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Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?

413 points by zdw 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
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egypturnash 1y ago
Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me. And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.
- radicaldreamer 1y ago
  They're for sure doing this and have been caught: https://x.com/d0nut2x/status/1940107015533285646 https://x.com/d0nut2x/status/1940107015533285646
  - sunaookami 1y ago
    The AI subtitles are delivered by the original company (Cygames in this case) and CR used them without proofreading. This happened to a few other animes in the past in Germany. For its own translations in Germany, CR uses freelancers which are VERY GOOD at their job, do not confuse them with the US Crunchyroll which consists mostly of the infamous Funimation staff.
  - Pikamander2 1y ago
    Looks like they blamed it on a third-party vendor. https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lqzdva/crunchyroll_investigates_controversial_chatgpt_ai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lqzdva/crunchyroll_... They probably went with a "lowest bidder" approach and then didn't sufficiently check the quality of work being submitted.
- monkaiju 1y ago
  Enshitification just being further turbo-fed by AI
  - an0malous 1y ago
    once AI enshitifies PE we’ll accelerate towards the enshitularity
- Narretz 1y ago
  Amazon Prime did it as well and it was absolutely horrible. Character names got completely butchered, and changed from one scene to the next.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  It's alright, I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto us, the customers.
  - Culonavirus 1y ago
    I'm sure they will. You know, AI is so cheap compared to humans, they have to, right? I'm sure. Obviously that is until the biggest bubble in the recorded history of human economy pops and we get back to 2008 economy (hopium), then it's gonna sting a wee bit, but that's the cost of progress, right.
- xenadu02 1y ago
  They did the same thing to their developers a few years back from what I recall. That's why the app has bugs that haven't been fixed in years. For example the sorting options on your watch list are just garbage. They aren't remembered. And "recent activity" includes adding dubs in languages I have disabled in the UI - constantly causing old shows to pop to the top of the list making it useless. Back when they had software developers they were rapidly improving the app but someone decided they needed more executive bonuses and laid everyone off. Their software hasn't moved an inch since. Funimation had the same idea. They bailed out of VRV (Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime "marketplace" all-in-one app) and released their own garbage app that is somehow much much worse. It is the classic "we have exclusives so these drooling morons will take whatever we deign to give them because we're the only ones with show X/Y/Z" move.
  - redwall_hp 1y ago
    I will still never complain about CrunchyRoll's apps after using HiDive for a few shows. It can't even remember shows I'm watching, let alone keep track of watched episodes, and insists on rendering subtitles with TVs' closed captioning system.
    - xenadu02 1y ago
      That's very true. Crunchyroll is just sad because it used to be good and feel like someone involved cared. Funimation lowered the bar so much I thought it couldn't go lower. Who knew HiDive would prove me wrong.
PebblesHD 1y ago
I’ve posted before about my half-in half-out life between Japan and Australia, and the media I consume is a product of this. Anime, while not a massive part of my watching habit, is certainly a weekly thing at least, and over the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to support legal services outside of Japan. In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc. They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’. I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.
  - kbolino 1y ago
    I'd rather have one good streaming service with everything on it than the dozens of crappy streaming services with their ever-shifting patchwork of available licensed content we have now. Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
    - PebblesHD 1y ago
      Challenge is we ended up with one really bad streaming service but lots of capital slurping up all the licenses. In my ideal world, the regulator would prevent using exclusivity as a moat to prevent smaller operations competing. Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.
totallymike 1y ago
For at least the past year, subtitles under dubs have been horrendous. I’ve watched a handful of Gundam series over this period, and while the subtitles under the Japanese audio are usually fine, the captions that run under the English audio more often than not get every single proper noun completely wrong, and half the dialog in general. A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.
- uxp100 1y ago
  The dub subtitles should be different than the original language subtitles, given the dub script is not just the reading the subtitle track, but that’s not an excuse for the dub subtitles being bad.
  - totallymike 1y ago
    I agree that technically this would be incorrect, but I’d still appreciate the option to choose the subtitle track from the original language over the horrible auto-generated subtitle track.
- silicon5 1y ago
  Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era. The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?
  - GolDDranks 1y ago
    It gets even worse, when the original mangaka typoes the name, and people follow a single typo like a religion. This happened with Kaoru Mori's "Emma", where a common English surname "Jones" was accidentally spelled "Jounse" by the author, and used in translations without questioning it too much, only later found to be written correctly "Jones" in a later chapter by the author herself.
charcircuit 1y ago
>see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it. If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  You could just turn the subtitles off, or watch it with Japanese subtitles
  - uxp100 1y ago
    I think they are referring to text localization. I’m not sure if you actually can turn the subtitle track off on the Japanese language on crunchy roll, the rights holders have long been very concerned with reverse importation.
    - Arnavion 1y ago
      CR rips (like SubsPlease, mentioned in the article) have jp audio and softsubs for en+signs, so I assume you can turn them off on CR's website too.
      - vunderba 1y ago
        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.
    - anigbrowl 1y ago
      As someone pointed out CR often lacks Japanese subtitles, but you can definitely turn them off.
  - zdw 1y ago
    Crunchyroll strangely lacks Japanese subs, which seems strange as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and most others have them in addition to all the translations.
o11c 1y ago
It really shouldn't be "extremely expensive to re-encode each language’s video files!". Has this industry not heard of transparent overlays?
- Izkata 1y ago
  That explanation doesn't make sense because they are doing that: there's a few groups that explicitly rip and share Crunchyroll's subtitles (one is mentioned in the article).
- silicon5 1y ago
  Most anime on Crunchyroll are softsubs. There's a single video file for each supported resolution, an audio file for each language, and a subtitle file in the highly versatile .ass format (Advanced SubStation Alpha). There are some anime in hardsubs, but usually older legacy series such as were originally DVDs.
