Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse? | Hacker News Reader

Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

animebythenumbers.substack.com

413 pointszdw290 comments

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.

Why don't they take the timings from the closed captions of the original Japanese broadcast?

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.

I mean, re: ramping, that sounds like a script could do it if the timings are actually consistent.

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.)

> furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel

One of my favourite things that clearly makes sense and sounds natural in Japanese but obviously doesn't translate well to English is "that person".

Every now and then you'll see some line of dialogue in an anime where someone says "Oh no, if this mark is showing up then we could see the return of _that person_." - which appears to be a way to refer to someone in the third person who the speaker knows but the listener doesn't - a linguistic "he who shall not be named", or "at least he who I'm not naming at this specific moment".

Discussion here, it seems: https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/llpqxt/is_that_perso...

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.

[1]: https://github.com/kaegi/alass

> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs!

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.

That’s why I said the SUBS are awesome… not the translations ;-)

Could you use fan subs to help AI models better sync your actual subs?

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”.

>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.

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...

Watching anime dubs with subtitles enabled can be interesting. I've literally seen the dub say "yes" with the sub saying "no."

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.

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.

This sort of difference is one of the reasons I will always prefer subs.

I guess I could be the odd one out but I'm not keen on the 'localisation' efforts that replace the cultural elements of the underlying media, e.g. how in Ace Attorney ramen is replaced with t-bone steaks (iirc?), prompting the meme 'Eat your hamburgers, Apollo'

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.

Not really familiar with Japanese; but I would interpret the English in exactly the opposite way, like the Japanese version.

(Native American English speaker.)

I'd consider it ambiguous and probably clarify it like "yes you are a student, or no you are not?"

My native Germanic language has a specific variant of 'yes' which is perfect for when both 'no' and 'yes' alone would be ambiguous. Not sure why not more languages have that. Japanese 'hai' isn't really 'yes' though.. so it's used way differently than you would use just 'yes'. In colloquial speech it's more common uttering various sounds instead.

> My native Germanic language has a specific variant of 'yes' which is perfect for when both 'no' and 'yes' alone would be ambiguous. Not sure why not more languages have that.

French draws this distinction; ordinary 'yes' is oui; 'yes' contradicting a negative is si instead.

Mandarin gives you a variety of options for how to respond. You can use equivalents of 'yes' and 'no', but it's more common to echo the verb in the question.

你喜欢吃辣的吗？("Do you like eating spicy food?")

不喜欢 ("[I] don't like [it].")

Here we have no need to worry about whether the question was positive or negative; if I like the food I'll say 喜欢 and if I don't I'll say 不喜欢.

It's also possible to say 对 "correct", in which case it does matter how the question was phrased.

The specific question here, 你不是学生吗 "Are you not a student?", might be a little odder than usual because the verb 是 is also what's used for a simple "yes". But for "No, I'm not" 不是 is unambiguous, and I have a vague gut feeling that 是啊 would probably be taken as "Yes, I am". And of course you have the option of continuing your response ("yes, I'm a student, I've been enrolled here for two years") if you feel the short answer was too cryptic.

In English it's ambiguous.

Source: I once said "So I guess you don't want to do the long-distance thing" to a native English speaker and she said "no" meaning she did, while I interpreted it the way you suggest and we (briefly) were not on the same page as to whether or not we were in a relationship.

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.

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"

> (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.

Curse my fat fingers, it should read:

In Japanese, you should say “yes, I didn’t go” or “no, I did go”:

Learning Japanese and being able to pick up bits of content, its interesting to see how very different from the subtitles it sometimes is.

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

There are a lot of bad fan subs, but the best subs I come across are always fan subs.

To be fair, official translations are equally notorious - "Jelly Donuts Are My Favorite" and so on

That’s from a dub, though. Whole other ball game.

I take hyperliteralism over agenda pushing any day. I do not want my foreign media to be entirely rewritten to some other foreign media. Just so that some overly political person can make a point...

> 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.

It's the kind of penny-wise and pound-foolish behaviour that happens in any large business. As you say, the productions cost dwarf the costs of subtitling so much it is ridiculous. Every unique frame of that show was literally hand drawn and colored by someone, to say nothing of all the writers, the voiceover, the marketing, etc. To refuse the light penny-shaving required to present the final product in a good light is completely non-sensical. If you have so little confidence then why are you licensing and paying for bandwidth to show it?

However, there is somebody in charge of subtitles, and they don't really care about overall business outcomes. So if they can reduce the budget of their department by squeezing typesetting, they win on an objective metric at the cost of a subjective (ie ignored) one.

