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

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

#241

Post by slackfan » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

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…

>If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. I miss the days of hand-timing 25 minute episodes in about 20 minutes in Aegisub because I learned to read the waveform, and had custom snap-to-keyframe commands set up in Aegisub.

Of course, the typesetting would take 8 hours, but timing was always easy.

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

#242

Post by ToucanLoucan » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #90

kbolino wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally we'd have both benefits: many platforms each with (more or less) all the content, where they compete on consumer-focused streaming features rather than on their (transient) licensed content libraries. But right now we have plenty of "competition" yet it's all just a race to the bottom.

> many platforms each with (more or less) all the content Which is what we have on the music side of things. You can choose Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music etc based on how their service works for you rather than what music you want to listen to.

Worth noting though, those monoliths themselves come with tradeoffs; artists don't earn shit for streaming, which is why the only way to really "support" one anymore is concerts and merch.

And don't get me wrong I love concerts and merch, but I'd rather people earn a reasonable living without needing to be on tour basically in perpetuity.

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

#243

Post by johnhenry » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

This makes me sad. For a while, the video player team at Crunchyroll was essentially just me. I spent countless hours fixing bugs and building features, especially around subtitling. The teammate who joined after me really took it to the next level. When I left, the player felt like it was in good hands — they even open-sourced the code for a time.

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

#244

Post by cardanome » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:43 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #150

slg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. And yet I can't think of a single large corporation that actually has this mindset anymore. The current mindset of management is that any delight your customers take in the product is a sign that either the price should have been higher or costs cut until the product is merely satisfactory rather than delightful.

Nintendo, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon. I’m sure there are many others in creative industries since you have to delight customers at least some of the time there. A large part of the reason Nvidia is a big deal is that they were willing to make the best drivers, that they just cared more about making a quality product. Lots of companies well exceed minimum quality necessary to keep customers from switching.

Nintendo is changing. Switch 2 is outdated over-priced hardware with super expensive games. Not to mention always being extremely hostile to fans and draconically enforcing their copyright. With their recent software patent trolling they are on their way to become the Japanese Oracle.

Nvidia has garnered a lot of hate from the gaming community. Completely dishonest marketing, purposefully gimped hardware that barely gets enough RAM to function. Everyone wishes there would be more competition in this space.

Sure some studios still care about their customers but any huge corporations is bound to become a rotting corpse of its former self over time.

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

#245

Post by timerol » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #209

buzer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I remember TheFluff was arguably one of the best timers (and encoders) in the fansub scene in the past and he could time the dialogue in under 10 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00xX0PwGUg8 Karaoke and typesetting can of course take longer (I remember someone complaining about how much effort it was to typeset every single book name in some scene that had a bookshelf) though karaoke is usually ~3 m…

I'm frankly puzzled by this meme. Only Bakemonogatari is sensitive to timing, and not in a good way, the rest is a matter of habit and taste, so you can't improve it.

> the rest is a matter of habit and taste, so you can't improve it

This statement is incorrect. All artistic endeavors are matters of habit and taste. You absolutely can improve at matters of taste

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

#246

Post by layer8 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #163

Oh that's interesting. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to Crunchyroll more than once on my TV when I try to watch something and then it seems to have garbage subtitles. Sadly, I keep forgetting and clicking on them in Prime Video. I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".

FYI, subtitles are often different between the Crunchyroll channel on Prime Video and “native” Crunchyroll. You aren’t getting the same on both.

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

#247

Post by pixl97 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

a1o wrote: post #216

asimovDev wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Raging on social media like tik-tok.

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

#248

Post by akimbostrawman » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #237

akimbostrawman wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://boundingintocomics.com/?s=Localize https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2021/04/23/localizer-goes-on-... That's only one show from one localizer and they and many others have been doing this for almost 10 years.

I checked both links (until the start of 2024). I see a number of examples for the jokey-joke type translations, but not for the political ones. The only politically charged mistranslation I see there is the Blue Box one from April, which honestly looks accidental. The Twitter gloatings screenshotted seem to squarely pertain to the jokey-joke type stuff too at a skim. Gonna stand by this angle being way overblown. Th…

if censorship, subversion and cultural rewriting is not "political" then i don't know what "political" is. stop enabling this behavior by making excuses and assuming good faith when they literally tell you to your face there bad intentions.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220717182807/https://twitter.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220218214341/https://twitter.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210410233042/https://twitter.c...

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

#249

Post by silicon5 » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #202

akimbostrawman wrote: post #195

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…

AI is not immune to accusations of political bias, as we've seen recently from Grok.

A while back there was a story going around that licensors were replacing human translators with AI to prevent political bias. It seems clear that the real reason they're doing this is to save time and money. Having used Japanese AI translation casually, it's definitely not accurate enough for professional use. Even the unofficial manga scanlators who use it will apologize profusely and use it only as a last resort when a human translator isn't available.

As accusations of translator bias go, other than the Dragon Maid debacle, the big one at that time was the Zombie Land Saga, where they were accused of changing the script to Hoshikawa Lily transgender. What they failed to notice is that the character was always transgender - Hoshikawa Lily being a stage name, her birth name is revealed in one episode to be Masao, a male name.

There are some instances of dubious translations that fail to accurately convey the author's intent, but at the same time, part of what we're seeing is just pushback to increased LGBT representation and feminist themes in anime. Translators are sometimes being blamed for inserting modern or western values into works that already reflected those values.

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

#250

Post by snickerbockers » Tue, Oct 07, 2025, 2:11 PM UTC

hnfong wrote: post #194

varenc wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly on legal anime. From the article, 70% of new releases are exclusive to Crunchyroll. They're not losing customers to platforms with better subs, because customers have no alternative. (Besides pirating, but I assume the golden…

> Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly Here's the answer right here...

I don't think that's accurate to the current market. Ten years ago it was true but in 2025 they have several competitors and not nearly as many exclusives. I can name several counterarguments.

* Shonen anime, which are consistently the most popular ones, are also on netflix and probably several other services. Eg, demon slayer, dandadan, etc.

* there are still shows that are japan-exclusive because nobody bothers to license them. Roboshinkalion is an entire franchise that nobody cares to import! We actually had to wait two extra years for gridman universe because nobody bothered to license it for English localization!

* just this year they failed to obtain the rights to Mobile Suit Gundam G-Quuuuuux and Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt because amazon outbid them. These are both new entries in well-established brands and they're both made by studios with large fan followings (khara for g-quuuuuux and trigger for panty and stocking).

* somehow Hulu ended up breaking harmony gold's 45-year blockade around the macross franchise and won exclusive streaming rights.

* netflix has a lot of exclusives these days, including Jojo stone ocean and the upcoming steelball run.