That scene has long had the "janky but really fast translation" niche and the "good but takes a couple of days" niche. From what little I experienced of the former, people who cared about translation quality probably weren't using it anyway.

I've been away from all that for rather a long time, so I don't know. Still, I'd guess these robo-subtitles are probably replacing the "fast and bad" niche. The "slow and good" niche seems like it could survive.

I've been getting the advice (but I'm learning German, not Japanese) that the best thing is to watch shows with subtitles in the foreign language to gradually acquire it.

Lots of Chinese dramas with barely-parseable subtitles as well. Missing sections, and completely wrong contextual glosses, which are particularly easy to get horribly wrong in Chinese.

I remember a while ago American shows and movies joked about Indian customer support, as they "lower the standard of customer service". Now here the same to AI "lower the standard of subtitle". The quality is not appreciated which is why the offering are lower the bar for quality constantly. Or they'll be out competed.

English dubbed English subs are completely different, the subs (presumably) being translations of the original language instead of the dubs. It's very jarring and I can only imagine this getting better with AI.

Paramount+ sucks. If you try to play DS9 season 5 episode 1, it simply throws an error. So all legal option for watching that episode is gone.

(I’m almost ashamed I watch Star Trek so often that I know this offhand…)

The subtitles are literally the worst, short of being incomprehensible. Like so bad that until someone experiences them, you can’t really grok how terrible they are. They’re a solid D minus.

Maybe it‘s an iOS thing. But every so often, the positioning codes sneak in to the subtitles themselves, so you start seeing x,y coordinates. And any time anything is italicized, the italicized part jumps to the opposite side of the screen, meaning the caption gets split in half. It’d be comical if it wasn’t frustrating.

(Thanks for the opportunity to vent about how sad it is that Star Trek is trapped behind such a bad streaming service. And I even pay for no ads, yet they still show ads every 8th episode or so.)

Subtitle mistakes are very common. I have tons of DVD's from before AI. The subtitles have tons of obvious errors. I doubt they re-subtitled it, thought they may have run it thru a generic AI? They probably took whatever was there and just dumped it onto the service. Some are even more fun in that they will have 3 generations of subtitles all on one disc. The TV CC fit into the vertical blank, the dvd subtitle, and the for the hearing impaired subtitle. I usually go for the hearing impaired ones. As they seem to be the most accurate, and usually have a nice bonus of putting the text over/near the person who is actually speaking. Which is nice for when chars on the show overtalk each other. A fun touch was on the toy story ones they used the font from the title cards as the font for the subtitles.