While it's true crunchyroll has a lot of the anime market, there are more streaming platforms than ever right now, and people don't just consume a fixed amount of legal anime episodes per week, forever unchanging. If they have it in their head that they cannot gain or lose subscribers, that's extremely short-sighted.

I wonder if it's just a limited number of people who could do this. There was a time when nearly all the anime in my country was dubbed by 2-3 people (and why all the anime had the same lame voices). Maybe if they were paid the same rates as proper voice actors, the quality and people willing to do so would go up.

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?

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 were, and thus it was worth it to make the subscription a little cheaper.

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.

> barring privacy

That’s the key right there.

The ironic part is that a large majority of the piracy is just crunchy roll rips or subtitles from crunchy roll.

Also worth remembering that CR itself started as a pirate site.

>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.

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.

$1/month extra cost on $16/month of revenue is very significant though.

1$/month was just wildly off.

They have 17 million paying subscribers. If they subtitled 1,000 episodes of content a month * 200$ = 200k / 17 million ~= 1 cent per subscriber per month. Actual cost per subscriber is well below that.

> 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)

I was going to ask, crunchyroll has competitors for legal anime stremaing?

At least in Europe, if CR has licensed a show or a season, then nobody else can license the same show or season. There's always exactly one place to watch one particular show or season. So, no competition - licensing goes to one, and only one place. Likewise, if Netflix has licensed something then CR isn't getting that license (e.g. Komi Can't Communicate - it's on Netflix, therefore not available on CR)

This may be true for current seasons but previous seasons and finished series are often available on other services. At least crunchyroll and Netflix have an overlap (in Sweden). Frieren is available on both as an example.

Look at Railgun, for example.. they're all old, and each season is either on CR or on Netflix, never on both. Same with Index, and some others.

I’ll definetly give you that there is weird licensing schenanigans going on.

> 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.

At the moment the threshold for a fansub getting made or not is whether or not the licensed releases are "good enough". If the official releases are terrible, expect someone to step up and at least fix the typesetting even if they use the script from the license.

Less now, but the bar is higher because now there's a baseline good enough product, so even if in the past you'd have done it anyway with more care, now unless the official sub is bad enough, why would you bother?

I remember seeing (I think Netflix release) of Komi-san can't communicate, noticing A lot of things being missed, like Komi's literal main manner of communication (A notebook where she writes) not getting any translation for some episodes, or a lot of things I'd have to fill others in that normally at least would have been a T/N in fansub

It was bad enough that I went looking elsewhere to see if I had missed more than I realized, and the fansub did have everything covered

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.

> Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly

Here's the answer right here...

I don't think that's accurate to the current market. Ten years ago it was true but in 2025 they have several competitors and not nearly as many exclusives. I can name several counterarguments.

* Shonen anime, which are consistently the most popular ones, are also on netflix and probably several other services. Eg, demon slayer, dandadan, etc.

* there are still shows that are japan-exclusive because nobody bothers to license them. Roboshinkalion is an entire franchise that nobody cares to import! We actually had to wait two extra years for gridman universe because nobody bothered to license it for English localization!

* just this year they failed to obtain the rights to Mobile Suit Gundam G-Quuuuuux and Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt because amazon outbid them. These are both new entries in well-established brands and they're both made by studios with large fan followings (khara for g-quuuuuux and trigger for panty and stocking).

* somehow Hulu ended up breaking harmony gold's 45-year blockade around the macross franchise and won exclusive streaming rights.

* netflix has a lot of exclusives these days, including Jojo stone ocean and the upcoming steelball run.

I've been hearing a lot about HiDive recently

Who ever heard of an anime fan pirating media.....

By tier 1, we refer to commiesubs right?

[gg] of course.

> 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.

Without those “fools” paying, you would have no content to pirate.

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.

Anime will not disappear if CR implodes. It will still be funded by the Japanese market and other streamers. There will probably be fewer shows per season for a while, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Anime existed before Crunchyroll and will continue to exist after Crunchyroll.

And sometimes it's more fun when there's no central source. Snarky chapter titles and leaving in a commercial for Morning Rescue when editing down the TV rip? Sure, why not.

I am also paying for crunchyroll and trying to support the creators in various ways.

But still, I often find myself watching anime from fansub groups even though I have a legitimate, official way of watching them. Paying for a streaming service that is objectively, significantly worse than even the shittier pirate offerings does make me feel like a fool.

Correlation is not causation and all that, but anime was better without Crunchyroll.

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.

Well, it's not completely crazy. They don't redo the subs for an old show every month. But they do create new subs for new shows every month. They have constant, ongoing costs of subtitle development, and if they permanently increase those costs, they will be spending additional money (compared to the alternative) every month forever.

