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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?

#251

Post by ishouldbework »

GolDDranks wrote: post #235
ishouldbework wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That depends on the intent of the sentence, and the intent was only a guess of the GP. But you can analyze だけに in two ways: 英語に吹き替える to dub in English (the base case of 吹き替える) 英語だけに吹き替える to dub just in English (だけ + に) アメリカだけに吹き替える to dub, just because it's America / as you'd expect of America (だけに grammar https://tanosuke.com/n2-dakeni )

Oooh I see, thanks!

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

#252

Post by kbolino »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #242
kalleboo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How much of this is actually new to the streaming era? Radio stations may have paid better per play/listener, but they had finite airtime and so fewer songs got played and fewer artists got paid. Physical media may have paid better compared to streaming the same songs once, but the media could be copied and replayed infinitely.

There was a lot of unrealistic hype that software magic could make everything between the consumer and the producer practically free, and that just hasn't happened and probably never will. Engineers need to get paid and infrastructure needs to get maintained too.

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

#253

Post by Nicook »

varenc wrote: post #105
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…

> 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…

By tier 1, we refer to commiesubs right?

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

#254

Post by casey2 »

Anime subtitles have always been hilariously bad even compared to early CC which would often position captions right under where you were looking. This is back when it was somebodies' job and they took it seriously. The hobbification of work had many casualties.

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

#255

Post by csin »

vunderba wrote: post #142
SllX wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 develo…

Shrugs. I don't know what to tell you. I'm glad to see that you're passionate about it I guess but most of my friends who use Crunchyroll were also equally unsurprised when they removed the comment section. I can't think of any streaming services that have something like that - as I said before, there's literally no upside to it for CR. Those comment sections could also be a puerile cesspool. I'm sure there was an ex…

"Calling the Crunchyroll anime comment section a community is a bit of a stretch, it's like saying that the comments under a TikTok video are a community."

Am I missing something here? (I don't use TikTok).

- The comment section under a youtube video is a community.

- The comments on the side of Instagram pictures is a community.

- Twitch chat is a community.

- Even Imgur has a community. I'm surprised that's a thing, but they do.

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

#256

Post by silicon5 »

akimbostrawman wrote: post #248
perching_aix wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://…

*their

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

#257

Post by FranOntanaya »

A lot of styling is done still in the old Advanced Substation subtitle format, which is nice in a whole number of ways but doesn't have any standards working group behind and so it's a bit ignored in software and operations.

People use either some flavor of W3C's Timed Text or WebVTT instead (and it was already a pain to get them to drag their feet into them and drop the old analog broadcast formats). Now, here's the thing. WebVTT isn't radically different in format and features to (A)SSA and it has plenty of styling options... but, once again, a lot of platforms and software are dragging their feet to support them.

So the industry has been sloooowly doing the right thing moving to the W3C standards (not a huge fan of Timed Text myself, but it exists for a reason), but only with the most basic and safe features. Which are also about as many features you get out of plain speech to text output, so it's even easier to make that decision.

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

#258

Post by Arnavion »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #82
Dylan16807 wrote: post #61

> 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.

I think one of the biggest mistakes was not making WebVTT equivalent to Advanced SubStation Alpha (the format of Aegisub). That would have driven basically all the various streaming services to grow support for the things anime subbers have done for years.

No need for a new format, just use ASS itself! https://github.com/libass/JavascriptSubtitlesOctopus

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

#259

Post by chownie »

vunderba wrote: post #142
SllX wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 develo…

Shrugs. I don't know what to tell you. I'm glad to see that you're passionate about it I guess but most of my friends who use Crunchyroll were also equally unsurprised when they removed the comment section. I can't think of any streaming services that have something like that - as I said before, there's literally no upside to it for CR. Those comment sections could also be a puerile cesspool. I'm sure there was an ex…

For the most part this HN community is comments bolted on to content from different websites, we call this a community with no issues. I don't think it's a stretch.
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