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> 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.
To be fair, official translations are equally notorious - "Jelly Donuts Are My Favorite" and so on
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…
Why don't they take the timings from the closed captions of the original Japanese broadcast?
* Almost all Japanese subtitles include subtitles for every noise made as well as including SDH-like information about sounds. This means that a naive attempt to just match up subtitle timings won't work -- the English translation will have fewer subtitles and you will have to skip Japanese lines that do not have an equivalent in the English transcript.
* Most translated subtitles simplify things and have to re-organise sentence structures to match the target language, which means that you often have to pick different timings for how a sentence is broken up in English than in the original Japanese. Sometimes a very short Japanese phrase requires two sentences to accurately translate, sometimes a long Japanese sentence can be translated into a fairly short English phrase.
* Higher-quality subtitles will also provide translations for signs and other on-screen text (ASS supports custom placement, fonts, styles, and colours -- it is powerful enough to the point where some of the really good fansub jobs I've seen make it look like the video was actually localised to English because all of the signs look like they have been translated in the original video). The original timings don't help with this.
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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.
I'm not aware of the landscape right now, but for a long time the absolute best translations were free, and potentially baked into pirated videos. Anime viewers tend to be passionate, I think there's a reasonable chance to have groups emerge with a reputation to defend and getting paid more than they are now (which could be 0)
This already exists today -- translation groups rush to be the first to translate a new series, and some fans have strong preferences around which groups provide the best translations (both in terms of accuracy and style). You can see the set of groups doing translations on the AniDB page for any Anime you like.
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…
except that it doesn't show up as revenue. That's where the problem is - people would obviously prefer to have elite tier subs, but not be willing to pay elite tier prices for it.
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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…
$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).
The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.
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…
Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree.
Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with.
Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless encodings to the point of delusion.
I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region.
Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned:
https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/Project-4K77/
Always bet on guys who care. Corporations will never be able to compete. They simply do not give a shit. They want money for minimum viable products. These guys do it out of love.
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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.
I'm not aware of the landscape right now, but for a long time the absolute best translations were free, and potentially baked into pirated videos. Anime viewers tend to be passionate, I think there's a reasonable chance to have groups emerge with a reputation to defend and getting paid more than they are now (which could be 0)
Make sure the editorial board is paid a living wage and the translators are too. Set up a marketplace for a dozen such organizations, and let them compete. All the incentives align.
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Crunchyroll strangely lacks Japanese subs, which seems strange as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and most others have them in addition to all the translations.
Japanese people as a whole never watch content with proper subtitles. And the subtitles that do exist in Japan for Japanese content are universally awful. It seems only foreign companies that promote being accessible have them. Unext, a Japanese company, never offers subs on Japanese content. It only have subtitles for foreign content... but it only offers subtitles if you're not watching Japanese dubs. It never, und…
Funnily enough, the complaints you have here actually apply more to English subtitles in my experience. Modern English subtitles tend to accurately transcribe what was said, but if you look at official subtitles from the mid-2000s and earlier you'll see that most subtitles are made much shorter than the original text. Tom Scott's video on subtitling talks about this historical practice and how it is different today[1].
Are you sure that the subtitle services you used are actually using official subtitles, and that they aren't actually translations or from some other source? How old are the shows you're watching (I believe some movies from the 70s I watched were character-accurate but that might not have been as common in the past)?
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Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.
I'd rather have one good streaming service with everything on it than the dozens of crappy streaming services with their ever-shifting patchwork of available licensed content we have now. Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
completely agree - i think the gov't regulatory body should change the landscape to what film and cinema have; such that distributor of media cannot own and monopolize the broadcast rights on their own platform, and publisher of media be forced to sell/license at the same price to all distributors.
This way, a streaming service can always know and pay for a broadcasting license for _any_ media, and all media must be license-able for any streaming service (at the same price), thus no monopoly can exist under this system.
> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.” I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.