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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?

#181

Post by sunaookami »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #5
egypturnash wrote: post #3

Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me. And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal s…

They're for sure doing this and have been caught: https://x.com/d0nut2x/status/1940107015533285646

The AI subtitles are delivered by the original company (Cygames in this case) and CR used them without proofreading. This happened to a few other animes in the past in Germany.

For its own translations in Germany, CR uses freelancers which are VERY GOOD at their job, do not confuse them with the US Crunchyroll which consists mostly of the infamous Funimation staff.

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

#182

Post by a-french-anon »

chii wrote: post #94
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…

> 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.

Personally, I won't pay to stream anime, but if Blu-Rays had subs as good as what dedicated fansubs can output (incl. a possibly optional more literal translation with honorifics) AND SSA subtitles somewhere on them to be used by computers, I'd actually buy them; if they aren't butchered QTEC crap (https://github.com/LightArrowsEXE/QTEC), of course.

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

#183

Post by jdranczewski »

kalleboo wrote: post #100
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.

The only video I've seen that uses the YouTube subtitle capabilities to their fullest, with animated subs etc is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDc1mjrIsPM and even then you have to dig down into the settings cog and choose "English - Animated" manually

https://caption.plus/ does excellent work for a couple YouTube/Nebula channels - not as exciting as the above, but they do coloured speakers, positioning to avoid in-video text, and an occasional animation to punch up a joke! I'm most familiar with their work for Tom Scott (+ the Technical Difficulties) and Jet Lag: The Game.

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

#184

Post by ff2400t »

So I know this because I did some research on why the crunchyroll subs didn't work in the pip mode on firefox. So it turns out they used a substitute format called .ass, which as the article mentioned was created by AegisSubs. This is not natively supported by browsers, so they used to import a wasm bundle for reading this file, rendering it on a Canvas that was overlayed on the Video. So they did put a lot of effort in the making it work not only in the labour of the translation but also in supporting it technically. Sadly it looks like they will be switching to more lackluster formats That don't support the advance positioning features.

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

#185

Post by Sophira »

viraptor wrote: post #154
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…

> I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over That's just because the legal options were easily available, right? Kind of like people stopped pirating as much when Netflix was actually decent. But now the tides are turning again, so maybe the fan subs will start coming back as well.

There used to be an unwritten rule in fansubbing that you should only fansub anime that didn't have a licensed release - but of course that was during the time when barely any anime got licensed.

Still, though, I wonder if that mindset is still going to be around.

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

#186

Post by thaumasiotes »

buzer wrote: post #107
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…

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 remember someone complaining about how much effort it was to typeset every single book name in some scene that had a bookshelf

That seems like something you might legitimately skip. Most books that appear in the background of a scene aren't relevant.

On the other hand, the example image in the article, where there's a big banner hung on the wall reading "Rana-chan's Surprise Party", seems like something you'd want to translate.

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

#187

Post by thaumasiotes »

chii wrote: post #176
riffruff24 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it does show up. Just like star wars, the toys and figurines and sometimes it even spread into the VAs, authors and other artists adjacent to the projects.

Those are money going into the original authors/production companies etc, rather than downstream into crunchyroll. In fact, you might even consider paying less for crunchyroll subscription, and buy more of the merch of your favourite franchises.

The usual thing in that case would be that crunchyroll asks the production company for money to fund all the marketing it's doing on their behalf.

In fact, the traditional model of television is that you give the show away for free and hope to make money on popularity.

If you produce music, there are multiple companies right now who sell the service of "we will upload your music to every streaming platform, so that anyone who wants to listen to it for free can do that".

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

#188

Post by fhd2 »

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…

I don't believe managers can operate with that kind of precision. I don't know how they'd execute the "let's spend 200$ more" idea. You're either in a quality or in a cost reduction mindset usually, these are _really_ difficult to mix for management. I know I've tried :) When you even bring up how long something takes, that can already have adverse effects on quality without you actually decreeing anything.

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

#189

Post by whywhywhywhy »

onoesworkacct wrote: post #42
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…

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?

You’re not competing with them being unable to watch it either. You’re competing with someone doing a better job for free out of passion.

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

#190

Post by extraduder_ire »

jcranmer wrote: post #126
praxulus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

In the very early days they were a piracy site that hosted fansubs.
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