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.

Well, they can, and at least did. I know because I was one of them! The P&L that I rolled up to our execs was dead simple as well. I think everyone had a pretty clear picture of what was going on, down to the fraction of the hour.

I just wish that there were versions of closed captioning that were fan-made and kept. There are movies that I watch over-and-over again that have bad subtitles, and I can do nothing about it. This is a travesty for the hearing-impaired, and the only good thing about it is that on occasion a film may have Easter eggs in their subtitles or things from the script that didn’t make it into production.

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.

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.

Fair point, it does sound like an industry that would have a high passion/vocational factor.

Wouldn't it be easier to just hire someone in Japan who knows English? Im sure they could find someone willing to work remotely.

Someone who knows English natively and Japanese sufficiently is necessary for producing quality subtitles; it's arguable that potentially having slightly less accurate subtitles (i.e. missing nuance) is better than having slightly less fluent English (i.e. not communicating in a natural-sounding manner).

It's not just about translation, after all, but localization. While you can (or kind of have to) assume some level of familiarity with Japanese life/culture for someone watching anime, it's easier for a native English speaker/someone who grew up in North America to notice cultural disconnects and figure them out.

An example I once heard: a book in Italian might say the character "ordered a coffee" and then "picked up the coffee, drank it, and walked out of the cafe". An Italian without as much consideration of American culture might translate that directly, but someone who understands localization would know that Italian character ordered what we would call an espresso, and know to change the text to be specific; otherwise, it sounds as though the person is guzzling an entire mug of black coffee on the spot, which would likely come across as psychotic and unnerving compared to taking a single shot of espresso.

Likewise, an Italian reader of an American novel might be unable to comprehend how or why an American character could spend 20 minutes nursing a cup of coffee, because they might be picturing a 1-2 oz espresso rather than a drip coffee.

So yeah, that's the big part of why it can't just be someone who knows English to some sufficient degree - because without fluency in spoken and written English, familiarity with how things would be said in English, and cultural differences between Japan and North America, you're going to end up with all kinds of dissonance.

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.

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.

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.

Reminds me of products on Amazon with little to know information about the product and photoshopped images. Somehow it was worth making, but selling? Who can be bothered.

...and that's for an episode that probably cost the original studio at least a hundred thousand dollars to produce, maybe a lot more.

TBF, for the more popular shows, they are spending that money on an English dub (which is considerably more expensive).

See also unanimated's typesetting guide: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm

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.

>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.

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.

Nintendo, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon. I’m sure there are many others in creative industries since you have to delight customers at least some of the time there. A large part of the reason Nvidia is a big deal is that they were willing to make the best drivers, that they just cared more about making a quality product. Lots of companies well exceed minimum quality necessary to keep customers from switching.

Nintendo is changing. Switch 2 is outdated over-priced hardware with super expensive games. Not to mention always being extremely hostile to fans and draconically enforcing their copyright. With their recent software patent trolling they are on their way to become the Japanese Oracle.

Nvidia has garnered a lot of hate from the gaming community. Completely dishonest marketing, purposefully gimped hardware that barely gets enough RAM to function. Everyone wishes there would be more competition in this space.

Sure some studios still care about their customers but any huge corporations is bound to become a rotting corpse of its former self over time.

> Switch 2 is outdated over-priced hardware

Per most reviewers (e.g. Digital Foundry), the Switch 2 is expensive but not over-priced for what you get (unless what you get is motion sickness from the overdriven LCD display).

There's a stark difference between "expensive" and "overpriced". A lot of people have said over the years that Apple's laptops were "overpriced", when what they really meant was that they could get something good enough for their needs for lower prices. Lots of people still bought them because it was worth it to them.

Likewise, the Switch 2 is expensive, and it is not worth it to everyone, but for a lot of people it's not "overpriced"; I would point to the Switch 2's sales numbers as the fastest selling console in history to indicate that most people don't seem to feel the same way.

> with super expensive games.

Correction: every other gaming platform has super cheap games. If game prices had kept up with inflation since I was a kid playing on the NES, we'd be paying well over $100-120 for games these days. They're definitely more expensive than other games, but (as one example) if I play Mario Kart World half as much as I played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe then I'm getting better value for my money than almost any other entertainment I've ever paid for.

Again, not worth it to everyone, but not unreasonable also. It sucks, but still.

Gaming being a relatively cheap hobby doesn't change the fact that Nintendo is using its market position to raise prices in a coldly capitalistic way that obviously saps some of the "delight" their customers would normally experience.

> 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.

I believe it does. In the comic world there were famous collaborations between visual and text artists. When the latter died the comic withered. Anime is about story telling - much harder to do well with images alone.

