[bonecrusher2102]

Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc.

It wound up being quite a large document!

But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.

If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).

Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”

Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.

I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.

[onoesworkacct]

How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+?

And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?

[bonecrusher2102]

I agree - this is the right take. Spend a little extra because your customers REALLY care.

[programjames]

I think the take is: If 100k people watch the episode, spending $200 more for higher quality subtitling comes out to... a whopping 0.2 cents per person (per episode). Let's just say that would cost an extra $1/month per person. Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles? I don't know, but maybe some manager believed they were, and thus it was worth it to make the subscription a little cheaper.

[varenc]

> 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)

[viraptor]

> 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.

[Sophira]

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.

[ineedasername]

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.

[hnfong]

> Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly

Here's the answer right here...

[snickerbockers]

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.

[sleepybrett]

I've been hearing a lot about HiDive recently

[jeron]

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

[Tor3]

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)

[MSFT_Edging]

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

[Nicook]

By tier 1, we refer to commiesubs right?

[slackfan]

[gg] of course.

[chii]

i think you've counted it in a way that makes it sound cheap, but in reality isnt.

$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.

[praxulus]

>A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.

Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.

[jcranmer]

My recollection is that, by the early days of Crunchyroll, fansubs weren't really competing on quality so much as speed. And with the legitimate licensors having access to the scripts slightly in advance of the Japanese release, the fansubs could never catch up to them in release speed.

[brigandish]

> barring privacy

That’s the key right there.

[bl4ckneon]

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

[FooBarWidget]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

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.

[Loocid]

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

[Retric]

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.

[matheusmoreira]

> Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles?

They should probably consider that this competitor is actually mpv playing the DRM-free blu-ray quality fully subtitled mkv files obtained for a grand total of zero dollars from organized groups of people who simply care about anime to an absurd degree.

"Paying customer" is a synonym for "fool" in this context. Paying for inferior products is just foolish. It is damaging to one's self-respect. It is even more damaging for the reputation of the corporation. A bunch of fans regularly put them to shame by releasing better products on a daily basis. That's just pathetic.

[what]

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

[matheusmoreira]

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.

[entropi]

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.

[DecoySalamander]

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.

[promano]

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

[fhd2]

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.

[bonecrusher2102]

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.

[subpariaH]

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.

[torben-friis]

That person would need, besides basic computer fluency for the timestamps, knowledge of Japanese and English.

Not unheard of, but probably harder than hiring for a call center, and more need to prevent high rotation due to difficulty in finding replacements.

Edit: not that I disagree with your general idea, just pointing out potential issues.

[bonecrusher2102]

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.

[torben-friis]

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

[throwaway92rw]

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

[danudey]

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.

[whywhywhywhy]

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.

[SecretDreams]

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.

[lasc4r]

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.

[alwaysdoit]

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

[DrewADesign]

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.

[elihu]

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

[jasonwatkinspdx]

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.

[asimovDev]

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.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

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.

[a1o]

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

[pixl97]

Raging on social media like tik-tok.

[asimovDev]

I was from a third world country

[matheusmoreira]

> 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.

[ohmahjong]

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

[a-french-anon]

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.

[matheusmoreira]

Absolute legend. I love this film.

[inopinatus]

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.

[fifteen1506]

I'm more than a Trekkie than a... Warrie (?), but does Project-4K77 means I can finally see Han shooting first?

[Renevith]

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.

[buzer]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

[GoblinSlayer]

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.

[timerol]

> 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

[GoblinSlayer]

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

[thaumasiotes]

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.

[koolba]

> 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?

[recursivecaveat]

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.

[muzani]

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.

[kcexn]

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).

[numpad0]

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.

[aidenn0]

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.

[sergers]

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

Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.

[silicon5]

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

[bonecrusher2102]

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.

[sleepybrett]

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

[mananaysiempre]

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.)

[danudey]

> 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...

[cyphar]

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

[Phelinofist]

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.

[slackfan]

>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.

[chii]

> 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.

[a-french-anon]

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.

[aspenmayer]

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.

[a-french-anon]

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).

[eviks]

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?

