[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.