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 English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.
If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).
Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. 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.”
Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.
I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.
onoesworkacct 5 hours ago [-]
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?
bonecrusher2102 5 hours ago [-]
I agree - this is the right take. Spend a little extra because your customers REALLY care.
programjames 4 hours ago [-]
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 were, and thus it was worth it to make the subscription a little cheaper.
varenc 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 age of Tier 1 fan subs is over)
jeron 18 minutes ago [-]
I was going to ask, crunchyroll has competitors for legal anime stremaing?
chii 3 hours ago [-]
i think you've counted it in a way that makes it sound cheap, but in reality isnt.
$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).
The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.
praxulus 2 hours ago [-]
>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 product.
jcranmer 1 hours ago [-]
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.
brigandish 2 hours ago [-]
> barring privacy
That’s the key right there.
bl4ckneon 2 hours ago [-]
The ironic part is that a large majority of the piracy is just crunchy roll rips or subtitles from crunchy roll.
Loocid 2 hours ago [-]
$1/month extra cost on $16/month of revenue is very significant though.
matheusmoreira 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
They should probably consider that this competitor is actually mpv playing the DRM-free blu-ray quality fully subtitled mkv files obtained for a grand total of zero dollars from organized groups of people who simply care about anime to an absurd degree.
"Paying customer" is a synonym for "fool" in this context. Paying for inferior products is just foolish. It is damaging to one's self-respect. It is even more damaging for the reputation of the corporation. A bunch of fans regularly put them to shame by releasing better products on a daily basis. That's just pathetic.
what 44 minutes ago [-]
Without those “fools” paying, you would have no content to pirate.
matheusmoreira 23 minutes ago [-]
I'm actually one of the fools who tries to support creators by "buying" (licensing with 0 rights) their things. Why do you think I'm so angry at the shit quality of the products I receive in return? Anger doesn't even begin to describe what I feel when I pay for streaming services and get video so poorly encoded they have artifacts in black frames.
FooBarWidget 1 hours ago [-]
Why is the $1 added to the subscription cost? They don't redo the subs every month. It's developing subs once and then enjoy the benefits forever. It should be a cost that's amortized over something.
kace91 5 hours ago [-]
That person would need, besides basic computer fluency for the timestamps, knowledge of Japanese and English.
Not unheard of, but probably harder than hiring for a call center, and more need to prevent high rotation due to difficulty in finding replacements.
Edit: not that I disagree with your general idea, just pointing out potential issues.
bonecrusher2102 5 hours ago [-]
It’s cheaper than you might think. Much like in gaming, there’s a lot of people who really want to work in the anime industry, even if it’s just on the localization and distribution side. This drives down salaries quite a bit.
kace91 5 hours ago [-]
Fair point, it does sound like an industry that would have a high passion/vocational factor.
SecretDreams 3 hours ago [-]
While I agree, it's all a our whether they can pass the cost off to the customer. Customers will care a lot for food quality - will they tolerate a price increase to preserve sub quality or accept lower quality for the same sub price? Are there competitors?
These are the questions that would get played out in the decision process.
DrewADesign 4 hours ago [-]
This is really what’s driving business AI products’ push by fleece vest set, though: knowing that they can make enshitification just that much more attractive.
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago [-]
> 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 encodings to the point of delusion.
I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region.
Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned:
Always bet on guys who care. Corporations will never be able to compete. They simply do not give a shit. They want money for minimum viable products. These guys do it out of love.
inopinatus 2 hours ago [-]
The Rakuten/Viki model appears to lean into this and just sponsor fansub groups directly and include their output in the licensed stream.
At least one of the Chinese streaming services (I think possibly iQIYI) crowdsources improved translations directly in the app, presumably relying on the irritation factor of early adopters stuck with the MTL-grade int'l subs supplied by many C-drama production companies.
ohmahjong 41 minutes ago [-]
That's the first I've seen of 4k77 and related projects, thanks for sharing. A true labour of love.
koolba 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
kcexn 5 hours ago [-]
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).
buzer 2 hours ago [-]
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 minutes of unique content (OP & ED) per ~12 episodes. Typesetting depends heavily on anime, like isekais don't usually have a lot Japanese writing anyway.
aidenn0 3 hours ago [-]
I sampled a couple of shows on Netfix and I couldn't find any anime subtitled in English; just closed-captioning of the English dub. Netflix's selection I would describe as "fine," so the quality of the subtitles is, IMO a big differentiator for Crunchyroll and given that my household is looking to reduce the streaming services, this change makes the decision of "which one" a lot easier.
zenlot 2 hours ago [-]
> Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. 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.”
Thank you for this. Great perspective.
sergers 2 hours ago [-]
I was on the animeone[AonE] team 2001 to 2007 atleast.
Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.
chii 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
slg 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
kibwen 3 hours ago [-]
Profit motives inherently optimize for consistent, regular, barely-acceptable slop. In order to optimize for quality, you need people to take pride in their work, and not merely take a profit.
