I wish they would at least include the japanese cc subtitles. They must already exist so I don't understand why they can't just be packaged along with the other subs.
Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
271–280 of 298 posts
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gets even worse, when the original mangaka typoes the name, and people follow a single typo like a religion. This happened with Kaoru Mori's "Emma", where a common English surname "Jones" was accidentally spelled "Jounse" by the author, and used in translations without questioning it too much, only later found to be written correctly "Jones" in a later chapter by the author herself.
I see this a lot, and it is a mild pet peeve of mine as well. Along the same lines, since I’m using Gundam as an example in this thread, I’ll point to a technology in the franchise called “psycommu” (pronounced in dubs as psy-com-moo) which is clearly transliterated from how it’s spelled in the original script without taking a second look at it. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have just localized it to “psy-com,” B…
Somewhat related is the situation with Shingeki no Kyojin / Attack on Titan. "Attack on Titan" was the manga author's chosen English title, except the story does not take place on the moon of Titan but is instead about giants attacking a human settlement. The Japanese title could be interpreted as "Attack of Titans" so everyone assumed "Attack on Titan" was just Engrish for that, and why CommieSubs' fan translation for example went with "The Eotena Onslaught". [1]
Years later it turned out some of the giants had classes / types and the title was a reference to the Attack type of giant. Thus the English title would've been better as "The Attack Titan", and indeed the Japanese title could also have been interpreted as that, though it's only obvious in hindsight. The Japanese title was likely deliberately intended to have the double-meaning "Attack of Titans" and "The Attack Titan", though this double-meaning cannot be conveyed in English, and in fact we're now stuck due to inertia with a third English rendering that is completely disconnected from either meaning.
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#273Earlier 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.
Also, it’s trivial to standup a minimal quality stt+translation workflow in something like comfyui, all freely available models, and run on modest consumer gpu, ~3050 is just fine. If you’re handy with this tech you can do a lot better. If crunchyroll is only going to have slightly better quality then it can be appealing even to moderate fans who wouldn’t spend the time doing things manually.
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#274I 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…
> Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players.
What does it even mean? The IP[1] holding single-purpose LLCs[2] have no means of distribution on its own. They commission sweatshops and license the artifacts to TV stations and streaming services. They can sell to Western streaming services like Netflix or send in brochures to American TV stations, in case they're taking it, but if they aren't taking it, then they aren't taking it.
I guess they can set up an IP to be worldwide exclusive on nicovideo.jp and let anyone pay for nicovideo.jp Premium subscription through VISA. But how many is going to actually sign up and how long will VISA work if it worked?
Japanese companies being "just allergic to opening up" is definitely half of the story or more, but it's also not the whole picture. The masses, and the distributors that can reach the masses, are also involved.
1: as in intellectual property, copyright, not the set of octets
2: the oft in-universe-named entity like "Julius Deane Import Export" shown in the copyright line
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#275Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.” Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree. Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with. Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless…
I'm more than a Trekkie than a... Warrie (?), but does Project-4K77 means I can finally see Han shooting first?
Yes! And you don't need to see Hayden Christensen's ghost at the Ewok party in episode 6, etc. They are a true gift.
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.” 3-4 hours of time for a sub must be a rounding error for the production costs of these shows. No?
Presumably the company translating and subtitling anime is licensing the show, not producing it. So subtitling and translation costs for a business like Crunchyroll would be most of their production budget (assuming licensing fees are not egregious).
idk but I think it's possible that baseline licensing fees are/were way lower than imagined. The entire rest of the world except Japan, in many anime type contexts in Japan, are still considered the singular entity as "the kaigai". Export sales are just coin rooms.
Or, this could be reflection of that "the kaigai" mindset rapidly changing causing prices to skyrocket. Anime is exclusively made in Japan(with outsource efforts from all over East Asia, but always concentrated back into Japan), so there's no competition. Zero competition over nonzero demand -> +Inf price.
Either ways, it does feel that licensing model could be key to understanding this.
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Respectfully you're looking at the wrong wing of the (old?) industry. Radio plays have never been a substantial revenue source, they have a lot more in common with streaming in that way, and in fact, many labels would use paid radio placement basically as a form of advertising. The tradeoff being, for the consumer, that the radio didn't play whatever they wanted; it played what was scheduled, with an occasional reque…
We really need some sort of vaguely apples-to-apples comparison.
Looking only at CDs ca. 2005, which sold at about $15 each, an album that went platinum (1 million sales) would gross $15 million in retail, probably $10 million in wholesale, leaving about $1-3 million for the artist depending on contract terms. Estimates seem to put Spotify compensation at $3000 paid to the artist per million plays. So, you'd need somewhere between 333 million and 1 billion plays to get comparable revenue to a platinum album.
"Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd is currently the most-streamed song on Spotify at 5 billion plays [1]. That's roughly equivalent to a 5-15x platinum album from a single song and streaming platform alone; the record for most platinum album seems to be 34x platinum for Michael Jackson's Thriller [2], which had 7 songs that all were hits to some degree or another. Michael Jackson did a lot besides just record the songs; he also put out elaborate music videos and went on showy tours. All told, there are more than 100 songs with more than 1 billion plays on Spotify (in fact, the 100th is still above 2.4 billion plays).
So, I think, the situation has not really gotten worse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Spotify_streaming_reco...
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#279Earlier 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…
By tier 1, we refer to commiesubs right?
[gg] of course.
Re: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?
#280Earlier 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.
The club I mentioned above was just hosted out of a guy's house. The original group new each other through a comic book shop, basically the only place in town that sold manga back then.
The host was an air force officer that'd been stationed in Okinawa for a while and fell in love with anime there. When he came back to the states he got friends to buy and ship him laserdiscs of anime from Japan on a regular basis, and showing those to friends gradually became the club.
Fun enough we'd host lan parties pretty often too. This was back when you had to daisychain coax ethernet, and one person having to leave meant everything had to shut down for a bit lol.
In the pre broadband era there was this sort of local collaboration in a way that I miss, but I'm also not blinded to the negatives of that era. Like the anime club had some very enthusiastic loli fans that with the benefit of adult hindsight were way past the creep line and definitely had a chilling effect.