The real problem with all these brand killing enshittification moves is the delay until consequences manifest.

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".

The more underlying question is "why does the production company care so little about the quality of the overseas version of their product?" Is it just that it's a small fraction of the JP-native revenue, or is there something else going on?

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.

I commend you for saying this, but this is akin to saying you would gladly pay me tomorrow for a hamburger today. It doesn’t pay the bills. Perhaps a group could assemble on Patreon or other crowdfunding to acquire rights to make their own releases if they wanted to be part of a market-based solution.

Would you be willing to crowdfund such an enterprise? It’s one thing to say you’ll put your money where your mouth is in some hypothetical future economic situation that may never arrive (as it was never funded by you or by anyone else), whereas it’s altogether another thing entirely to actually do what you say you’ll do in hopes that your investment will come good.

I understand what you're saying, but I'm still showing my disapproval via my wallet and not giving money to people who do a much worse (and/or unsuitable for fans instead of the general public) job than fans.

The amount of laughably bad upscales making BDs worse than the previous DVDs is just the cherry on top showing that they truly don't care about anyone with taste or discernment; they should put the DVD masters untouched on BD and they very rarely do so (Di Gi Charat had that).

How would you even know? Is there any single company that prices that service separately so you can tell how many customers are willing to pay for it?

> 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:

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.

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.

That's the first I've seen of 4k77 and related projects, thanks for sharing. A true labour of love.

There's a direct equivalent in the world of anime: frame-per-frame restoration like the GITS Blu-Ray (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316985) or the '99 HxH anime and LaserDisc scans.

Absolute legend. I love this film.

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.

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.

> 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.

I'm frankly puzzled by this meme. Only Bakemonogatari is sensitive to timing, and not in a good way, the rest is a matter of habit and taste, so you can't improve it.

> the rest is a matter of habit and taste, so you can't improve it

This statement is incorrect. All artistic endeavors are matters of habit and taste. You absolutely can improve at matters of taste

What? It doesn't work like that. At best, they improve(?) fashion, not taste.

I was on the animeone[AonE] team 2001 to 2007 atleast.

Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.

> 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.

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 difference in someone actually taking care with the subtitles is not even close to subtle. It makes a huge difference.

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.

Wait, are schools with no clubs now? What do people do to fill all the time?

Raging on social media like tik-tok.

I was from a third world country

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.

I remember the Gintama fan subs. They were awesome. They had a lot of explanation that really made the show accessible for someone not all to intimate with Japanese culture. That also helped with getting some jokes that would've went over my head otherwise.

Nowadays SubsPlease floods the market with their Crunchyroll rips.

Also, I tried watching Komi-san on Netflix but it was atrocious - the timing and placements were so bad it was actually unwatchable.

Fascinating insight into the industry. Thanks for sharing.

Viki is a platform to watch Asian TV with subtitles in various languages. Their policy on subtitles is, users are free to provide subtitles. Viki won't provide any itself. Their obligation begins and ends with making the video file available.

Each show is subtitled by a team of volunteers. (Generally one team per sub language.)

I watched 大江大河 ("Like a Flowing River"; the English name seems to have no particular relation to the Chinese name) on Viki. But between that series and the sequel (大江大河2), Viki lost the license to stream it.

So now both series are on YouTube, provided by some other party. Viki's subtitles are permissively licensed, so season 1 is up there still using the Viki subtitles.

Viki never got to show season 2, and the new publisher had to provide those subtitles itself. Unfortunately, they tend to be unintelligible gibberish. I was eventually able to watch season 2 after I found a set of fansubs on reddit.

I've noticed that Netflix and Amazon Prime now offer Korean dramas, and it made me wonder if that had something to do with Viki's struggles. But this wasn't even a Korean show.

On the topic of crunchyroll, they could fix their subtitle problems while spending less money by just moving to Viki's system.

Can't pry my Ani-Kraze fansub of Area 88 from my cold dead hands.

I don't get it - these shows and their subtitles get streamed tens of millions of times across decades, but 4 hours per episode is too expensive?

I mean I guess there's a very long tail of mediocre shows as well that get thousands of streams at best, but still.

>If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. I miss the days of hand-timing 25 minute episodes in about 20 minutes in Aegisub because I learned to read the waveform, and had custom snap-to-keyframe commands set up in Aegisub.

Of course, the typesetting would take 8 hours, but timing was always easy.

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.

Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.

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.

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.

And what makes the one streaming service stay good, with no competitors?

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.

> many platforms each with (more or less) all the content

Which is what we have on the music side of things. You can choose Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music etc based on how their service works for you rather than what music you want to listen to.