Why don't they take the timings from the closed captions of the original Japanese broadcast?
bonecrusher2102 5 hours ago [-]
It’s a great question actually, and the answer has mostly to do with Romanization. Japanese and English are sufficiently structurally different, that even the sentence length won’t necessarily be one to one (eg subject and object inverted).
Another thing that happens is time code shifts that come from differences in frame rate between source material and what the subtitlers end up with (eg 24 vs 23.98 if I’m remembering correctly), which can cause subs to have what we called “ramping” issues over time (timing gets less and less accurate). So you have to go through and reset all the lines anyway.
That being said, we DID do this sometimes, but maybe that takes your time down to 25 minutes, the hard minimum possible time to accurately subtitle a 25 minute show.
And translators hated having to add the times codes (or copy paste their translations over the CCs) — they preferred to just give a script to the subtitler and let them handle it. And actually, if it’s a really good subtitler, they can! In about 35 mins.
So I think the translators were probably right to push back, as it’s only 10 minute savings for probably >10 mins on their part.
mananaysiempre 5 hours ago [-]
Two issues:
- Japanese has very different word order and word lengths, and furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel. (Vice versa as well, of course, but that’s not really a problem here.) To give a sense of the alienness at play here, Japanese is essentially postfix throughout, that is the most literal counterpart of “the car [that you saw yesterday]” is “[[you SUBJECT] yesterday saw] car”; and it also has no way to join sentences that would not make one of them potentially subordinate to the other (like the “and” before the semicolon does in this sentence). Virtually anything longer than a single line has to be retimed (and occasionally edited for length).
- “Forced” subtitles for captions, on-screen text, etc. are simply absent in the original, for lack of need. True believers (like GP apparently used to be) will try to match the positioning and even typesetting of the on-screen original, either replacing or supplementing it. (Those aren’t your run of the mill SRT subs, ASS is a completely different level of functionality.)
cyphar 3 hours ago [-]
Some of the issues you often run into with Japanese subtitles are:
* Almost all Japanese subtitles include subtitles for every noise made as well as including SDH-like information about sounds. This means that a naive attempt to just match up subtitle timings won't work -- the English translation will have fewer subtitles and you will have to skip Japanese lines that do not have an equivalent in the English transcript.
* Most translated subtitles simplify things and have to re-organise sentence structures to match the target language, which means that you often have to pick different timings for how a sentence is broken up in English than in the original Japanese. Sometimes a very short Japanese phrase requires two sentences to accurately translate, sometimes a long Japanese sentence can be translated into a fairly short English phrase.
* Higher-quality subtitles will also provide translations for signs and other on-screen text (ASS supports custom placement, fonts, styles, and colours -- it is powerful enough to the point where some of the really good fansub jobs I've seen make it look like the video was actually localised to English because all of the signs look like they have been translated in the original video). The original timings don't help with this.
I should mention that I have used tools like alass[1] to re-time subtitles between languages before (including retiming Japanese subtitles to match English ones) so this is not an unreasonable idea on its face, but those tools mostly work with already existing subtitle tracks that have correct timings. My experience is that if you have tracks with very different timings (as opposed to chunks of subtitles with fairly fixed offsets) you start getting rubbish results.
It's wild to hear someone - especially someone in the industry - say that. Fans definitely bring the most enthusiasm to their work, but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.
bnjms 5 hours ago [-]
I used to like what I assume is the hyper literalism and f fan subs. The certain phrases with consistent and repeated translations would gain their own color. I don’t know but it felt like that context was somehow carried over.
Similarly there are some phrases which are probably unavoidably awkward. Like when translating vaguely as “that guy”.
baobun 4 hours ago [-]
Let's just say the variance is high. Great stuff and groups out there but the bar has been lower (until now, I guess).
Just according to keikaku.
Translator's note: "Keikaku" means plan
bonecrusher2102 5 hours ago [-]
That’s why I said the SUBS are awesome… not the translations ;-)
gchamonlive 5 hours ago [-]
Could you use fan subs to help AI models better sync your actual subs?
xboxnolifes 3 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of bad fan subs, but the best subs I come across are always fan subs.
kalleboo 3 hours ago [-]
To be fair, official translations are equally notorious - "Jelly Donuts Are My Favorite" and so on
wk_end 3 hours ago [-]
That’s from a dub, though. Whole other ball game.
Barrin92 5 hours ago [-]
>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 Polonius. And, like Polonius, it is there that you shall meet your end."
I was so surprised that they threw in the Hamlet reference it's what made me look up what the original Japanese line was. The English dub writing often strikes me just as straight up better the more I watch of it.
orthozato 4 hours ago [-]
Well, but that's the work of localization, which is a whole art itself.
It is quite tricky and this Shakespeare reference might be a little bit out of context...
aidenn0 3 hours ago [-]
Watching anime dubs with subtitles enabled can be interesting. I've literally seen the dub say "yes" with the sub saying "no."
