Why Did Crunchyroll's Subtitles Just Get Worse?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

>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'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.

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

Those were the days.

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)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

> 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)

> 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.