Worth noting though, those monoliths themselves come with tradeoffs; artists don't earn shit for streaming, which is why the only way to really "support" one anymore is concerts and merch.

And don't get me wrong I love concerts and merch, but I'd rather people earn a reasonable living without needing to be on tour basically in perpetuity.

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

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

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 request from a lucky listener.

What streaming has cannibalized is album sales, which is the problematic aspect. The fixed price-per-month to access a vast library of music is a killer value prospect for the consumer, which is why Spotify et al have succeeded as they have. However, again, it's bad for the artists; they don't make shit. And I mean, think about the economics there and it'll become evident why: previously to access between 10 and 20 songs depending on the album costed you about $10-15, one time purchase, but it was yours for the life of the media. Now you're paying (if you're paying) about $15-20 per month to access all of the music ever. And yeah there's less cost, no printed CDs, no shipping, no retail markup, but come on, if you have 4 CDs in your spotify library and are on the most expensive family plan, which IIRC is about $30/month, you're already ahead by 50%. That doesn't bode well for the artist's revenue split.

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...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thriller_(album)

> 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.

Solid comparison, and illustrates the issue pretty well I feel.

> "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 then let's bear that out. I don't have the data on the Thriller album for for the sake of argument, we'll rely on a quick google which says it was about $8 in 1982. I'll use the same split you did (33% off for wholesale, about 30% of which went to the artist) so if we run all that down, with US sales being 35 million units. So $55.44 million went to Michael, if we assume all of that is true and correct, which adjusted for inflation would be about 184 million dollars.

We'll compare that to the Weeknd's streams for Blinding Lights. We'll put him on the high end of receiving a half a penny per play, that works out to about 30 million dollars, for as you point out, the highest streamed song on the platform.

It's still not quite a 1:1, unfortunately, but: Michael Jackson with 7 hit songs of varying popularity was able to shift 35 million albums for a personal profit of 184 million in 2025 dollars, versus the Weeknd, who with the most popular song on Spotify, made $30 million.

And it's worth pointing out here, these are both superstar heavy hitters. The story gets a lot worse for any artist not in that category.

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.

> 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.

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.

The solution to this is copyright only lasting for 10 years.

Just imagine what the British regulatory body OFCOM would do with anime.

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.

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.

> I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.

In 2002 it was and I really liked it then.

YouTube was founded in 2005, is this a typo?

I'll be shocked if they're able to get noticed above the tide of slop and industrially automated bogus copyright claims.

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.

There are some anime that are simulcast on YouTube. Watanare was one of them during the summer 2025 season.

https://youtu.be/wyyXL__Awlk

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm sure there was an 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 a bit of a stretch, it's like saying that the comments under a TikTok video are a community.

My original point stands.

A brand is built on sentiment. That's the upside. You are witnessing exactly why it's important here, as people tell you why they're going to stop being customers. I don't watch anime so have no skin in this game, but this is a classic tale at this point.

A company gets successful off the back of community engagement and builds great shared sentiment with its customers. They get bought, the incoming board members start cutting costs, accidentally cutting the artery they didn't realise fed the heart of the brand.

The company loses an edge the board didn't realise it had, and people slowly lose that connection, which allows them to painlessly jump ship to the next company with the same catalog but better sentiment brand.

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

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

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

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

- Twitch chat is a community.

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

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

The problem is that '.. make Crunchyroll less competitive..' isn't really happening. There is no competition. Even when there are multiple providers (say, Netflix in addition to Crunchyroll), a particular show, or even season, will be licensed to exactly one of them, in any particular region. There was a particular show where I had to juggle between CR and N for every season because CR and N couldn't both license all the seasons.

And.. it's actually better if absolutely everything is on Crunchyroll. One subscription and you're set. Or I am, at least. Having to hunt around to figure out where some particular show can be found.. subscribe there only for watching that particular one.. mostly it can't be done, in my region, and I absolutely don't want to.

Which of course also gives CR no competition, and that's the price we pay. When the quality has gone down enough, the alternative isn't moving to a competitor, it's to give up on anime altogether.

Plan B is of course to get my Japanese up to a level sufficient to be able to turn off the subs, at least any potential problem there will be gone.

I pay much less for CR than for Netflix, I would rather pay more on Crunchyroll if this could guarantee a certain quality. Netflix, on the other hand, is basically a giant waste of money for me. That I haven't cancelled yet is just lazyness.

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

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.

Yes, that the comments disappeared was terrible. Some comment would have early and precious information in some cases, e.g. the existence of a direct precursor (not part of the list of 'seasons'), and tons of other information, not just comments about characters in the show or whatever. And reviews don't have comments either, I miss those. Would have saved wasted time.

