Post

Oh yeah, thats half the reason I care but I was also an active sub watcher back in my highschool anime phase when crunchy was at its peak lol.

@valkorn.bsky.social has adapted it for the Russian audience, good job to both of you! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny9Z...

This was an excellent read. Thanks for putting this together (for a free read even!!!) and I hope it continues to enlighten folks to the direction of the industry, even as the market continues to grow.

,s

honestly good subtitles can make or break anime, i had to specifically look up a version of bofuri with better subtitles than i'd been watching due to the nature of default subs being terrible, and the properly formatted version is so much better for readabilty, the fact its not standard is scary

had to dig up my bluesky account from The Pile™, holy hell this article is a certified banger

Should have linked them. @schmullus.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/schm... Credits at ANN (likely incomplete list (more people need to add credits regularly - source: I can see submission info)): www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia... MediaOCD has the best typesetting on disc, no questions asked.

I mean, considering trends, dubbing isn't too high on that list either :/

Yeah even closed captions on streaming is extremely subpar.

We also need more of them. Like why must SDH and signs & subs apply to only English dubs? Shouldn't hard of hearing English-speakers watching subbed anime get English SDH as an option when viewing the Japanese audio? English dub script=/=Japanese subtitle script They're rarely 100% the same.

Then there's how this ends up happening. Wasn't it they hired someone that's better with translating technical documents rather than visual media? Translating both is not the same thing. www.reddit.com/r/anime/comm...

Great analysis and in depth article of the current state of things, the exclusivity of the streaming rights makes it so no one can even compete with a better service...

I thought the story would end after the revelation of the 2-line limit by licensees. But you went super hard into the softwares and the historical companies! Great article. Thanks!

really fantastic article, kudos to you and everyone involved.

/I cancelled my own subscription and turned to anime piracy BECAUSE the quality of Crunchyroll subs were that poor. The UK sadly doesn't have much in the way of affordable alternatives for most anime, and Netflix only has so much.

Incredible work!

I vividly remember the mix-up in subtitles that resulted in an episode of Heaven Official's Blessing having the subs for an episode of UmaMusume. Stayed like that for days, at least! Made for hilarity, at least!

Crunchyroll once stated they won't use AI in creative process - but creating CC for dubs might not be "creative".

Ah my bad! I conflate the two sometimes and I know there's a difference.

Amazing article, btw! Very well-researched and synthesized.

Though, even if I knew some of the info already, I refused to skip it. Just like how I don't skip OP/EDs, I didn't skip any of the text in the article.

Ah, good ol' JP side meddling to make things worse... but sadly, the stuff I'm talking about here is coming straight from the CR executives. And it's baaaaaaaad.

Crunchyroll gonna Crunchyroll.

They don't. I have a book in front of me right now and I had to flick through like ten pages before I found a single hypenated word. It's very poor for readability so publishers take special care to avoid it.

Honestly just turn them off. You've got a wide enough column of text that the change in spacing is minimal, and far less distracting than the near-constant word splitting.

The return of horrible subs is needed more than ever

They're also failing to QC subs. The eng subtitles on Who Made Me a Princess use awkward wording indicative of AI, and the russian subs I switched from were so clearly mistimed w/cn VO at launch that I noticed while only studying fit HSK3.

So crunchyroll is worse than piracy? I've known that a while now.

Capitalism is the direct enemy of art.

MISRIL ORE (Mithril Ore) I'm thinking they are just running the Japanese subtitles through machine translation/AI translation at this point with no QA.

@daiz.moe Here's an example of typesetting by "It's Anime powered by REMOW" on YouTube

📌

Not only is this a really fantastic and thorough article but it might be the best, easiest to read format I've ever come across? Your use of color and formatting not only expresses personality but makes it *really* easy to organize a lot of information in mind while ready. 10/10.

Expressing interest in it when the business world is basically investing buckets of money for anyone who wants to dehumanize their business with AI tools is close enough in my eyes. Especially given the way Netflix handles it, your article points out those business ties have down stream influence.

The only reason crunchy exists is because they offered an alternative way to one piece without living the one piece lifestyle. Being a pirate is free and easy. As the late Robbie Rotten said "Being a pirate is alright to be. Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free. You are a pirate!"

So both video games and Anime are going to be dead to the English speaking World soon, unless you're a okay with AI and mediocrity...

Nice! But for real, this was a great read, thank you very much. Now I'm late for work 🤣

I already cancelled a while back and cited this stuff as the reason, cause yeah, it was getting kinda garbage.

Thank you for this. It was quite educational and useful. Will be sharing it.

I did it for a few years, translating, typesetting and karaoke, kinda miss it but I got burned out hard

Great read! The very sharp drop in subtitle quality is actually what pushed me to end my subscription to them a while back

Great work on this. Your knowledge and research you've done on anime subtitling is clear to see.

Crunchyroll Germany still uses typeset for most series. For selected titles Crunchyroll uses subtitles provided from external sources, this might include ADN as well for German & French translations of titles that are airing on both services (Dan Da Dan, Witch Watch, Tougen Anki)

I have heard about this too. It seems pretty clear to me that these orders came down from management with the plans to move to OOONA in mind, as typesetting wouldn't be possible with it anymore.

The story of Wakanim is quite the simple one: under Sony ownership, it eventually lost the one thing that made it unique (DRM-free downloads you could buy), and then it was killed in the Great Unification to Crunchyroll

The English screenings in the US had no song subtitles to speak of at all for any of the music.

(Didn't link just the first tweet because for some reason, my own replies on my own thread from September 2017 don't show up on the site nor xcancel unless I link one of the replies. Elon broke the site more than I thought. Just look at this by comparison. xcancel.com/BigOnAnime/s...)

This line of thinking doesn't make much sense imo. Any softsubbed piece of media is already very ingestable and the typesetting aspect won't hinder interpretability. If we're going to get conspiratorial, something properly typeset is likely *better* for them as it's structured and annotated data!

The decay of subtitling at Crunchyroll reminds me of an anecdote I heard many years ago as to why Funimation DVDs and Blu-rays stopped utilizing branching: it was too hard to implement. I can’t remember the source so it’s little more than speculation, but it seems so in character for the company.

I took these several months ago.

Out of curiosity, do you know what platform the Delta in-flight entertainment software uses? Crunchyroll just started licensing its content to Delta, and I wonder what kind of limitations are present there. news.delta.com/crunchyroll-...