Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by praxulus » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:27 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #95

programjames wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i think you've counted it in a way that makes it sound cheap, but in reality isnt. $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…

>A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.

Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.

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

#122

Post by shigawire » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:30 AM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #115

aidenn0 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching anime dubs with subtitles enabled can be interesting. I've literally seen the dub say "yes" with the sub saying "no."

Sometimes, the same meaning has the opposite response in English and Japanese. It’s called echo polarity (apparently). For example, in English: “You didn’t go?” → “No, I didn’t go” (agreeing) or “Yes, I went” (disagreeing). In Japanese, you should say “yes, I didn’t go” or “yes, I didn’t go”: 行かなかったんですか。→ はい、行きませんでした。(agreeing with the negative) or いいえ、行きました。(disagreeing with the negative) (This difference possibly s…

Even more confusingly, in casual speech I'd probably respond to that question in English like, "yeah, no I didn't go" or conversely "no, yeah I did end up going"

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

#123

Post by HaZeust » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:39 AM UTC

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.

this is a huge problem with opensubtitles - download count or year count for a TV show or movie's subtitles tells you absolutely nothing about how reliable it is.

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

#124

Post by aidenn0 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:45 AM UTC

rmunn wrote: post #112

aidenn0 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching anime dubs with subtitles enabled can be interesting. I've literally seen the dub say "yes" with the sub saying "no."

Was either "yes" or "no" clearly the right translation in context? I'm very curious to know which one was correct, the dub or the sub. Or was it one of those ambiguous situations where either one would be a correct translation of the text, but with different subtext? P.S. For an example of when "yes" might really mean "no", I heard an anecdote. An American guy had been hired by a Japanese company to work in their off…

It was unimportant; in the subs the waiter asked if she wanted tea, in the dubs it was if she wanted coffee after her meal.

IIRC it was the DVD release of Tenchi Forever.

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

#125

Post by FooBarWidget » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:52 AM UTC

programjames wrote: post #74

bonecrusher2102 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is the $1 added to the subscription cost? They don't redo the subs every month. It's developing subs once and then enjoy the benefits forever. It should be a cost that's amortized over something.

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

#126

Post by jcranmer » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:57 AM UTC

praxulus wrote: post #121

chii wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think you've counted it in a way that makes it sound cheap, but in reality isnt. $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…

>A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy). When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality. Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality p…

My recollection is that, by the early days of Crunchyroll, fansubs weren't really competing on quality so much as speed. And with the legitimate licensors having access to the scripts slightly in advance of the Japanese release, the fansubs could never catch up to them in release speed.

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

#127

Post by SllX » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:58 AM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #59

SllX wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re still just within the threshold of good enough, but I was pretty annoyed the day comments disappeared. It might have been young viewers, but I was a young viewer once and those comments went back all the way to that time. It was also one thing Crunchyroll had that other streaming sites typically don’t (except YouTube of course): community.

It's a shame but understandable from a business perspective since they had to have a moderation team to support some of the less savory comments juvenile users were leaving.

No, it’s not understandable because Crunchyroll has spent the majority of its time as a streaming service as a commercial paid or free-with-ads service that has a community, with comments under every video up until like last year. Moderation is an expense, but it’s 1) not an unreasonable one, especially given the scale of Crunchyroll and a paid subscriber base and 2) some investment in automating moderation or developing tools for their moderators can reduce the cost of maintaining moderation.

It was a deliberate choice that removed some of the value of the service and wiped out yet another swath of Internet history. The core is of course the videos, they can coast on that for a while, but it’s the changes like that add up that make Crunchyroll less competitive going forward, especially as other larger services acquire larger anime libraries.

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

#128

Post by charcircuit » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 4:59 AM UTC

kmeisthax wrote: post #43

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.

日本語をわかれる人として、アニメはアメリカで一番部分は英語だけで見たいのは分かります。それから、アメリカで英語に翻訳しております。 If you don't understand the above, then you don't want raw episodes after all.

わかる takes the が particle for what's known. You should use わかる instead of わかれる. わかれる usually means 分かれる. 一番部分 is not natural here, I don't know what you mean

Good luck in your studies.

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

#129

Post by charcircuit » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 5:01 AM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #88

charcircuit wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it just defaults to the user's OS language (iOS, browser). Fortunately once you turn it off (or set it to another language) - that setting will persist so you don't have to constantly change it back. I flip pretty frequently between Chinese and English subs and it'll remember the last setting between episodes / shows / etc.

It didn't persist when I tried it out for what it's worth. Maybe that is a limitation of the browser version.

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

#130

Post by redwall_hp » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 5:02 AM UTC

kbolino wrote: post #11

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a reason it was law in the US that movie production companies couldn't own movie theaters: distribution should be required to be separate to ensure choice on the viewer side due to the inherent non-fungibility of entertainment media. In other words, if through copyright we grant a monopoly, then it's not a sustainable situation for the distribution to also be allowed to consolidate.