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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, 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.

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?

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

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

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

It’s cheaper than you might think. Much like in gaming, there’s a lot of people who really want to work in the anime industry, even if it’s just on the localization and distribution side. This drives down salaries quite a bit.

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

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

> 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.

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”.

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

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

>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.

> 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?

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).

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

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.)

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.

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

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.

The Crunchyroll/Funimation merger was a really bad deal for fans, in that a huge number of series were never ported over to Crunchyroll before the Funimation shutdown.

Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.

When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.

The funny thing about this narrative is that Crunchyroll also started out as an "informal distribution" pirate site, and had all the good things you mentioned beat out of them by successive acquisitions and corporate ownership.

They’re still just within the threshold of good enough, but I was pretty annoyed the day comments disappeared. It might have been young viewers, but I was a young viewer once and those comments went back all the way to that time. It was also one thing Crunchyroll had that other streaming sites typically don’t (except YouTube of course): community.

It's a shame but understandable from a business perspective since they had to have a moderation team to support some of the less savory comments juvenile users were leaving.

CR removing comments removed the soul from the product :/

Was always fun reading the top comments on big episodes. Finding those few other ppl who noticed that one small thing at timestamp 14:30, dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai... etc

It might take a few more decades, but Google will ultimately win the streaming wars.

I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.

You can also interpret that as I'll be shocked if AI doesn't result in every mangaka becoming their own small studio and distributing via YouTube.

> I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.

In 2002 it was and I really liked it then.

YouTube was founded in 2005, is this a typo?

I think you’re right for certain use cases. When I want to watch a specific movie, you can pull it up and rent it super easy on YouTube.

No fuss. It’s basically a 1-click operation. $2.99 or whatever to watch your movie in good quality.

I'll be shocked if they're able to get noticed above the tide of slop and industrially automated bogus copyright claims.

Discovery has always been a problem.

You can look to the past to see what this might look like in the future:

- Publishing in the digital publishing era.

- Indie Gaming in the Steam Greenlight era.

- Indie music in the digital recording / DAW era.

- Trying to make it as an actor or musician in general.

- YouTuber careers vs. "YouTube poop"

- Trying to make it as a streamer / influencer

Novelty, self-promo, luck, preparation, right place/right time, likeability -- there are lots of things that can come together to make it work. But it's still a lot of work.

Corporate consolidation ruins products left and right. I wish we had a functioning regulatory body.

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.

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.

I tend to agree with this take - look at the book or music industry, where you can buy most media in each category on most platforms, with some exceptions.

Ideally, like music, we'd get multiple vendors offering downloads that are high quality copy of video that isn't DRM encumbered.

But currently, we don't get this, and the closest legitimate way (modulo the DMCA...) to get video as a file is to buy physical media and rip it.

Serious shades of Gabe Newell's "it's a service problem, not a pricing problem" around all of this.

And what makes the one streaming service stay good, with no competitors?

Ideally we'd have both benefits: many platforms each with (more or less) all the content, where they compete on consumer-focused streaming features rather than on their (transient) licensed content libraries. But right now we have plenty of "competition" yet it's all just a race to the bottom.

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.

They're for sure doing this and have been caught: https://x.com/d0nut2x/status/1940107015533285646

Amazon Prime did it as well and it was absolutely horrible. Character names got completely butchered, and changed from one scene to the next.

It's alright, I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto us, the customers.

Enshitification just being further turbo-fed by AI

once AI enshitifies PE we’ll accelerate towards the enshitularity

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.

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.

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 ?

Yes

My first thought here is that an open market for translations would just create lots of really bad, free translations and make discovering good translations impossible.

Ultimately, there will be a concern that it devalues the translation process, leading to translators getting paid less, not more.

It's already happening. There are visual novel groups that take pateron sponsorship to run the script through machine translation. It's now done in giant batches. They're released for free and I am not able to speak of the quality as I've never tried them, but when I see reviews on steam for a VN that has been machine translated, it never results in a good review.

I'm not aware of the landscape right now, but for a long time the absolute best translations were free, and potentially baked into pirated videos.

Anime viewers tend to be passionate, I think there's a reasonable chance to have groups emerge with a reputation to defend and getting paid more than they are now (which could be 0)

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.

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?

This is a problem as well, but what I see often is what seems to be the cheapest speech recognition software they could find auto-transcribing the dub, and it falls over any time it meets a name or word it can’t guess out of like to 1,000 most common words in the English language.

Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.

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.

I see this a lot, and it is a mild pet peeve of mine as well. Along the same lines, since I’m using Gundam as an example in this thread, I’ll point to a technology in the franchise called “psycommu” (pronounced in dubs as psy-com-moo) which is clearly transliterated from how it’s spelled in the original script without taking a second look at it. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have just localized it to “psy-com,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

> 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.

>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.

The most popular anime streaming site outside of Japan, Crunchyroll, hasn't had hard-subs.... in forever. You can watch any of the shows in their original Japanese or available dubs without subtitles.

I'd be willing to wager Netflix, which has a fair amount of anime, can do the same.

What site(s) are you referring to?

You could just turn the subtitles off, or watch it with Japanese subtitles

Crunchyroll strangely lacks Japanese subs, which seems strange as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and most others have them in addition to all the translations.

Japanese people as a whole never watch content with proper subtitles. And the subtitles that do exist in Japan for Japanese content are universally awful. It seems only foreign companies that promote being accessible have them. Unext, a Japanese company, never offers subs on Japanese content. It only have subtitles for foreign content... but it only offers subtitles if you're not watching Japanese dubs. It never, under any circumstance, allows the audio and subtitle language to be the same.

I feel like one reason is that subtitles in Japan never match what the characters actually say. A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese) Not sure why but the Japanese subtitle industry is just terrible in so many ways.

>A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese)

This is standard in closed captions and is not specific to Japan. So perhaps the service you're talking about only has closed captions and is incorrectly marking them as subtitles.

I 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.

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.

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.

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