bonecrusher2102 1y ago
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.
- 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.
makeitdouble 1y ago
I really wish we could have had a subs/dubs marketplace. There was no way to make it a proper business when anime was becoming popular on the net, but it would solve an infinite number of problems. Could it be done now that the distribution channels are more mature in Japan ? - Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great. They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive. - good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people. - "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.
- theogravity 1y ago
  My first thought would be consistency in localization / typesetting. Groups have their own ways of localizing and typesetting content and most likely would not want to share their style guide when they lost out on something they recently translated to a lower bidder.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    Isn't it the same issue when a localization team/member with its distinct style decides to get off the train and the next contractor can't replicate it ?
    - theogravity 1y ago
      Yes
    - Tor3 1y ago
      That appears to happen sometimes in the middle of Crunchyroll seasons. Suddenly the translations change. Spelling of names, other things. Jarring.
jmward01 1y ago
The subs are noticeably worse in a continuing trend. Maybe I am just now noticing it but in the dubs for the most recent shows it seems like the important subs for text (like important signs, etc) in a dub are also now missing and only come up if you turn subs on with the dub. Crunchyroll has clearly also done other things though that have impacted the experience. They started by removing comments and a year ago (?) and then added the -incredibly- annoying wipe to 'here watch this' that can't be avoided when a show ends and there isn't a next episode. We will see how they evolve. Are there any other actually good services out there? hidive has very limited content and a terrible interface. I don't know of anything with the catalogue that crunchyroll has.
Dylan16807 1y ago
> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.” I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.
- Conan_Kudo 1y ago
  I think one of the biggest mistakes was not making WebVTT equivalent to Advanced SubStation Alpha (the format of Aegisub). That would have driven basically all the various streaming services to grow support for the things anime subbers have done for years.
  - Arnavion 1y ago
    No need for a new format, just use ASS itself! https://github.com/libass/JavascriptSubtitlesOctopus https://github.com/libass/JavascriptSubtitlesOctopus
- kalleboo 1y ago
  The only video I've seen that uses the YouTube subtitle capabilities to their fullest, with animated subs etc is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDc1mjrIsPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDc1mjrIsPM and even then you have to dig down into the settings cog and choose "English - Animated" manually
  - jdranczewski 1y ago
    https://caption.plus/ https://caption.plus/ does excellent work for a couple YouTube/Nebula channels - not as exciting as the above, but they do coloured speakers, positioning to avoid in-video text, and an occasional animation to punch up a joke! I'm most familiar with their work for Tom Scott (+ the Technical Difficulties) and Jet Lag: The Game.
- afishhh 1y ago
  > I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used. Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't. I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter. If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :) [1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems. [2] https://github.com/afishhh/subrandr https://github.com/afishhh/subrandr
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socalgal2 1y ago
Are they just bad now? The one I noticed was the "Kingdom" which is several years old. It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and characters but the spoken language was Japanese. So the sub would say "General Mike is going to attack Houston" and the spoken Japanese would say "General Bob is going to attach Seattle" (fill in Mike and Houston with Chinese names and Bob and Seattle with Japaense names)
- jan_Inkepa 1y ago
  > It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones? I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do! (IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
  - kbolino 1y ago
    It is a weird mix. Kingdom at least has some connection to historical places/people so it kind of makes sense. Thunderbolt Fantasy on the other hand is completely original/fictional in setting and characters, and yet still uses the Chinese names in the subtitles. While it is a joint Taiwanese-Japanese project, the only available audio is Japanese. So none of the completely made up names ever match between audio and subtitles. And then there's Dragon Ball with e.g. Son Goku who is named after the Monkey King from Journey to the West but nobody ever refers to him as Sun Wukong.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  It's a tough one for Chinese names. Japan will usually read the actual kanji but with their Japanese reading, which sounds nothing like the actual Chinese. And western audience will probably be more familiar with the Chinese name, except if they have their own weird pronouciation altogether. For instance the current PRC chairman, Xi Jinping, has an alphabet reading close to Chinese, but Japanese news will call him along the lines of "Shu Kinpei", which sounds absolutely nothing near the original name, but is how someone would read the name assuming it was Japanese and with no pronounciations hints. They just don't care much about the sounds when it comes Asian names, even in official settings.
kennywinker 1y ago
[flagged]
asimpletune 1y ago
This is random but Aegisub is an amazing tool and a wonderful way to get ear training when you're learning a language.
- liampulles 1y ago
  Haven't thought of it as a language learning tool before, that is an interesting way of looking at it.
akimbostrawman 1y ago
I take AI slop over what ever they have been doing last couple years...
- perching_aix 1y ago
  You're in luck then, as one of the reasons their subs are getting increasingly worse is exactly their growing reliance on AI.
  - akimbostrawman 1y ago
    No, it has gotten worse long before AI boom because of political activism from humans.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      Extremists gotta extremize, right? They couldn't stop themselves from tainting their work with their beliefs, you cannot stop yourself from taking the few times this happened and magnifying it, as if it was predominant, and then reacting to it viscerally, even years down the line under no emotional pressure to do so. And then even with all that additional capacity at hand, the proposed solution is replacing the rarely politically addled subs with mostly nonsensical AI generated rubbish, because that is such a reasonable alternative. Some people really deserve what's coming for them it seems. Just wish normal people didn't have to along for the ride. What about AI being politically biased by the way? Or is that talking point already forgotten?
      - akimbostrawman 1y ago