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.

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.

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.

Looks like they blamed it on a third-party vendor.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lqzdva/crunchyroll_...

They probably went with a "lowest bidder" approach and then didn't sufficiently check the quality of work being submitted.

Enshitification just being further turbo-fed by AI

once AI enshitifies PE we’ll accelerate towards the enshitularity

Amazon Prime did it as well and it was absolutely horrible. Character names got completely butchered, and changed from one scene to the next.

It's alright, I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto us, the customers.

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.

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.

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.

That's very true. Crunchyroll is just sad because it used to be good and feel like someone involved cared.

Funimation lowered the bar so much I thought it couldn't go lower.

Who knew HiDive would prove me wrong.

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.

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.

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 ?

Yes

That appears to happen sometimes in the middle of Crunchyroll seasons. Suddenly the translations change. Spelling of names, other things. Jarring.

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.

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)

> 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.

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.

I remember watching a video a decade ago, of someone doing review of the subs for each group that was doing Black Rock Shooter, specifically the wheelchair scene, because what it's said has to be taken within the context of what's presented.

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.

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.

> 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.

You couldn't do this legally without cooperation from the license holders, and good luck with that.

License holders have the means to do it themselves (and keep the money), they're already bound to streaming companies.

> 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

Many IP holders belong to a group like Kadokawa, which straight own several streaming platforms (dwango/niconico is a perfect example of this)

Other groups like DMM or Fuji already have their direct platform where they also stream their own content. Except they fiercely cut it from foreign registration.

They all already accept credit cards, and could further cut H content from foreign audiences if needed.

If they wanted to, they could open it internationaly tomorrow.

> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.”

I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.

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

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

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.

> I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.

Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't.

I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter.

If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :)

[1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems.

[2] https://github.com/afishhh/subrandr

This is a random aside but somewhere I have some slightly obscure early 2000s anime with fan subs, and in one of them they accidentally left an additional “working notes” subtitle track that I find fascinating. It basically has all the little messages between the participants discussing whether a given translation is accurate or should be changed, alternative ideas, disagreements over proper translation, etc. It really illustrates how subtitling is nowhere near an exact science and oftentimes whether a given translation is the best is highly subjective. You basically need to be a good writer to be a good translator.

> Most anime have exclusive streaming licenses, so for ~70% of 2025’s new releases, and an even larger share of catalog shows and movies, Crunchyroll is often your only means to do so. But that’s not an issue.

Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.

This is random but Aegisub is an amazing tool and a wonderful way to get ear training when you're learning a language.

Haven't thought of it as a language learning tool before, that is an interesting way of looking at it.

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.

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)

> 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...)

It is a weird mix.

Kingdom at least has some connection to historical places/people so it kind of makes sense.

Thunderbolt Fantasy on the other hand is completely original/fictional in setting and characters, and yet still uses the Chinese names in the subtitles. While it is a joint Taiwanese-Japanese project, the only available audio is Japanese. So none of the completely made up names ever match between audio and subtitles.

And then there's Dragon Ball with e.g. Son Goku who is named after the Monkey King from Journey to the West but nobody ever refers to him as Sun Wukong.

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.

> Since the most recent round of Crunchyroll layoffs

What's the point of writing a full article when the answer is literally in the eighth word?

Maybe some people are still amazed to witness that machines still cannot create the same quality content that (passionate) human (teams) can create? Quality takes patience, time and money.

It really shouldn't be "extremely expensive to re-encode each language’s video files!". Has this industry not heard of transparent overlays?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series

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.

[1]: https://commiesubs.com/shingeki-no-kyojin-01/

Most fans I saw called it by the Japanese title, Shingeki no Kyojin. You could almost tell whether someone watched the official licensed translation or not, based on what they called the series.

Actually, another quirk is the German lyric in the first season's opening theme. Crunchyroll doesn't usually translate opening or ending lyrics, but translating the lyrics was standard practice in the fansub era, so the. However, they misheard the lyric as "Sie sind das Essen und wir sind die Jäger" - "You are the food and we are the hunters" - as if the line is spoken by the Titans (perhaps the English-speaking audience is primed to the Germans being the bad guys in movies). The actual lyric was revealed in official Japanese sources as spoken from the perspective of the humans: "Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind die Jäger!" - "Are we the food? No, we are the hunters!" However, the incorrect lyric persists among fans because the second opening theme superceded the first before the error was widely noted in the English speaking anime community.

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.

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

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

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

This makes me sad. For a while, the video player team at Crunchyroll was essentially just me. I spent countless hours fixing bugs and building features, especially around subtitling. The teammate who joined after me really took it to the next level. When I left, the player felt like it was in good hands — they even open-sourced the code for a time.