[riffruff24]

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.

[chii]

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.

[pjc50]

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?

[thaumasiotes]

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".

[heisenbit]

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.

[Arnavion]

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

[slg]

>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.

[barry-cotter]

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.

[cardanome]

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.

[danudey]

> 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.

[slg]

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.

[kibwen]

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.

[mmaaz]

Fascinating insight into the industry. Thanks for sharing.

[commandersaki]

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

[zenlot]

> 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.

[wk_end]

> 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.

[Barrin92]

>but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.

funny to see the comment. I was rewatching JoJo, this time in dub, and just came across a line like this. (the context is a fight between two 19th century British characters in a very theatrical setting):

Sub: "Stop the futile, useless resistance. Don't hide in the curtain's shadows and come out!"

Dub: "You're behind the curtain, like Polonius. And, like Polonius, it is there that you shall meet your end."

I was so surprised that they threw in the Hamlet reference it's what made me look up what the original Japanese line was. The English dub writing often strikes me just as straight up better the more I watch of it.

[orthozato]

Well, but that's the work of localization, which is a whole art itself.

It is quite tricky and this Shakespeare reference might be a little bit out of context...

[aidenn0]

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

[Arnavion]

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.

[aidenn0]

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.

[Tor3]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

[userbinator]

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

(Native American English speaker.)

[rkomorn]

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

[brigandish]

Sometimes, the same meaning has the opposite response in English and Japanese. It’s called echo polarity (apparently). For example, in English:

“You didn’t go?” → “No, I didn’t go” (agreeing) or “Yes, I went” (disagreeing).

In Japanese, you should say “yes, I didn’t go” or “yes, I didn’t go”:

行かなかったんですか。→ はい、行きませんでした。(agreeing with the negative) or いいえ、行きました。(disagreeing with the negative)

(This difference possibly shows the more fundamental difference in the cultures, where one values truth more, and one values agreement/harmony more.)

I’m not saying that’s what happened to you, just that it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to see it.

[jcranmer]

> (This difference possibly shows the more fundamental difference in the cultures, where one values truth more, and one values agreement/harmony more.)

I'd be extremely wary of ascribing any cultural significance to the language modes here. Negation and especially affirmative/negative responses to negative questions is just extremely variable among languages. Even languages in the same language family just end up doing it differently.

[shigawire]

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"

[brigandish]

Curse my fat fingers, it should read:

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

[rmunn]

Was either "yes" or "no" clearly the right translation in context? I'm very curious to know which one was correct, the dub or the sub. Or was it one of those ambiguous situations where either one would be a correct translation of the text, but with different subtext?

P.S. For an example of when "yes" might really mean "no", I heard an anecdote. An American guy had been hired by a Japanese company to work in their offices in Japan and be a liaison to foreign businessmen. He was attending a meeting once where everyone but him was Japanese. The boss presented an idea. There was silence for about 10-15 seconds, then people said things like "Yes, that's a good idea, let's do that." The American left the meeting thinking that the idea had been approved, only to have his Japanese colleague explain to him that the key part was the silence. The boss clearly heard and understood the message that his employees didn't think it was a good idea, and the idea was dropped and never mentioned again.

So I could see a case where the character says "Yes" but the subtext is "No", and that would be clearly understood by a Japanese viewer. Different translators would choose different approaches there; some might translate the text, and some might translate the subtext. I'm curious to know if this was a case like that, or if it was a clear-cut case of one translation being right and the other one being flat-out wrong.

[aidenn0]

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.

[VGHN7XDuOXPAzol]

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'

[sevenseacat]

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

[bnjms]

I used to like what I assume is the hyper literalism and f fan subs. The certain phrases with consistent and repeated translations would gain their own color. I don’t know but it felt like that context was somehow carried over.

Similarly there are some phrases which are probably unavoidably awkward. Like when translating vaguely as “that guy”.

[baobun]

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

[xboxnolifes]

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

[bonecrusher2102]

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

[gchamonlive]

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

[kalleboo]

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

[wk_end]

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

[Ekaros]

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...

[Cthulhu_]

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.