Arnavion 2 hours ago [-]
The answers to negative questions are the other way around in Japanese compared to English.
"Are you not a student?"
In English, the non-student speaker would respond with "No", short for "No, I am not."
In Japanese, the non-student speaker would respond with "Yes", short for "Yes that's correct."
A literal translation would make this mistake.
userbinator 8 minutes ago [-]
Not really familiar with Japanese; but I would interpret the English in exactly the opposite way, like the Japanese version.
(Native American English speaker.)
rkomorn 5 minutes ago [-]
I'd consider it ambiguous and probably clarify it like "yes you are a student, or no you are not?"
rmunn 2 hours ago [-]
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 offices in Japan and be a liaison to foreign businessmen. He was attending a meeting once where everyone but him was Japanese. The boss presented an idea. There was silence for about 10-15 seconds, then people said things like "Yes, that's a good idea, let's do that." The American left the meeting thinking that the idea had been approved, only to have his Japanese colleague explain to him that the key part was the silence. The boss clearly heard and understood the message that his employees didn't think it was a good idea, and the idea was dropped and never mentioned again.
So I could see a case where the character says "Yes" but the subtext is "No", and that would be clearly understood by a Japanese viewer. Different translators would choose different approaches there; some might translate the text, and some might translate the subtext. I'm curious to know if this was a case like that, or if it was a clear-cut case of one translation being right and the other one being flat-out wrong.
aidenn0 1 hours ago [-]
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.
brigandish 2 hours ago [-]
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 shows the more fundamental difference in the cultures, where one values truth more, and one values agreement/harmony more.)
I’m not saying that’s what happened to you, just that it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to see it.
jcranmer 39 minutes ago [-]
> (This difference possibly shows the more fundamental difference in the cultures, where one values truth more, and one values agreement/harmony more.)
I'd be extremely wary of ascribing any cultural significance to the language modes here. Negation and especially affirmative/negative responses to negative questions is just extremely variable among languages. Even languages in the same language family just end up doing it differently.
shigawire 1 hours ago [-]
Even more confusingly, in casual speech I'd probably respond to that question in English like, "yeah, no I didn't go" or conversely "no, yeah I did end up going"
PebblesHD 6 hours ago [-]
I’ve posted before about my half-in half-out life between Japan and Australia, and the media I consume is a product of this. Anime, while not a massive part of my watching habit, is certainly a weekly thing at least, and over the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to support legal services outside of Japan.
In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.
They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.
I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.
silicon5 5 hours ago [-]
The Crunchyroll/Funimation merger was a really bad deal for fans, in that a huge number of series were never ported over to Crunchyroll before the Funimation shutdown.
Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.
When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.
zdw 6 hours ago [-]
The funny thing about this narrative is that Crunchyroll also started out as an "informal distribution" pirate site, and had all the good things you mentioned beat out of them by successive acquisitions and corporate ownership.
SllX 6 hours ago [-]
They’re still just within the threshold of good enough, but I was pretty annoyed the day comments disappeared. It might have been young viewers, but I was a young viewer once and those comments went back all the way to that time. It was also one thing Crunchyroll had that other streaming sites typically don’t (except YouTube of course): community.
bavell 5 hours ago [-]
CR removing comments removed the soul from the product :/
Was always fun reading the top comments on big episodes. Finding those few other ppl who noticed that one small thing at timestamp 14:30, dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai... etc
SllX 55 minutes ago [-]
Yep!
> dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai
I was literally reaching to see if somebody else had already made a lame-ass “Truck-kun” joke on the first episode of No Longer Allowed in Another World or if I was going to have to provide a fill when I saw the change.
vunderba 5 hours ago [-]
It's a shame but understandable from a business perspective since they had to have a moderation team to support some of the less savory comments juvenile users were leaving.
SllX 1 hours ago [-]
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 developing tools for their moderators can reduce the cost of maintaining moderation.
It was a deliberate choice that removed some of the value of the service and wiped out yet another swath of Internet history. The core is of course the videos, they can coast on that for a while, but it’s the changes like that add up that make Crunchyroll less competitive going forward, especially as other larger services acquire larger anime libraries.
vunderba 6 minutes ago [-]
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 the company. Those comment sections could be a complete cesspool.
I'm sure there was an extremely vocal minority that threw a fit when they killed it off, but I doubt their overall subscriber numbers were significantly impacted. The majority of people are just there to watch anime. There's plenty of subreddits that are vastly more suitable to discussion.
Calling the Crunchyroll anime comment section a community is like saying that the comments under a TikTok video are a cohesive community. Give me a break.
My original point stands - it's completely understandable from a business perspective.
ToucanLoucan 6 hours ago [-]
Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.
kbolino 6 hours ago [-]
I'd rather have one good streaming service with everything on it than the dozens of crappy streaming services with their ever-shifting patchwork of available licensed content we have now. Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
PebblesHD 6 hours ago [-]
Challenge is we ended up with one really bad streaming service but lots of capital slurping up all the licenses. In my ideal world, the regulator would prevent using exclusivity as a moat to prevent smaller operations competing.
Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.
redwall_hp 57 minutes ago [-]
There's a reason it was law in the US that movie production companies couldn't own movie theaters: distribution should be required to be separate to ensure choice on the viewer side due to the inherent non-fungibility of entertainment media. In other words, if through copyright we grant a monopoly, then it's not a sustainable situation for the distribution to also be allowed to consolidate.
lotsofpulp 24 minutes ago [-]
The solution to this is copyright only lasting for 10 years.
chii 2 hours ago [-]
> Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
completely agree - i think the gov't regulatory body should change the landscape to what film and cinema have; such that distributor of media cannot own and monopolize the broadcast rights on their own platform, and publisher of media be forced to sell/license at the same price to all distributors.
This way, a streaming service can always know and pay for a broadcasting license for _any_ media, and all media must be license-able for any streaming service (at the same price), thus no monopoly can exist under this system.
mkozlows 6 hours ago [-]
And what makes the one streaming service stay good, with no competitors?
kbolino 5 hours ago [-]
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.
kalleboo 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
zdw 6 hours ago [-]
I tend to agree with this take - look at the book or music industry, where you can buy most media in each category on most platforms, with some exceptions.
Ideally, like music, we'd get multiple vendors offering downloads that are high quality copy of video that isn't DRM encumbered.
But currently, we don't get this, and the closest legitimate way (modulo the DMCA...) to get video as a file is to buy physical media and rip it.
Serious shades of Gabe Newell's "it's a service problem, not a pricing problem" around all of this.
echelon 6 hours ago [-]
It might take a few more decades, but Google will ultimately win the streaming wars.
I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.
You can also interpret that as I'll be shocked if AI doesn't result in every mangaka becoming their own small studio and distributing via YouTube.
axpy906 6 hours ago [-]
> I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.
In 2002 it was and I really liked it then.
zdw 6 hours ago [-]
YouTube was founded in 2005, is this a typo?
lanyard-textile 6 hours ago [-]
I think you’re right for certain use cases. When I want to watch a specific movie, you can pull it up and rent it super easy on YouTube.
No fuss. It’s basically a 1-click operation. $2.99 or whatever to watch your movie in good quality.
Hamuko 55 minutes ago [-]
There are some anime that are simulcast on YouTube. Watanare was one of them during the summer 2025 season.
I'll be shocked if they're able to get noticed above the tide of slop and industrially automated bogus copyright claims.
echelon 5 hours ago [-]
Discovery has always been a problem.
You can look to the past to see what this might look like in the future:
- Publishing in the digital publishing era.
- Indie Gaming in the Steam Greenlight era.
- Indie music in the digital recording / DAW era.
- Trying to make it as an actor or musician in general.
- YouTuber careers vs. "YouTube poop"
- Trying to make it as a streamer / influencer
Novelty, self-promo, luck, preparation, right place/right time, likeability -- there are lots of things that can come together to make it work. But it's still a lot of work.
asimpletune 2 minutes ago [-]
This is random but Aegisub is an amazing tool and a wonderful way to get ear training when you're learning a language.
egypturnash 6 hours ago [-]
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 subtitlers with AI.
xenadu02 2 hours ago [-]
They did the same thing to their developers a few years back from what I recall. That's why the app has bugs that haven't been fixed in years. For example the sorting options on your watch list are just garbage. They aren't remembered. And "recent activity" includes adding dubs in languages I have disabled in the UI - constantly causing old shows to pop to the top of the list making it useless.
Back when they had software developers they were rapidly improving the app but someone decided they needed more executive bonuses and laid everyone off. Their software hasn't moved an inch since.
Funimation had the same idea. They bailed out of VRV (Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime "marketplace" all-in-one app) and released their own garbage app that is somehow much much worse.
It is the classic "we have exclusives so these drooling morons will take whatever we deign to give them because we're the only ones with show X/Y/Z" move.
redwall_hp 54 minutes ago [-]
I will still never complain about CrunchyRoll's apps after using HiDive for a few shows. It can't even remember shows I'm watching, let alone keep track of watched episodes, and insists on rendering subtitles with TVs' closed captioning system.
Amazon Prime did it as well and it was absolutely horrible. Character names got completely butchered, and changed from one scene to the next.
Analemma_ 5 hours ago [-]
It's alright, I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto us, the customers.
Culonavirus 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they will. You know, AI is so cheap compared to humans, they have to, right? I'm sure. Obviously that is until the biggest bubble in the recorded history of human economy pops and we get back to 2008 economy (hopium), then it's gonna sting a wee bit, but that's the cost of progress, right.
monkaiju 6 hours ago [-]
Enshitification just being further turbo-fed by AI
an0malous 6 hours ago [-]
once AI enshitifies PE we’ll accelerate towards the enshitularity
makeitdouble 5 hours ago [-]
I 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 translation through their players. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great.
