[falcolas]

> Why though?!

There's not a ton of money in the Anime industry. Especially over-seas, since translation is a very labor intensive and largely manual process.

There's also not a guaranteed audience for an anime. They have to rely on fans of the existing works (typically light novels) to view the (often drastically different) animes. I've seen a few of my favorite series get dropped due to being too niche.

[buzer]

> Especially over-seas, since translation is a very labor intensive and largely manual process.

Subbed translations at least previously were not usually very labor intensive if you didn't try to do heavy localization or typesetting everything (I remember someone translating every single book name in some bookcase). Fansubs managed to do pretty good job with just about 1MD worth of effort per episode (~20x length of the episode, extremely small amount compared to work required to actually produce the original episode). Old fansubs did need quite a bit more, but improved processes, tools & computers (just encoding & uploading used to pretty slow step) also improved the overall speed. No clue what how much CR & co need these days.

Of course, dubbing is very different case, but that's usually only done for DVD/Blu-ray releases. No clue if it's really worth to do it though, but my viewpoint is probably too biased.

[falcolas]

That’s a fair point on the subtitling. I do know that translations for Japanese dialog can differ in difficulty - there are some more esoteric writing/speaking dialects which can take a significant amount of effort to turn into English dialog (for example, “The Irregular in Magic High School” novels have very poor official translations, largely due to how it was written in Japanese).

As for dubbing, there are instances where animes are “simultaneous dubbed” for international release. A recent example is Shield Hero.

[Razengan]

> There's not a ton of money in the Anime industry. Especially over-seas ... There's also not a guaranteed audience for an anime.

How even did you arrive at that deduction?

There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas. Japanese pop culture is probably second in worldwide popularity after America's.

And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.

2-3 decades ago it was a relatively small handful of fans who contributed their time and effort for free, and worked against legal prohibitions, to provide anime fansubs and manga scanlations throughout the 1990s and 2000s, until the anime fandom grew to the millions today, with adaptations, inspirations (Matrix, Kill Bill etc.), cosplayers, conventions, and even pornstars jumping in.

This is a unique case where an industry was practically established by piracy!

Many of those fans still rely on unofficial translations, reviews and torrents to get their fix, and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)

Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture. There are still tons of anime, manga and video games with lots of worldwide fans but they've never been officially ported outside Japan.

[slightwinder]

> There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas.

That's just wishful thinking. There are decades of effort tapping into that potential with mildly success.

> And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.

Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.

> and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)

Not enough. Market-localisation is too expensive to justify the risk of pampering a handful fans.

The whole japanese Pop-culture is divided in a very small number of big franchises, which make the gross of the money, and a very big number of very niche-productions which hardly make enough money to even survive. The big franchises can take the risk of going overseas, and they do that for a long time now. But the small companys don't have the money, often not even the knowledge for it.

On the other side, even with the niche-produtions we now have a rather good situation today. We now have many semi-official english localisations in timly manner for anime and games. It's just not the whole market, and not for the whole world, and manga is still very much a dead fish. But that's simply beacuse it's a different market.

> Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture.

You also only see the fraction of the big picture which you are part in, not the complete big picture.

[arczyx]

>Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.

This is patently false. There are lots and lots anime for adults and there are so many adult fans nowadays. To be honest this statement alone would probably disqualify you from giving any opinion worth considering in this discussion.

[dang]

Can you please edit personal swipes out of your posts here? This comment would be fine without the last sentence. Actually it probably doesn't need the first one either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[Razengan]

> That's just wishful thinking.

That's just pessimistic thinking.