        It is not only a few times. I watch multiple shows every season for close to a decade and at this point it is the exception when most of them aren't butchered by political or "comedic" mistranslation. If I have to choose between funding political zealot humans and political zealot AI, I pick the later. At least AI aren't boasting and insulting there customer on social media about "fixing" art for the greater good. https://boundingintocomics.com/manga/interview-fan-and-professional-translators-speak-out-on-western-localization-issues-and-the-current-state-of-the-english-manga-industry/ https://boundingintocomics.com/manga/interview-fan-and-profe...
tonyhart7 1y ago
Isn't this because they outsourced the subtitle work to an Israeli-based AI startup?
PixyMisa 1y ago
So I'm not going mad. Good to know. Or rather, I am, but I'm still right about the subtitles.
renewiltord 1y ago
Oh that's interesting. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to Crunchyroll more than once on my TV when I try to watch something and then it seems to have garbage subtitles. Sadly, I keep forgetting and clicking on them in Prime Video. I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".
- layer8 1y ago
  FYI, subtitles are often different between the Crunchyroll channel on Prime Video and “native” Crunchyroll. You aren’t getting the same on both.
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    Oh well that helps to know. I'll try native and see. The subtitles are truly atrocious on Prime's Crunchyroll.
ff2400t 1y ago
So I know this because I did some research on why the crunchyroll subs didn't work in the pip mode on firefox. So it turns out they used a substitute format called .ass, which as the article mentioned was created by AegisSubs. This is not natively supported by browsers, so they used to import a wasm bundle for reading this file, rendering it on a Canvas that was overlayed on the Video. So they did put a lot of effort in the making it work not only in the labour of the translation but also in supporting it technically. Sadly it looks like they will be switching to more lackluster formats That don't support the advance positioning features.
pif 1y ago
> Since the most recent round of Crunchyroll layoffs What's the point of writing a full article when the answer is literally in the eighth word?
- b3lvedere 1y ago
  Maybe some people are still amazed to witness that machines still cannot create the same quality content that (passionate) human (teams) can create? Quality takes patience, time and money.
Pikamander2 1y ago
> Multiple overlapping speakers are represented on the top and bottom of the screen. > This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience Quality concerns aside, I've always disliked having text on the top and bottom of the screen simultaneously. My eyes are focused on the bottom of the screen, so I sometimes don't even realize that there's text at the top and have to pause/rewind to figure out what I missed. I think putting both speakers' captions at the bottom with some kind of differentiator makes more sense.
- braiamp 1y ago
  The top one is usually a background speaker, and not the focus of the scene. It is extremely rare that directors do that anyways.
liampulles 1y ago
This is really indicative of the people in charge at Crunchyroll not understanding their audience, as any serious anime fan can tell you that high quality subtitles have a huge effect on the enjoyability of an anime. Colourful, expressive, well timed subs really add something to the experience.
eviks 1y ago
> Most anime have exclusive streaming licenses, so for ~70% of 2025’s new releases, and an even larger share of catalog shows and movies, Crunchyroll is often your only means to do so. But that’s not an issue. Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.
jagged-chisel 1y ago
Money. Less money to pay for quality.
DoneWithAllThat 1y ago
This is a random aside but somewhere I have some slightly obscure early 2000s anime with fan subs, and in one of them they accidentally left an additional “working notes” subtitle track that I find fascinating. It basically has all the little messages between the participants discussing whether a given translation is accurate or should be changed, alternative ideas, disagreements over proper translation, etc. It really illustrates how subtitling is nowhere near an exact science and oftentimes whether a given translation is the best is highly subjective. You basically need to be a good writer to be a good translator.
deafpolygon 1y ago
Crunchyroll’s “de facto” monopoly is the main cause: with little competition, no one has any real alternative therefore Crunchyroll doesn't have any incentive to improve.
thomasfarstrike 1y ago
[dead]
johnhenry 1y ago
This makes me sad. For a while, the video player team at Crunchyroll was essentially just me. I spent countless hours fixing bugs and building features, especially around subtitling. The teammate who joined after me really took it to the next level. When I left, the player felt like it was in good hands — they even open-sourced the code for a time.
casey2 1y ago
Anime subtitles have always been hilariously bad even compared to early CC which would often position captions right under where you were looking. This is back when it was somebodies' job and they took it seriously. The hobbification of work had many casualties.
FranOntanaya 1y ago
A lot of styling is done still in the old Advanced Substation subtitle format, which is nice in a whole number of ways but doesn't have any standards working group behind and so it's a bit ignored in software and operations. People use either some flavor of W3C's Timed Text or WebVTT instead (and it was already a pain to get them to drag their feet into them and drop the old analog broadcast formats). Now, here's the thing. WebVTT isn't radically different in format and features to (A)SSA and it has plenty of styling options... but, once again, a lot of platforms and software are dragging their feet to support them. So the industry has been sloooowly doing the right thing moving to the W3C standards (not a huge fan of Timed Text myself, but it exists for a reason), but only with the most basic and safe features. Which are also about as many features you get out of plain speech to text output, so it's even easier to make that decision.
lacoolj 1y ago
YES where do I sign the petition to revert this terrible change?
- layer8 1y ago
  The only effective petition is to cancel your subscription.
vaer-k 1y ago
I wish they would at least include the japanese cc subtitles. They must already exist so I don't understand why they can't just be packaged along with the other subs.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  From what I understand, the written translation, in the form of subtitles, that accompanies the original language audio are have their own copyright and are licensed separately to the translated audio version and its closed captions. If they were to include the dubbed audio alongside the translated subtitles, to be compliant with all applicable copyrights, they would be on the hook for licensing costs twice over, which is why the legitimate streaming sites rarely do that, nor do they even expose such a dual-mode capability via the user interface.
Smar 1y ago
Why is this getting pushed up so fiercely? It seems all of the issues are for dubs and their closed captions. CC users are a very minor target group. Deaf can just use proper subs. I have seen no issues in regular subs, and they look like they always have looked.
snvzz 1y ago
We need to go back to fansubbing.
ksynwa 1y ago
I haven't watched an airing anime ever. How good are fansubs? I found it very surprising that volunteers would write subtitles for free when I became aware of the phenomenon.

