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Answerman - Why Don't Simulcast Subtitles Get Corrected?

Fansubs have taught us that fans will always go for the cheapest (free) option so long as it's also the fastest. They don't care about quality. They'll even defend the complete inaccuracy not fully understanding the nature of the language or its translation.

Agreed. HTML5 (and blurays, while we're on the subject, albeit with a lot of bs and finagling) can support the same stylized subtitles (including the fancy "sign subtitles") that fansubbers have been producing for a long time. I'm not saying that it's something that should be done for simulcasts, because that would take forever, but it's something I wish they would think about while putting up catalog shows for stream and when releasing the shows for home video.

What's worse is that some of them are college-level students and still type like they're in grade school, sadly. Just goes to show how much some folks still spit out that outdated and juvenile early-Internet era response: "Spelling and grammar don't matter online! We're not getting graded for it!"

Sigh...it makes you want to weep for the future of humanity sometimes.

i understand grousing when a show you like gets a legitimately shit-tier adaptation, dub or sub. and i understand it can be jarring and frustrating to catch a dumb mistake or typo in a sub track. but people don't seem to want to compromise on quality or speed when it comes to getting their simulcast shows -- they want 100% of both and that's neither fair or even doable.

Which in itself is odd because speedsub groups had plenty of errors in their releases. So even for fansubs, there was always a you can either take this release asap knowing it was rushed and thus more error prone or you can wait for that other group to release it in 4-5 days.

There was an Answerman column some time back where someone asked this. Flash/Animate is used, it seems, because it's easier to implement security and copy-protection on it than the alternatives. For companies who have suffered a great deal of piracy, this is a make-or-break factor.

Really? Copy-protection that can't prevent from Crynchyroll rips to appear on illegal sites almost the moment they are at CR anyway? What's the point of applying already broken protection over better service for your customers?

Yeah, that's the impression I've always had--the people Crunchyroll are competing with are speedsubbers.

if you go back and watch various shows from 2009 on CR, you get the same shoddy subs that viewers saw when those titles were first airing.

I wonder if the people who tolerate mistakes in their professional anime subs would tolerate the same mistakes in any other paid media, be it books, articles, magazines, etc.

It's not up to Crunchyroll. It's because the rights holders require some form of DRM no matter how broken. Why do so many people continue to think licensors like CR and Funi call the shots when all the power resides with the Japanese rights holders?

I wonder if the same people who insist on firing "incompetent" staff working on professional anime subs would also insist that they themselves be fired when making small errors in their job.

What's incredibly ironic is that display of grammar though, I'm surprised they can even spot grammar and spelling mistakes.

Just like Tajima said, you need a high form of understanding for it. And clearly some people looked to others, like English teachers (ala Hyper Anime Reviews for me) or internet users with said knowledge over subtitle translations or grammar.

So you're being outraged on behalf of other people, even though you yourself do not possess the "high form of understanding" required to be inconvenienced by the mistakes yourself.

Plus, just like you and possibly other users. I have my own limits on what reaches, "perfection." Involving grammar.

Grammar in social media means little to me since it's a free piece of instant communication besides our monthly internet bills.

Who wants to listen to a person who can't be bothered to string together a grammatically correct sentence, hypocritically chastising hard-working translators for their lack of attention to grammatical detail? They have a quick turn-around time as their excuse, what's yours? Even worse, poor grammar might make you look uneducated, and people don't want to listen to the nitpicky ravings of a dim-wit either.

Grammar in social media should mean as much to you as grammar anywhere else does. Practice what you preach.

I'm not getting payed for this, I don't know who you are so I can't warp it into something that can fit your own, "nitpicky." Standard, I'm not making a video and this forum is a legit niche sub culture with groups that already have their own entitled opinions. You say it like I'll swoon over the masses if I just make fancy grammar changes. And I bet you wouldn't change your mind either in this mosh pit of a site no matter how constructed the user's sentences are. Why do it then, you might ask? Because it's still better than doing nothing at all.

Here's a couple fun facts:

- Crunchyroll has at least around 150 on-site employees in San Franscisco, one of the most expensive places on Earth to live (and obviously the pay grades need to be high enough for people to actually be able to live there so they can work on-site).
- Meanwhile, basically all the subtitling staff is remote contractors, and they're paid in essentially peanuts. A translator only gets $80 per episode flat, regardless of how long or complicated the script is. (Timers get $20 per episode, and considering that a good timer can do an episode in 30 minutes, this means a translator would need to produce a script in mere 2 hours in order to have an equal hourly wage to a timer. More likely their hourly wage is going to be worse, though.)

So it's not that Crunchyroll wouldn't have money, it's just that they don't seem to be particularly interested in investing any of it into improving just, you know, their main product. After all, it's not like the legal consumers have a choice anyway with licenses being primarily exclusive :^)

Hey look, it was well presented, it offered facts, it offered sources, it offered a new perspective to consider. It wasn't just petulant outrage over something insignificant. It's a post that earned my respect and piqued my curiosity. If it had the same content but was written poorly, however, I might have glossed over it. The fact that it is composed well is one factor of several that make it a good post.