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Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

animebythenumbers.substack.com

211–220 of 298 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That Japanese is a travesty. I can only guess, but I suppose you meant something like アメリカ人は大体英語吹き替えのアニメしか見ないからアメリカだけに吹き替えされている

Word of the day, 吹き替える. TIL.

One question if you have a minute. Why is it アメリカだけに吹き替えされている instead of 英語だけに吹き替えされている?

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

#212
> Most anime have exclusive streaming licenses, so for ~70% of 2025’s new releases, and an even larger share of catalog shows and movies, Crunchyroll is often your only means to do so. But that’s not an issue.

Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.

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

#213
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…

Curse my fat fingers, it should read:

In Japanese, you should say “yes, I didn’t go” or “no, I did go”:

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

#214

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 just wish that there were versions of closed captioning that were fan-made and kept. There are movies that I watch over-and-over again that have bad subtitles, and I can do nothing about it. This is a travesty for the hearing-impaired, and the only good thing about it is that on occasion a film may have Easter eggs in their subtitles or things from the script that didn’t make it into production.

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

#215
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I remember watching a video a decade ago, of someone doing review of the subs for each group that was doing Black Rock Shooter, specifically the wheelchair scene, because what it's said has to be taken within the context of what's presented.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 90s I attended an anime club where the main host had an amiga with genloc to generate subtitles, and we watched all the anime classics up to that era. The host had a basic understanding of Japanese while not being fluent, but it was good enough that he'd download and retime fansubs. He also funded his own translations with a couple local exchange students. Even with stuff at this hobby/mature level, the d…

I love stories like this. I wish my school still had clubs when I was a student. My computer science teacher was speaking fondly of having doom and quake lan parties in the computer class in the evenings for students and teaching staff and even apparently some parents.

Wait, are schools with no clubs now? What do people do to fill all the time?

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

#217
post #94

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…

> The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. 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.

How would you even know? Is there any single company that prices that service separately so you can tell how many customers are willing to pay for it?

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it has gotten worse long before AI boom because of political activism from humans.

Extremists gotta extremize, right? They couldn't stop themselves from tainting their work with their beliefs, you cannot stop yourself from taking the few times this happened and magnifying it, as if it was predominant, and then reacting to it viscerally, even years down the line under no emotional pressure to do so. And then even with all that additional capacity at hand, the proposed solution is replacing the rarel…

It is not only a few times. I watch multiple shows every season for close to a decade and at this point it is the exception when most of them aren't butchered by political or "comedic" mistranslation.

If I have to choose between funding political zealot humans and political zealot AI, I pick the later. At least AI aren't boasting and insulting there customer on social media about "fixing" art for the greater good.

https://boundingintocomics.com/manga/interview-fan-and-profe...

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

#219
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

This sort of difference is one of the reasons I will always prefer subs.

I guess I could be the odd one out but I'm not keen on the 'localisation' efforts that replace the cultural elements of the underlying media, e.g. how in Ace Attorney ramen is replaced with t-bone steaks (iirc?), prompting the meme 'Eat your hamburgers, Apollo'

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

#220
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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

Learning Japanese and being able to pick up bits of content, its interesting to see how very different from the subtitles it sometimes is.
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