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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,

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.

koolba 1y ago
> 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?
- kcexn 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
- recursivecaveat 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
silicon5 1y ago
Why don't they take the timings from the closed captions of the original Japanese broadcast?
- bonecrusher2102 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    I mean, re: ramping, that sounds like a script could do it if the timings are actually consistent.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  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.)
wk_end 1y ago
> 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.
- bonecrusher2102 1y ago
  That’s why I said the SUBS are awesome… not the translations ;-)
  - gchamonlive 1y ago
    Could you use fan subs to help AI models better sync your actual subs?
- bnjms 1y ago
  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”.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >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 1y ago
    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...
onoesworkacct 1y ago
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 1y ago
  I agree - this is the right take. Spend a little extra because your customers REALLY care.
  - programjames 1y ago
    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.
    - chii 1y ago
      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.
      - brigandish 1y ago
        > barring privacy That’s the key right there.
        bl4ckneon 1y ago
        The ironic part is that a large majority of the piracy is just crunchy roll rips or subtitles from crunchy roll.
Arnavion 1y ago
See also unanimated's typesetting guide: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm
aidenn0 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
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slg 1y ago
>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.
- kibwen 1y ago
  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.
- barry-cotter 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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.
chii 1y ago
> 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.
- heisenbit 1y ago
  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.
- riffruff24 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      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".
    - pjc50 1y ago
      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?
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> 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/ 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.
- inopinatus 1y ago
  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.
- ohmahjong 1y ago
  That's the first I've seen of 4k77 and related projects, thanks for sharing. A true labour of love.
- a-french-anon 1y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316985) or the '99 HxH anime and LaserDisc scans.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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buzer 1y ago
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 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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 11mo ago
      What? It doesn't work like that. At best, they improve(?) fashion, not taste.
sergers 1y ago
I was on the animeone[AonE] team 2001 to 2007 atleast. Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.
zenlot 1y ago
> 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.
jasonwatkinspdx 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - a1o 1y ago
    Wait, are schools with no clubs now? What do people do to fill all the time?
    - pixl97 1y ago
      Raging on social media like tik-tok.
    - asimovDev 11mo ago
      I was from a third world country
  - jasonwatkinspdx 1y ago
    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.
Phelinofist 1y ago
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.
mmaaz 1y ago
Fascinating insight into the industry. Thanks for sharing.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
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.
commandersaki 1y ago
Can't pry my Ani-Kraze fansub of Area 88 from my cold dead hands.
deleted 1y ago
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Cthulhu_ 1y ago
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.
slackfan 1y ago
>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.

koolba 1y ago

> 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?

kcexn 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
recursivecaveat 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.

silicon5 1y ago

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

bonecrusher2102 1y ago
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 1y ago
  I mean, re: ramping, that sounds like a script could do it if the timings are actually consistent.
mananaysiempre 1y ago
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.)

wk_end 1y ago

> 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.

bonecrusher2102 1y ago
That’s why I said the SUBS are awesome… not the translations ;-)
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  Could you use fan subs to help AI models better sync your actual subs?
bnjms 1y ago
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”.
Barrin92 1y ago
>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 1y ago
  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...

onoesworkacct 1y ago

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 1y ago
I agree - this is the right take. Spend a little extra because your customers REALLY care.
- programjames 1y ago
  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.
  - chii 1y ago
    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.
    - brigandish 1y ago
      > barring privacy That’s the key right there.
      - bl4ckneon 1y ago
        The ironic part is that a large majority of the piracy is just crunchy roll rips or subtitles from crunchy roll.

Arnavion 1y ago

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

aidenn0 1y ago

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.

deleted 1y ago
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slg 1y ago

>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.

kibwen 1y ago
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.
barry-cotter 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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.

chii 1y ago

> 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.

heisenbit 1y ago
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.
riffruff24 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    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".
  - pjc50 1y ago
    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?

matheusmoreira 1y ago

> 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/ 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.

inopinatus 1y ago
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.
ohmahjong 1y ago
That's the first I've seen of 4k77 and related projects, thanks for sharing. A true labour of love.
a-french-anon 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316985) or the '99 HxH anime and LaserDisc scans.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago

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buzer 1y ago

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 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 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 11mo ago
    What? It doesn't work like that. At best, they improve(?) fashion, not taste.

sergers 1y ago

I was on the animeone[AonE] team 2001 to 2007 atleast. Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.

zenlot 1y ago

> 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.

jasonwatkinspdx 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.
- a1o 1y ago
  Wait, are schools with no clubs now? What do people do to fill all the time?
  - pixl97 1y ago
    Raging on social media like tik-tok.
  - asimovDev 11mo ago
    I was from a third world country
- jasonwatkinspdx 1y ago
  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.

Phelinofist 1y ago

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.

mmaaz 1y ago

Fascinating insight into the industry. Thanks for sharing.

thaumasiotes 1y ago

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.

commandersaki 1y ago

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

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Cthulhu_ 1y ago

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.

slackfan 1y ago

>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.