413 points by zdw 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me. And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.

radicaldreamer 1y ago
They're for sure doing this and have been caught: https://x.com/d0nut2x/status/1940107015533285646 https://x.com/d0nut2x/status/1940107015533285646
- sunaookami 1y ago
  The AI subtitles are delivered by the original company (Cygames in this case) and CR used them without proofreading. This happened to a few other animes in the past in Germany. For its own translations in Germany, CR uses freelancers which are VERY GOOD at their job, do not confuse them with the US Crunchyroll which consists mostly of the infamous Funimation staff.
- Pikamander2 1y ago
  Looks like they blamed it on a third-party vendor. https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lqzdva/crunchyroll_investigates_controversial_chatgpt_ai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lqzdva/crunchyroll_... They probably went with a "lowest bidder" approach and then didn't sufficiently check the quality of work being submitted.
monkaiju 1y ago
Enshitification just being further turbo-fed by AI
- an0malous 1y ago
  once AI enshitifies PE we’ll accelerate towards the enshitularity
Narretz 1y ago
Amazon Prime did it as well and it was absolutely horrible. Character names got completely butchered, and changed from one scene to the next.
Analemma_ 1y ago
It's alright, I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto us, the customers.
- Culonavirus 1y ago
  I'm sure they will. You know, AI is so cheap compared to humans, they have to, right? I'm sure. Obviously that is until the biggest bubble in the recorded history of human economy pops and we get back to 2008 economy (hopium), then it's gonna sting a wee bit, but that's the cost of progress, right.
xenadu02 1y ago
They did the same thing to their developers a few years back from what I recall. That's why the app has bugs that haven't been fixed in years. For example the sorting options on your watch list are just garbage. They aren't remembered. And "recent activity" includes adding dubs in languages I have disabled in the UI - constantly causing old shows to pop to the top of the list making it useless. Back when they had software developers they were rapidly improving the app but someone decided they needed more executive bonuses and laid everyone off. Their software hasn't moved an inch since. Funimation had the same idea. They bailed out of VRV (Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime "marketplace" all-in-one app) and released their own garbage app that is somehow much much worse. It is the classic "we have exclusives so these drooling morons will take whatever we deign to give them because we're the only ones with show X/Y/Z" move.
- redwall_hp 1y ago
  I will still never complain about CrunchyRoll's apps after using HiDive for a few shows. It can't even remember shows I'm watching, let alone keep track of watched episodes, and insists on rendering subtitles with TVs' closed captioning system.
  - xenadu02 1y ago
    That's very true. Crunchyroll is just sad because it used to be good and feel like someone involved cared. Funimation lowered the bar so much I thought it couldn't go lower. Who knew HiDive would prove me wrong.