This is really indicative of the people in charge at Crunchyroll not understanding their audience, as any serious anime fan can tell you that high quality subtitles have a huge effect on the enjoyability of an anime.

Colourful, expressive, well timed subs really add something to the experience.

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

Isn't this because they outsourced the subtitle work to an Israeli-based AI startup?

> Multiple overlapping speakers are represented on the top and bottom of the screen.

> This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience

Quality concerns aside, I've always disliked having text on the top and bottom of the screen simultaneously. My eyes are focused on the bottom of the screen, so I sometimes don't even realize that there's text at the top and have to pause/rewind to figure out what I missed.

I think putting both speakers' captions at the bottom with some kind of differentiator makes more sense.

The top one is usually a background speaker, and not the focus of the scene. It is extremely rare that directors do that anyways.

Crunchyroll’s “de facto” monopoly is the main cause: with little competition, no one has any real alternative therefore Crunchyroll doesn't have any incentive to improve.

>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.

You could just turn the subtitles off, or watch it with Japanese subtitles

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.

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.

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.

As someone pointed out CR often lacks Japanese subtitles, but you can definitely turn them off.

Crunchyroll strangely lacks Japanese subs, which seems strange as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and most others have them in addition to all the translations.

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.

>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.

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)?

[1]: https://youtu.be/pU9sHwNKc2c?t=124

I'm only familiar with Japanese TV.. there, subtitles work. They're actually CC, very close to the speech. My wife fiddled with the TV for a while until she got it working (always a bit of black magic there), and since then there's always been subtitles matching the speech. Pretty well too, as far as I can tell.

You are correct, I forgot that they usually lack the original language. Makes zero sense to me, but licensing is frequently lacking in logic.

日本語をわかれる人として、アニメはアメリカで一番部分は英語だけで見たいのは分かります。それから、アメリカで英語に翻訳しております。

If you don't understand the above, then you don't want raw episodes after all.

Not the GP, but I watch all my anime raw (often enabling Japanese closed captions), and I struggle to understand the above...

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.

Those were the days.

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

Word of the day, 吹き替える. TIL.

One question if you have a minute. Why is it アメリカだけに吹き替えされている instead of 英語だけに吹き替えされている?

That depends on the intent of the sentence, and the intent was only a guess of the GP. But you can analyze だけに in two ways:

英語に吹き替える to dub in English (the base case of 吹き替える)

英語だけに吹き替える to dub just in English (だけ + に)

アメリカだけに吹き替える to dub, just because it's America / as you'd expect of America (だけに grammar https://tanosuke.com/n2-dakeni)

Oooh I see, thanks!

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

Good luck in your studies.

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?

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.

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.

It didn't persist when I tried it out for what it's worth. Maybe that is a limitation of the browser version.

> tourists

look, buddy, anime is mainstream now

Oh that's interesting. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to Crunchyroll more than once on my TV when I try to watch something and then it seems to have garbage subtitles. Sadly, I keep forgetting and clicking on them in Prime Video.

I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".

FYI, subtitles are often different between the Crunchyroll channel on Prime Video and “native” Crunchyroll. You aren’t getting the same on both.

Oh well that helps to know. I'll try native and see. The subtitles are truly atrocious on Prime's Crunchyroll.

So I'm not going mad. Good to know.

Or rather, I am, but I'm still right about the subtitles.

I haven't watched an airing anime ever. How good are fansubs? I found it very surprising that volunteers would write subtitles for free when I became aware of the phenomenon.

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.

From what I understand, the written translation, in the form of subtitles, that accompanies the original language audio are have their own copyright and are licensed separately to the translated audio version and its closed captions. If they were to include the dubbed audio alongside the translated subtitles, to be compliant with all applicable copyrights, they would be on the hook for licensing costs twice over, which is why the legitimate streaming sites rarely do that, nor do they even expose such a dual-mode capability via the user interface.

Why is this getting pushed up so fiercely? It seems all of the issues are for dubs and their closed captions. CC users are a very minor target group. Deaf can just use proper subs.

I have seen no issues in regular subs, and they look like they always have looked.

We need to go back to fansubbing.

Money.

Less money to pay for quality.

YES where do I sign the petition to revert this terrible change?

The only effective petition is to cancel your subscription.

I take AI slop over what ever they have been doing last couple years...

You're in luck then, as one of the reasons their subs are getting increasingly worse is exactly their growing reliance on AI.

No, it has gotten worse long before AI boom because of political activism from humans.