They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive.
- good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people.
- "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.
kcexn 5 hours ago [-]
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.
theogravity 4 hours ago [-]
It's already happening. There are visual novel groups that take pateron sponsorship to run the script through machine translation. It's now done in giant batches. They're released for free and I am not able to speak of the quality as I've never tried them, but when I see reviews on steam for a VN that has been machine translated, it never results in a good review.
makeitdouble 5 hours ago [-]
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)
cyphar 3 hours ago [-]
> I think there's a reasonable chance to have groups emerge with a reputation to defend
This already exists today -- translation groups rush to be the first to translate a new series, and some fans have strong preferences around which groups provide the best translations (both in terms of accuracy and style). You can see the set of groups doing translations on the AniDB page for any Anime you like.
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
This could work in the same way fiction podcasts do: Have an editorial board rank decide which translations they want to pay for.
Make sure the editorial board is paid a living wage and the translators are too. Set up a marketplace for a dozen such organizations, and let them compete. All the incentives align.
HaZeust 1 hours ago [-]
this is a huge problem with opensubtitles - download count or year count for a TV show or movie's subtitles tells you absolutely nothing about how reliable it is.
theogravity 5 hours ago [-]
My first thought would be consistency in localization / typesetting. Groups have their own ways of localizing and typesetting content and most likely would not want to share their style guide when they lost out on something they recently translated to a lower bidder.
makeitdouble 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't it the same issue when a localization team/member with its distinct style decides to get off the train and the next contractor can't replicate it ?
theogravity 4 hours ago [-]
Yes
Ferret7446 2 hours ago [-]
> I really wish we could have had a subs/dubs marketplace.
There already is (at least for subs). In the wise words of Gabe Newell, piracy is a service problem.
socalgal2 4 hours ago [-]
Are they just bad now? The one I noticed was the "Kingdom" which is several years old. It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and characters but the spoken language was Japanese. So the sub would say "General Mike is going to attack Houston" and the spoken Japanese would say "General Bob is going to attach Seattle" (fill in Mike and Houston with Chinese names and Bob and Seattle with Japaense names)
makeitdouble 53 minutes ago [-]
It's a tough one for Chinese names. Japan will usually read the actual kanji but with their Japanese reading, which sounds nothing like the actual Chinese. And western audience will probably be more familiar with the Chinese name, except if they have their own weird pronouciation altogether.
For instance the current PRC chairman, Xi Jinping, has an alphabet reading close to Chinese, but Japanese news will call him along the lines of "Shu Kinpei", which sounds absolutely nothing near the original name, but is how someone would read the name assuming it was Japanese and with no pronounciations hints. They just don't care much about the sounds when it comes Asian names, even in official settings.
jan_Inkepa 2 hours ago [-]
> It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character
More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?
I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!
(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
jmward01 5 hours ago [-]
The subs are noticeably worse in a continuing trend. Maybe I am just now noticing it but in the dubs for the most recent shows it seems like the important subs for text (like important signs, etc) in a dub are also now missing and only come up if you turn subs on with the dub. Crunchyroll has clearly also done other things though that have impacted the experience. They started by removing comments and a year ago (?) and then added the -incredibly- annoying wipe to 'here watch this' that can't be avoided when a show ends and there isn't a next episode. We will see how they evolve. Are there any other actually good services out there? hidive has very limited content and a terrible interface. I don't know of anything with the catalogue that crunchyroll has.
totallymike 6 hours ago [-]
For at least the past year, subtitles under dubs have been horrendous. I’ve watched a handful of Gundam series over this period, and while the subtitles under the Japanese audio are usually fine, the captions that run under the English audio more often than not get every single proper noun completely wrong, and half the dialog in general.
A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.
silicon5 6 hours ago [-]
Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era.
The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?
totallymike 4 hours ago [-]
This is a problem as well, but what I see often is what seems to be the cheapest speech recognition software they could find auto-transcribing the dub, and it falls over any time it meets a name or word it can’t guess out of like to 1,000 most common words in the English language.
Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.
GolDDranks 5 hours ago [-]
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.
totallymike 4 hours ago [-]
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,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series
uxp100 6 hours ago [-]
The dub subtitles should be different than the original language subtitles, given the dub script is not just the reading the subtitle track, but that’s not an excuse for the dub subtitles being bad.
totallymike 4 hours ago [-]
I agree that technically this would be incorrect, but I’d still appreciate the option to choose the subtitle track from the original language over the horrible auto-generated subtitle track.
o11c 6 hours ago [-]
It really shouldn't be "extremely expensive to re-encode each language’s video files!". Has this industry not heard of transparent overlays?
silicon5 5 hours ago [-]
Most anime on Crunchyroll are softsubs. There's a single video file for each supported resolution, an audio file for each language, and a subtitle file in the highly versatile .ass format (Advanced SubStation Alpha). There are some anime in hardsubs, but usually older legacy series such as were originally DVDs.