PebblesHD 1y ago

I’ve posted before about my half-in half-out life between Japan and Australia, and the media I consume is a product of this. Anime, while not a massive part of my watching habit, is certainly a weekly thing at least, and over the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to support legal services outside of Japan. In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc. They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’. I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.
- kbolino 1y ago
  I'd rather have one good streaming service with everything on it than the dozens of crappy streaming services with their ever-shifting patchwork of available licensed content we have now. Rightsholders seem like a bigger problem than licensees to me.
  - PebblesHD 1y ago
    Challenge is we ended up with one really bad streaming service but lots of capital slurping up all the licenses. In my ideal world, the regulator would prevent using exclusivity as a moat to prevent smaller operations competing. Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.

totallymike 1y ago

For at least the past year, subtitles under dubs have been horrendous. I’ve watched a handful of Gundam series over this period, and while the subtitles under the Japanese audio are usually fine, the captions that run under the English audio more often than not get every single proper noun completely wrong, and half the dialog in general. A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.

uxp100 1y ago
The dub subtitles should be different than the original language subtitles, given the dub script is not just the reading the subtitle track, but that’s not an excuse for the dub subtitles being bad.
- totallymike 1y ago
  I agree that technically this would be incorrect, but I’d still appreciate the option to choose the subtitle track from the original language over the horrible auto-generated subtitle track.
silicon5 1y ago
Getting proper nouns wrong is a flaw I thought we left behind in the fansub era. The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?
- GolDDranks 1y ago
  It gets even worse, when the original mangaka typoes the name, and people follow a single typo like a religion. This happened with Kaoru Mori's "Emma", where a common English surname "Jones" was accidentally spelled "Jounse" by the author, and used in translations without questioning it too much, only later found to be written correctly "Jones" in a later chapter by the author herself.

charcircuit 1y ago

>see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it. If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.

anigbrowl 1y ago
You could just turn the subtitles off, or watch it with Japanese subtitles
- uxp100 1y ago
  I think they are referring to text localization. I’m not sure if you actually can turn the subtitle track off on the Japanese language on crunchy roll, the rights holders have long been very concerned with reverse importation.
  - Arnavion 1y ago
    CR rips (like SubsPlease, mentioned in the article) have jp audio and softsubs for en+signs, so I assume you can turn them off on CR's website too.
    - vunderba 1y ago
      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.
  - anigbrowl 1y ago
    As someone pointed out CR often lacks Japanese subtitles, but you can definitely turn them off.
- zdw 1y ago
  Crunchyroll strangely lacks Japanese subs, which seems strange as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and most others have them in addition to all the translations.

o11c 1y ago

It really shouldn't be "extremely expensive to re-encode each language’s video files!". Has this industry not heard of transparent overlays?