Extremists gotta extremize, right? They couldn't stop themselves from tainting their work with their beliefs, you cannot stop yourself from taking the few times this happened and magnifying it, as if it was predominant, and then reacting to it viscerally, even years down the line under no emotional pressure to do so.

And then even with all that additional capacity at hand, the proposed solution is replacing the rarely politically addled subs with mostly nonsensical AI generated rubbish, because that is such a reasonable alternative. Some people really deserve what's coming for them it seems. Just wish normal people didn't have to along for the ride.

What about AI being politically biased by the way? Or is that talking point already forgotten?

It is not only a few times. I watch multiple shows every season for close to a decade and at this point it is the exception when most of them aren't butchered by political or "comedic" mistranslation.

If I have to choose between funding political zealot humans and political zealot AI, I pick the later. At least AI aren't boasting and insulting there customer on social media about "fixing" art for the greater good.

https://boundingintocomics.com/manga/interview-fan-and-profe...

I also watch like half a dozen shows every season, and have been for more than a decade too. Pretty much the only scandal I actively recall is the Dragon Maid one, and even that was so long ago that at this point you could convince me that was the dub not the sub being "creative". Even saying "a few times" is just me granting the idea validity, rather than me actually remembering more.

That link is exclusively about manga translations at a skim btw, which I'll admit I know nothing about. Stopped reading any a long time ago.

> At least AI aren't narcissistically spitting in your face when circle jerking on social media about "fixing" art for the greater good.

Isn't this also a voice actor thing? I mostly remember these with regards to EN gacha game voice actors (US EN specifically).

>only scandal I actively recall is the Dragon Maid one

Then you have not paid attention at all. Almost every season there is a case like this same with LNs and VNs to a point where it's not even news worthy anymore.

> I mostly remember these with regards to EN gacha game voice actors

No there are multiple people that are infamous anime localizers that are gloating on Twitter how they fix anime by pushed there political agenda, anybody engaging with the medium beyond surface level would know.

> anybody engaging with the medium beyond surface level would know.

I'll readily admit to not caring about the people or the process behind how anime are made. I consider that a separate side of the hobby entirely. It is an unfortunate side effect of social media that I can less and less ignore these aspects, including VAs blackwashing characters and other utterly puzzling antics. It's not something I seek out myself, I watch the shows for themselves. 0% apologetic about this too

That said, if there's such an influence on the translations, I'd prefer to be rid of it of course. Which brings us to...

> Then you have not paid attention at all. Almost every season there is a case like this

That is entirely possible. Do you maybe have like a short list of examples? From the last few seasons then, at least a handful. Cause "infamous anime localizers that are gloating on Twitter how they fix anime by pushed there political agenda" sounds very readily bad, and yet a quick search (via AI, of course) left me completely empty handed beyond the high profile case of "Dragon Maid", and the lesser but still talked about "My first girlfriend is a gyaru" (which didn't do much other than namedropping SJWs iirc, a now outdated term).

https://boundingintocomics.com/?s=Localize

https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2021/04/23/localizer-goes-on-...

That's only one show from one localizer and they and many others have been doing this for almost 10 years.

I checked both links (until the start of 2024). I see a number of examples for the jokey-joke type translations, but not for the political ones. The only politically charged mistranslation I see there is the Blue Box one from April, which honestly looks accidental. The Twitter gloatings screenshotted seem to squarely pertain to the jokey-joke type stuff too at a skim.

Gonna stand by this angle being way overblown. Thanks for at least bringing receipts though nevertheless.

if censorship, subversion and cultural rewriting is not "political" then i don't know what "political" is. stop enabling this behavior by making excuses and assuming good faith when they literally tell you to your face there bad intentions.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220717182807/https://twitter.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220218214341/https://twitter.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210410233042/https://twitter.c...

*their

AI is not immune to accusations of political bias, as we've seen recently from Grok.

A while back there was a story going around that licensors were replacing human translators with AI to prevent political bias. It seems clear that the real reason they're doing this is to save time and money. Having used Japanese AI translation casually, it's definitely not accurate enough for professional use. Even the unofficial manga scanlators who use it will apologize profusely and use it only as a last resort when a human translator isn't available.

As accusations of translator bias go, other than the Dragon Maid debacle, the big one at that time was the Zombie Land Saga, where they were accused of changing the script to Hoshikawa Lily transgender. What they failed to notice is that the character was always transgender - Hoshikawa Lily being a stage name, her birth name is revealed in one episode to be Masao, a male name.

There are some instances of dubious translations that fail to accurately convey the author's intent, but at the same time, part of what we're seeing is just pushback to increased LGBT representation and feminist themes in anime. Translators are sometimes being blamed for inserting modern or western values into works that already reflected those values.

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