see this a lot, and it is a mild pet peeve of mine as well. Along the same lines, since I’m using Gundam as an example in this thread, I’ll point to a technology in the franchise called “psycommu” (pronounced in dubs as psy-com-moo) which is clearly transliterated from how it’s spelled in the original script without taking a second look at it. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have just localized it to “psy-com,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#74

Post by programjames »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #47
onoesworkacct wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+? And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?

I agree - this is the right take. Spend a little extra because your customers REALLY care.

I think the take is: If 100k people watch the episode, spending $200 more for higher quality subtitling comes out to... a whopping 0.2 cents per person (per episode). Let's just say that would cost an extra $1/month per person. Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles? I don't know, but maybe some manager believed they were, and thus it was worth it to make the subscription a little cheaper.

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#75

Post by charcircuit »

vunderba wrote: post #54
charcircuit wrote: post #16

>see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it. If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.

The most popular anime streaming site outside of Japan, Crunchyroll, hasn't had hard-subs.... in forever. You can watch any of the shows in their original Japanese or available dubs without subtitles. I'd be willing to wager Netflix, which has a fair amount of anime, can do the same. What site(s) are you referring to?

It looks like they now offer the option on some content, but it automatically defaults to English and you have to manually turn it off each time. That's a step in the right direction at least.

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#76

Post by socalgal2 »

Are they just bad now? The one I noticed was the "Kingdom" which is several years old. It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and characters but the spoken language was Japanese. So the sub would say "General Mike is going to attack Houston" and the spoken Japanese would say "General Bob is going to attach Seattle" (fill in Mike and Houston with Chinese names and Bob and Seattle with Japaense names)

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#77

Post by DrewADesign »

onoesworkacct wrote: post #42
bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #22

Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc. It wound up being quite a large document! But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching…

How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+? And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?

This is really what’s driving business AI products’ push by fleece vest set, though: knowing that they can make enshitification just that much more attractive.

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#78

Post by baobun »

wk_end wrote: post #30
bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #22

Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc. It wound up being quite a large document! But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching…

> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! It's wild to hear someone - especially someone in the industry - say that. Fans definitely bring the most enthusiasm to their work, but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.

Let's just say the variance is high. Great stuff and groups out there but the bar has been lower (until now, I guess).

Just according to keikaku.

Translator's note: "Keikaku" means plan

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#79

Post by orthozato »

Barrin92 wrote: post #62
wk_end wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! It's wild to hear someone - especially someone in the industry - say that. Fans definitely bring the most enthusiasm to their work, but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.

>but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism. funny to see the comment. I was rewatching JoJo, this time in dub, and just came across a line like this. (the context is a fight between two 19th century British characters in a very theatrical setting): Sub: "Stop the futile, useless resistance. Don't hide in the curtain's shadows and come out!" Dub: "You're behind the curtain, like Poloni…

Well, but that's the work of localization, which is a whole art itself.

It is quite tricky and this Shakespeare reference might be a little bit out of context...

Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

#80

Post by aidenn0 »

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #22

Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc. It wound up being quite a large document! But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching…

I sampled a couple of shows on Netfix and I couldn't find any anime subtitled in English; just closed-captioning of the English dub. Netflix's selection I would describe as "fine," so the quality of the subtitles is, IMO a big differentiator for Crunchyroll and given that my household is looking to reduce the streaming services, this change makes the decision of "which one" a lot easier.
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