Izkata 1y ago
That explanation doesn't make sense because they are doing that: there's a few groups that explicitly rip and share Crunchyroll's subtitles (one is mentioned in the article).
silicon5 1y ago
Most anime on Crunchyroll are softsubs. There's a single video file for each supported resolution, an audio file for each language, and a subtitle file in the highly versatile .ass format (Advanced SubStation Alpha). There are some anime in hardsubs, but usually older legacy series such as were originally DVDs.

bonecrusher2102 1y ago

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.

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.

makeitdouble 1y ago

I really wish we could have had a subs/dubs marketplace. There was no way to make it a proper business when anime was becoming popular on the net, but it would solve an infinite number of problems. Could it be done now that the distribution channels are more mature in Japan ? - Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great. They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive. - good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people. - "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.

theogravity 1y ago
My first thought would be consistency in localization / typesetting. Groups have their own ways of localizing and typesetting content and most likely would not want to share their style guide when they lost out on something they recently translated to a lower bidder.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Isn't it the same issue when a localization team/member with its distinct style decides to get off the train and the next contractor can't replicate it ?
  - theogravity 1y ago
    Yes
  - Tor3 1y ago
    That appears to happen sometimes in the middle of Crunchyroll seasons. Suddenly the translations change. Spelling of names, other things. Jarring.

jmward01 1y ago

The subs are noticeably worse in a continuing trend. Maybe I am just now noticing it but in the dubs for the most recent shows it seems like the important subs for text (like important signs, etc) in a dub are also now missing and only come up if you turn subs on with the dub. Crunchyroll has clearly also done other things though that have impacted the experience. They started by removing comments and a year ago (?) and then added the -incredibly- annoying wipe to 'here watch this' that can't be avoided when a show ends and there isn't a next episode. We will see how they evolve. Are there any other actually good services out there? hidive has very limited content and a terrible interface. I don't know of anything with the catalogue that crunchyroll has.

Dylan16807 1y ago

> If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.” I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.

Conan_Kudo 1y ago
I think one of the biggest mistakes was not making WebVTT equivalent to Advanced SubStation Alpha (the format of Aegisub). That would have driven basically all the various streaming services to grow support for the things anime subbers have done for years.
- Arnavion 1y ago
  No need for a new format, just use ASS itself! https://github.com/libass/JavascriptSubtitlesOctopus https://github.com/libass/JavascriptSubtitlesOctopus
kalleboo 1y ago
The only video I've seen that uses the YouTube subtitle capabilities to their fullest, with animated subs etc is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDc1mjrIsPM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDc1mjrIsPM and even then you have to dig down into the settings cog and choose "English - Animated" manually
- jdranczewski 1y ago
  https://caption.plus/ https://caption.plus/ does excellent work for a couple YouTube/Nebula channels - not as exciting as the above, but they do coloured speakers, positioning to avoid in-video text, and an occasional animation to punch up a joke! I'm most familiar with their work for Tom Scott (+ the Technical Difficulties) and Jet Lag: The Game.
afishhh 1y ago
> I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used. Yep, their srv3 format is very usable, although it is in many ways inferior to ASS (animations have to be done manually in discrete timesteps, although YTSubConverter does that for you I think, and no crazy stuff like shape drawing or 3d transforms). Does support ruby text though which ASS currently doesn't. I think the worst thing about it is actually that YouTube is not doing very well in getting people to use it. For example they don't support most of the format's functionality in any client that isn't the web one[1]. Additionally I don't think there's even an official way to create these complex subtitles, you have to use unofficial tools like YTSubConverter. If anyone is interested, I am working on a library for rendering srv3 (and some WebVTT) here[2]. Maybe if we had widespread support people would use it more? That seems like very wishful thinking though :) [1] I suspect this is because they have to work within the constraints of whatever UI frameworks they're using for apps. It does not seem possible to implement compliant web text layout (pretty complicated!) on top of such higher level systems. [2] https://github.com/afishhh/subrandr https://github.com/afishhh/subrandr