Izkata 5 hours ago [-]
That explanation doesn't make sense because they are doing that: there's a few groups that explicitly rip and share Crunchyroll's subtitles (one is mentioned in the article).
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Conan_Kudo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kalleboo 2 hours ago [-]
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
Maybe because they partnered with an israeli AI subtitling company, thus funding an ongoing genocide?
5 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 6 hours ago [-]
>see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it.
If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.
vunderba 5 hours ago [-]
The most popular anime streaming site outside of Japan, Crunchyroll, hasn't had hard-subs.... in forever. You can watch any of the shows in their original Japanese or available dubs without subtitles.
I'd be willing to wager Netflix, which has a fair amount of anime, can do the same.
What site(s) are you referring to?
charcircuit 4 hours ago [-]
It looks like they now offer the option on some content, but it automatically defaults to English and you have to manually turn it off each time. That's a step in the right direction at least.
vunderba 3 hours ago [-]
I think it just defaults to the user's OS language (iOS, browser). Fortunately once you turn it off (or set it to another language) - that setting will persist so you don't have to constantly change it back.
I flip pretty frequently between Chinese and English subs and it'll remember the last setting between episodes / shows / etc.
charcircuit 58 minutes ago [-]
It didn't persist when I tried it out for what it's worth. Maybe that is a limitation of the browser version.
anigbrowl 6 hours ago [-]
You could just turn the subtitles off, or watch it with Japanese subtitles
zdw 6 hours ago [-]
Crunchyroll strangely lacks Japanese subs, which seems strange as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and most others have them in addition to all the translations.
forgotoldacc 5 hours ago [-]
Japanese people as a whole never watch content with proper subtitles. And the subtitles that do exist in Japan for Japanese content are universally awful. It seems only foreign companies that promote being accessible have them. Unext, a Japanese company, never offers subs on Japanese content. It only have subtitles for foreign content... but it only offers subtitles if you're not watching Japanese dubs. It never, under any circumstance, allows the audio and subtitle language to be the same.
I feel like one reason is that subtitles in Japan never match what the characters actually say. A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese) Not sure why but the Japanese subtitle industry is just terrible in so many ways.
cyphar 2 hours ago [-]
I agree there appears to be very little interest in subtitles in Japan from most Japanese people, but it is absolutely not true that Japanese subtitles are as haphazard as you say. The overwhelming majority of official Japanese subtitles I have seen (having studied Japanese for more than 5 years now) are not only word-accurate transcriptions, but also include transcriptions of noises (like あああああ for screams) as well as SDH-like notations for sound effects. Most include furigana for new/uncommon words as well. This has been the case for all anime, dramas, and movies I have watched with subtitles for the past 5 years (too many hours to count).
Funnily enough, the complaints you have here actually apply more to English subtitles in my experience. Modern English subtitles tend to accurately transcribe what was said, but if you look at official subtitles from the mid-2000s and earlier you'll see that most subtitles are made much shorter than the original text. Tom Scott's video on subtitling talks about this historical practice and how it is different today[1].
Are you sure that the subtitle services you used are actually using official subtitles, and that they aren't actually translations or from some other source? How old are the shows you're watching (I believe some movies from the 70s I watched were character-accurate but that might not have been as common in the past)?
>A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese)
This is standard in closed captions and is not specific to Japan. So perhaps the service you're talking about only has closed captions and is incorrectly marking them as subtitles.
uxp100 6 hours ago [-]
I think they are referring to text localization. I’m not sure if you actually can turn the subtitle track off on the Japanese language on crunchy roll, the rights holders have long been very concerned with reverse importation.
Arnavion 5 hours ago [-]
CR rips (like SubsPlease, mentioned in the article) have jp audio and softsubs for en+signs, so I assume you can turn them off on CR's website too.
vunderba 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah CR's mobile app supports this as well - I've accidentally turned off subs when watching anime on CR in the original Japanese dub.
If you don't understand the above, then you don't want raw episodes after all.
Ferret7446 2 hours ago [-]
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
GolDDranks 2 hours ago [-]
Not the GP, but I watch all my anime raw (often enabling Japanese closed captions), and I struggle to understand the above...
Ferret7446 2 hours ago [-]
Well, it's not really Japanese. It reminds me of myself as a doe-eyed freshman who took Japanese 101 and thought I was hot shit.
charcircuit 60 minutes ago [-]
わかる takes the が particle for what's known. You should use わかる instead of わかれる. わかれる usually means 分かれる. 一番部分 is not natural here, I don't know what you mean
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 English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.
If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).
Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. 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.”
Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.
I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.
And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?
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 age of Tier 1 fan subs is over)
$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).
The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.
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 product.
That’s the key right there.
They should probably consider that this competitor is actually mpv playing the DRM-free blu-ray quality fully subtitled mkv files obtained for a grand total of zero dollars from organized groups of people who simply care about anime to an absurd degree.