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socalgal2 1y ago

Are they just bad now? The one I noticed was the "Kingdom" which is several years old. It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and characters but the spoken language was Japanese. So the sub would say "General Mike is going to attack Houston" and the spoken Japanese would say "General Bob is going to attach Seattle" (fill in Mike and Houston with Chinese names and Bob and Seattle with Japaense names)

jan_Inkepa 1y ago
> It had horrible subs because the sub were written by Chinese people using Chinese names for places and character More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones? I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do! (IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)
- kbolino 1y ago
  It is a weird mix. Kingdom at least has some connection to historical places/people so it kind of makes sense. Thunderbolt Fantasy on the other hand is completely original/fictional in setting and characters, and yet still uses the Chinese names in the subtitles. While it is a joint Taiwanese-Japanese project, the only available audio is Japanese. So none of the completely made up names ever match between audio and subtitles. And then there's Dragon Ball with e.g. Son Goku who is named after the Monkey King from Journey to the West but nobody ever refers to him as Sun Wukong.
makeitdouble 1y ago
It's a tough one for Chinese names. Japan will usually read the actual kanji but with their Japanese reading, which sounds nothing like the actual Chinese. And western audience will probably be more familiar with the Chinese name, except if they have their own weird pronouciation altogether. For instance the current PRC chairman, Xi Jinping, has an alphabet reading close to Chinese, but Japanese news will call him along the lines of "Shu Kinpei", which sounds absolutely nothing near the original name, but is how someone would read the name assuming it was Japanese and with no pronounciations hints. They just don't care much about the sounds when it comes Asian names, even in official settings.

kennywinker 1y ago

[flagged]

asimpletune 1y ago

This is random but Aegisub is an amazing tool and a wonderful way to get ear training when you're learning a language.

liampulles 1y ago
Haven't thought of it as a language learning tool before, that is an interesting way of looking at it.

akimbostrawman 1y ago

I take AI slop over what ever they have been doing last couple years...

perching_aix 1y ago
You're in luck then, as one of the reasons their subs are getting increasingly worse is exactly their growing reliance on AI.
- akimbostrawman 1y ago
  No, it has gotten worse long before AI boom because of political activism from humans.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    Extremists gotta extremize, right? They couldn't stop themselves from tainting their work with their beliefs, you cannot stop yourself from taking the few times this happened and magnifying it, as if it was predominant, and then reacting to it viscerally, even years down the line under no emotional pressure to do so. And then even with all that additional capacity at hand, the proposed solution is replacing the rarely politically addled subs with mostly nonsensical AI generated rubbish, because that is such a reasonable alternative. Some people really deserve what's coming for them it seems. Just wish normal people didn't have to along for the ride. What about AI being politically biased by the way? Or is that talking point already forgotten?
    - akimbostrawman 1y ago
      It is not only a few times. I watch multiple shows every season for close to a decade and at this point it is the exception when most of them aren't butchered by political or "comedic" mistranslation. If I have to choose between funding political zealot humans and political zealot AI, I pick the later. At least AI aren't boasting and insulting there customer on social media about "fixing" art for the greater good. https://boundingintocomics.com/manga/interview-fan-and-professional-translators-speak-out-on-western-localization-issues-and-the-current-state-of-the-english-manga-industry/ https://boundingintocomics.com/manga/interview-fan-and-profe...

tonyhart7 1y ago

Isn't this because they outsourced the subtitle work to an Israeli-based AI startup?

PixyMisa 1y ago

So I'm not going mad. Good to know. Or rather, I am, but I'm still right about the subtitles.

renewiltord 1y ago

Oh that's interesting. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to Crunchyroll more than once on my TV when I try to watch something and then it seems to have garbage subtitles. Sadly, I keep forgetting and clicking on them in Prime Video. I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".

layer8 1y ago
FYI, subtitles are often different between the Crunchyroll channel on Prime Video and “native” Crunchyroll. You aren’t getting the same on both.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Oh well that helps to know. I'll try native and see. The subtitles are truly atrocious on Prime's Crunchyroll.

ff2400t 1y ago

So I know this because I did some research on why the crunchyroll subs didn't work in the pip mode on firefox. So it turns out they used a substitute format called .ass, which as the article mentioned was created by AegisSubs. This is not natively supported by browsers, so they used to import a wasm bundle for reading this file, rendering it on a Canvas that was overlayed on the Video. So they did put a lot of effort in the making it work not only in the labour of the translation but also in supporting it technically. Sadly it looks like they will be switching to more lackluster formats That don't support the advance positioning features.

pif 1y ago

> Since the most recent round of Crunchyroll layoffs What's the point of writing a full article when the answer is literally in the eighth word?

b3lvedere 1y ago
Maybe some people are still amazed to witness that machines still cannot create the same quality content that (passionate) human (teams) can create? Quality takes patience, time and money.

Pikamander2 1y ago

> Multiple overlapping speakers are represented on the top and bottom of the screen. > This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience Quality concerns aside, I've always disliked having text on the top and bottom of the screen simultaneously. My eyes are focused on the bottom of the screen, so I sometimes don't even realize that there's text at the top and have to pause/rewind to figure out what I missed. I think putting both speakers' captions at the bottom with some kind of differentiator makes more sense.

braiamp 1y ago
The top one is usually a background speaker, and not the focus of the scene. It is extremely rare that directors do that anyways.

liampulles 1y ago

This is really indicative of the people in charge at Crunchyroll not understanding their audience, as any serious anime fan can tell you that high quality subtitles have a huge effect on the enjoyability of an anime. Colourful, expressive, well timed subs really add something to the experience.

eviks 1y ago

> Most anime have exclusive streaming licenses, so for ~70% of 2025’s new releases, and an even larger share of catalog shows and movies, Crunchyroll is often your only means to do so. But that’s not an issue. Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.

jagged-chisel 1y ago

Money. Less money to pay for quality.

DoneWithAllThat 1y ago

This is a random aside but somewhere I have some slightly obscure early 2000s anime with fan subs, and in one of them they accidentally left an additional “working notes” subtitle track that I find fascinating. It basically has all the little messages between the participants discussing whether a given translation is accurate or should be changed, alternative ideas, disagreements over proper translation, etc. It really illustrates how subtitling is nowhere near an exact science and oftentimes whether a given translation is the best is highly subjective. You basically need to be a good writer to be a good translator.

deafpolygon 1y ago

Crunchyroll’s “de facto” monopoly is the main cause: with little competition, no one has any real alternative therefore Crunchyroll doesn't have any incentive to improve.

thomasfarstrike 1y ago

[dead]

johnhenry 1y ago

This makes me sad. For a while, the video player team at Crunchyroll was essentially just me. I spent countless hours fixing bugs and building features, especially around subtitling. The teammate who joined after me really took it to the next level. When I left, the player felt like it was in good hands — they even open-sourced the code for a time.

casey2 1y ago

Anime subtitles have always been hilariously bad even compared to early CC which would often position captions right under where you were looking. This is back when it was somebodies' job and they took it seriously. The hobbification of work had many casualties.

FranOntanaya 1y ago

A lot of styling is done still in the old Advanced Substation subtitle format, which is nice in a whole number of ways but doesn't have any standards working group behind and so it's a bit ignored in software and operations. People use either some flavor of W3C's Timed Text or WebVTT instead (and it was already a pain to get them to drag their feet into them and drop the old analog broadcast formats). Now, here's the thing. WebVTT isn't radically different in format and features to (A)SSA and it has plenty of styling options... but, once again, a lot of platforms and software are dragging their feet to support them. So the industry has been sloooowly doing the right thing moving to the W3C standards (not a huge fan of Timed Text myself, but it exists for a reason), but only with the most basic and safe features. Which are also about as many features you get out of plain speech to text output, so it's even easier to make that decision.

lacoolj 1y ago

YES where do I sign the petition to revert this terrible change?

layer8 1y ago
The only effective petition is to cancel your subscription.

vaer-k 1y ago

I wish they would at least include the japanese cc subtitles. They must already exist so I don't understand why they can't just be packaged along with the other subs.

aspenmayer 1y ago
From what I understand, the written translation, in the form of subtitles, that accompanies the original language audio are have their own copyright and are licensed separately to the translated audio version and its closed captions. If they were to include the dubbed audio alongside the translated subtitles, to be compliant with all applicable copyrights, they would be on the hook for licensing costs twice over, which is why the legitimate streaming sites rarely do that, nor do they even expose such a dual-mode capability via the user interface.

Smar 1y ago

Why is this getting pushed up so fiercely? It seems all of the issues are for dubs and their closed captions. CC users are a very minor target group. Deaf can just use proper subs. I have seen no issues in regular subs, and they look like they always have looked.

snvzz 1y ago

We need to go back to fansubbing.

ksynwa 1y ago

I haven't watched an airing anime ever. How good are fansubs? I found it very surprising that volunteers would write subtitles for free when I became aware of the phenomenon.