"Paying customer" is a synonym for "fool" in this context. Paying for inferior products is just foolish. It is damaging to one's self-respect. It is even more damaging for the reputation of the corporation. A bunch of fans regularly put them to shame by releasing better products on a daily basis. That's just pathetic.
Not unheard of, but probably harder than hiring for a call center, and more need to prevent high rotation due to difficulty in finding replacements.
Edit: not that I disagree with your general idea, just pointing out potential issues.
These are the questions that would get played out in the decision process.
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 encodings to the point of delusion.
I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region.
Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned:
https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/Project-4K77/
Always bet on guys who care. Corporations will never be able to compete. They simply do not give a shit. They want money for minimum viable products. These guys do it out of love.
At least one of the Chinese streaming services (I think possibly iQIYI) crowdsources improved translations directly in the app, presumably relying on the irritation factor of early adopters stuck with the MTL-grade int'l subs supplied by many C-drama production companies.
3-4 hours of time for a sub must be a rounding error for the production costs of these shows. No?
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 minutes of unique content (OP & ED) per ~12 episodes. Typesetting depends heavily on anime, like isekais don't usually have a lot Japanese writing anyway.
Thank you for this. Great perspective.
Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.
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.
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.
Another thing that happens is time code shifts that come from differences in frame rate between source material and what the subtitlers end up with (eg 24 vs 23.98 if I’m remembering correctly), which can cause subs to have what we called “ramping” issues over time (timing gets less and less accurate). So you have to go through and reset all the lines anyway.
That being said, we DID do this sometimes, but maybe that takes your time down to 25 minutes, the hard minimum possible time to accurately subtitle a 25 minute show.
And translators hated having to add the times codes (or copy paste their translations over the CCs) — they preferred to just give a script to the subtitler and let them handle it. And actually, if it’s a really good subtitler, they can! In about 35 mins.
So I think the translators were probably right to push back, as it’s only 10 minute savings for probably >10 mins on their part.
- Japanese has very different word order and word lengths, and furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel. (Vice versa as well, of course, but that’s not really a problem here.) To give a sense of the alienness at play here, Japanese is essentially postfix throughout, that is the most literal counterpart of “the car [that you saw yesterday]” is “[[you SUBJECT] yesterday saw] car”; and it also has no way to join sentences that would not make one of them potentially subordinate to the other (like the “and” before the semicolon does in this sentence). Virtually anything longer than a single line has to be retimed (and occasionally edited for length).
- “Forced” subtitles for captions, on-screen text, etc. are simply absent in the original, for lack of need. True believers (like GP apparently used to be) will try to match the positioning and even typesetting of the on-screen original, either replacing or supplementing it. (Those aren’t your run of the mill SRT subs, ASS is a completely different level of functionality.)
[1]: https://github.com/kaegi/alass
It's wild to hear someone - especially someone in the industry - say that. Fans definitely bring the most enthusiasm to their work, but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.
Similarly there are some phrases which are probably unavoidably awkward. Like when translating vaguely as “that guy”.
Just according to keikaku.
Translator's note: "Keikaku" means plan
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 Polonius. And, like Polonius, it is there that you shall meet your end."
I was so surprised that they threw in the Hamlet reference it's what made me look up what the original Japanese line was. The English dub writing often strikes me just as straight up better the more I watch of it.
It is quite tricky and this Shakespeare reference might be a little bit out of context...
"Are you not a student?"
In English, the non-student speaker would respond with "No", short for "No, I am not."
In Japanese, the non-student speaker would respond with "Yes", short for "Yes that's correct."
A literal translation would make this mistake.
(Native American English speaker.)
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 offices in Japan and be a liaison to foreign businessmen. He was attending a meeting once where everyone but him was Japanese. The boss presented an idea. There was silence for about 10-15 seconds, then people said things like "Yes, that's a good idea, let's do that." The American left the meeting thinking that the idea had been approved, only to have his Japanese colleague explain to him that the key part was the silence. The boss clearly heard and understood the message that his employees didn't think it was a good idea, and the idea was dropped and never mentioned again.
So I could see a case where the character says "Yes" but the subtext is "No", and that would be clearly understood by a Japanese viewer. Different translators would choose different approaches there; some might translate the text, and some might translate the subtext. I'm curious to know if this was a case like that, or if it was a clear-cut case of one translation being right and the other one being flat-out wrong.
IIRC it was the DVD release of Tenchi Forever.
“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 shows the more fundamental difference in the cultures, where one values truth more, and one values agreement/harmony more.)
I’m not saying that’s what happened to you, just that it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to see it.
I'd be extremely wary of ascribing any cultural significance to the language modes here. Negation and especially affirmative/negative responses to negative questions is just extremely variable among languages. Even languages in the same language family just end up doing it differently.
In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.
They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.
I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.
Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.
When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.
Was always fun reading the top comments on big episodes. Finding those few other ppl who noticed that one small thing at timestamp 14:30, dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai... etc
> dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai
I was literally reaching to see if somebody else had already made a lame-ass “Truck-kun” joke on the first episode of No Longer Allowed in Another World or if I was going to have to provide a fill when I saw the change.
It was a deliberate choice that removed some of the value of the service and wiped out yet another swath of Internet history. The core is of course the videos, they can coast on that for a while, but it’s the changes like that add up that make Crunchyroll less competitive going forward, especially as other larger services acquire larger anime libraries.
I'm sure there was an extremely vocal minority that threw a fit when they killed it off, but I doubt their overall subscriber numbers were significantly impacted. The majority of people are just there to watch anime. There's plenty of subreddits that are vastly more suitable to discussion.
Calling the Crunchyroll anime comment section a community is like saying that the comments under a TikTok video are a cohesive community. Give me a break.
My original point stands - it's completely understandable from a business perspective.
Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.
completely agree - i think the gov't regulatory body should change the landscape to what film and cinema have; such that distributor of media cannot own and monopolize the broadcast rights on their own platform, and publisher of media be forced to sell/license at the same price to all distributors.
This way, a streaming service can always know and pay for a broadcasting license for _any_ media, and all media must be license-able for any streaming service (at the same price), thus no monopoly can exist under this system.
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.
Ideally, like music, we'd get multiple vendors offering downloads that are high quality copy of video that isn't DRM encumbered.
But currently, we don't get this, and the closest legitimate way (modulo the DMCA...) to get video as a file is to buy physical media and rip it.
Serious shades of Gabe Newell's "it's a service problem, not a pricing problem" around all of this.
I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.
You can also interpret that as I'll be shocked if AI doesn't result in every mangaka becoming their own small studio and distributing via YouTube.
In 2002 it was and I really liked it then.
No fuss. It’s basically a 1-click operation. $2.99 or whatever to watch your movie in good quality.
https://youtu.be/wyyXL__Awlk
You can look to the past to see what this might look like in the future:
- Publishing in the digital publishing era.
- Indie Gaming in the Steam Greenlight era.
- Indie music in the digital recording / DAW era.
- Trying to make it as an actor or musician in general.
- YouTuber careers vs. "YouTube poop"
- Trying to make it as a streamer / influencer
Novelty, self-promo, luck, preparation, right place/right time, likeability -- there are lots of things that can come together to make it work. But it's still a lot of work.
And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.
Back when they had software developers they were rapidly improving the app but someone decided they needed more executive bonuses and laid everyone off. Their software hasn't moved an inch since.
Funimation had the same idea. They bailed out of VRV (Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime "marketplace" all-in-one app) and released their own garbage app that is somehow much much worse.
It is the classic "we have exclusives so these drooling morons will take whatever we deign to give them because we're the only ones with show X/Y/Z" move.
- 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. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great.
They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive.
- good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people.
- "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.
Ultimately, there will be a concern that it devalues the translation process, leading to translators getting paid less, not more.
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)
This already exists today -- translation groups rush to be the first to translate a new series, and some fans have strong preferences around which groups provide the best translations (both in terms of accuracy and style). You can see the set of groups doing translations on the AniDB page for any Anime you like.
Make sure the editorial board is paid a living wage and the translators are too. Set up a marketplace for a dozen such organizations, and let them compete. All the incentives align.
There already is (at least for subs). In the wise words of Gabe Newell, piracy is a service problem.
For instance the current PRC chairman, Xi Jinping, has an alphabet reading close to Chinese, but Japanese news will call him along the lines of "Shu Kinpei", which sounds absolutely nothing near the original name, but is how someone would read the name assuming it was Japanese and with no pronounciations hints. They just don't care much about the sounds when it comes Asian names, even in official settings.
More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?
I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!
(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.
The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?
Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.
I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
Maybe because they partnered with an israeli AI subtitling company, thus funding an ongoing genocide?
If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.
I'd be willing to wager Netflix, which has a fair amount of anime, can do the same.
What site(s) are you referring to?
I flip pretty frequently between Chinese and English subs and it'll remember the last setting between episodes / shows / etc.
I feel like one reason is that subtitles in Japan never match what the characters actually say. A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese) Not sure why but the Japanese subtitle industry is just terrible in so many ways.
Funnily enough, the complaints you have here actually apply more to English subtitles in my experience. Modern English subtitles tend to accurately transcribe what was said, but if you look at official subtitles from the mid-2000s and earlier you'll see that most subtitles are made much shorter than the original text. Tom Scott's video on subtitling talks about this historical practice and how it is different today[1].
Are you sure that the subtitle services you used are actually using official subtitles, and that they aren't actually translations or from some other source? How old are the shows you're watching (I believe some movies from the 70s I watched were character-accurate but that might not have been as common in the past)?
[1]: https://youtu.be/pU9sHwNKc2c?t=124
This is standard in closed captions and is not specific to Japan. So perhaps the service you're talking about only has closed captions and is incorrectly marking them as subtitles.
If you don't understand the above, then you don't want raw episodes after all.
Good luck in your studies.