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Last edited by Daizo on Sat Oct 29, 2016 5:17 am; edited 1 time in total

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 :^)

0nsen wrote:

Why do they hardsub anyway? It's $currentyear. Even my toaster can handle softsubs.

Lots of things can handle softsubs. Not all of them handle them well, and most only support one or two standards. It's all well and good to say "softsubs fix this problem", but softsubs themselves then become another problem. At least with hardsubs, you can be sure that your viewers do have readable subtitles.

bs3311 wrote:

We would'nt lose 3/4 of seasonal shows legally when the probable effect would be that those shows will be licensed or outsourced by other companies spreading the work load. Oh, they wont be a one stop shop then? Well tough love cause they can't back up what they're barking.

The thing is, paid streaming is only worth the money (and barely, at that) because it is a one stop shop. If the average viewer had to pay fees to multiple outlets in order to watch all the shows they're interested in, they'd say "to hell with it" and pirate some or all of what they'd otherwise get from the one stop shop.

bs3311 wrote:

Yet from what I'm hearing, CR's staff is huge and each group works on a few shows, it's just the people they hire are possibly incompetent

They're not incompetent, just rushed. Even the best professionals make mistakes when really pressed for time.

Paiprince wrote:

It's nothing compared to the "good old days" when fansubbers simulcast and several groups would have different interpretations of a line spoken.

And if you were really lucky, one of them would get it right. If you were exceptionally lucky, one group would get all of the contested lines in any given episode right.

I like how Justin answered this question, then everyone else saying he is wrong.

It all boils down to it not being cost effective.

tbh the era of highspeed subbing and mirroring has made people real damn entitled about their anime. right now is the best ever time to be an anime fan -- i could literally tab over to crunchroll or funimation or any other legal stream right now and i would have thousands of legal, free, quality shows to watch for however long i want. and yet it feels like i hear nothing except complaints over the most minor shit.

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.

i don't even have a proper conclusion to this thought except i guess i'm just sick of seeing the same old complaints over and over from people who clearly don't understand the way the industry works and throw around baseless accusations about the way people work when their sky-high expectations aren't met.

(case in point: legitimately saw people shitting on funimation for delays to the dr3 simulcast that were caused by the Japanese studio not getting the episode to them on time. good lord.)

0nsen wrote:

Why do they hardsub anyway? It's $currentyear. Even my toaster can handle softsubs. And they should really, really drop flash.

The desktop browser flash versions still use softsubs. Only the dedicated device versions (consoles, mobile, etc) use hardsubs. That's because they use the built-in libraries and facilities of the device, which tries to rely on hardware video acceleration as much as possible. Softsubs require software processing so those will waste battery and/or the weak cpus in some devices are not up to par for single threaded tasks. VLC and MXplayer on mobile for example are very cpu heavy with any fancy softsubs.

As far as why they still use flash, there's no equivalent way to implement the stylized softsubs (different fonts and colors simultaneously on screen at different positions) yet in HTML5 video.

Last edited by omiya on Sat Oct 29, 2016 10:30 am; edited 1 time in total

bs3311 wrote:

more kindergarten screw ups like this = hilarity = loss of trust = less viewership = less money.

That's the impression that I get with The Japan Times - they have more typos, bad or obscure English or otherwise scramble a news item so much more frequently than the other English-translated Japanese newspapers (e.g. Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, Japan News (English version of Yomiuri Shimbun)).

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:

Lots of things can handle softsubs. Not all of them handle them well, and most only support one or two standards. It's all well and good to say "softsubs fix this problem", but softsubs themselves then become another problem. At least with hardsubs, you can be sure that your viewers do have readable subtitles.

I don't get what you mean, the only thing different about softsubs is they aren't burned into the video and can be toggled.

and if everyone is using the same player provided by the people who are doing the subbing (ex crunchyroll player) then if its viewable for one its viewable for all

ItAintEazy wrote:

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.

If we are talking about other paid media under similar time constraints, then yes. The people doing simulcast subs often have a matter of hours to do them. Most media doesn't work that way. Anime on discs doesn't work that way.

A larger number of errors is just something you need to accept if you want a simulcast, and if you don't want to do that then wait for the disc release where they have plenty of time to work on it. Not that disc versions never have errors, but at least your complaint would be reasonable at that point.

yurigasaki wrote:

tbh the era of highspeed subbing and mirroring has made people real damn entitled about their anime.

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.

Tylerr wrote:

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:

Lots of things can handle softsubs. Not all of them handle them well, and most only support one or two standards. It's all well and good to say "softsubs fix this problem", but softsubs themselves then become another problem. At least with hardsubs, you can be sure that your viewers do have readable subtitles.

I don't get what you mean, the only thing different about softsubs is they aren't burned into the video and can be toggled.

and if everyone is using the same player provided by the people who are doing the subbing (ex crunchyroll player) then if its viewable for one its viewable for all

Is this true? Because if so, I have no idea why people are arguing about why they don't have softsubs, because they do. I literally just toggled the subs off and on in Crunchyroll just now.

ItAintEazy wrote:

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.

i read a lot of books and i sometimes notice mistakes. usually minor editing things. but it doesn't really bother me. same thing with anime subs. it doesn't bother me. maybe because i understand that the problem is time constraint and not editorial knowledge/skill.

One detail Justin might want to address is how long the translators have the scripts before the show airs. Clearly the script has to be available to the seiyuu well before the broadcast date. Does Crunchyroll get the script at the same time the actors do? If not, why not?

vonPeterhof wrote:

The most recent example I can remember is episode 7 of New Game!, where they first translated "taking barium" as "getting a barium enema" (barium contrast is more commonly administered orally in Japan, and another character specifically mentions having drunk it later on). A little more than a week the reference to enemas was removed.

As someone who has had gastrograffin (an alternative contrast agent to barium) orally in Japan I can appreciate that dedication to correcting that sub.

Tylerr wrote:

I don't get what you mean, the only thing different about softsubs is they aren't burned into the video and can be toggled.

and if everyone is using the same player provided by the people who are doing the subbing (ex crunchyroll player) then if its viewable for one its viewable for all

Of course. Somehow I got to thinking in general terms, rather than the specifics here.

yuna49 wrote:

One detail Justin might want to address is how long the translators have the scripts before the show airs. Clearly the script has to be available to the seiyuu well before the broadcast date. Does Crunchyroll get the script at the same time the actors do? If not, why not?

If memory serves, he already had spoken about that, and the gist is that they often do get the scripts, but what's in the script and the actual finished product aren't the same thing. Changes can, and frequently do, get made at every step of the production process.

yurigasaki wrote:

tbh the era of highspeed subbing and mirroring has made people real damn entitled about their anime. right now is the best ever time to be an anime fan -- i could literally tab over to crunchroll or funimation or any other legal stream right now and i would have thousands of legal, free, quality shows to watch for however long i want. and yet it feels like i hear nothing except complaints over the most minor shit.

Complaining over errors in translations is not complaining over something minor, it's a big thing. Mess up the translation enough, and you lose the original meaning, and it can even change parts of the plot. Some examples of what happens when you mess up badly enough. These are not typos, these are flat out not getting the Japanese lines properly.
https://twitter.com/BlackDragonHunt/status/753630016303312896
https://twitter.com/BlackDragonHunt/status/753652907539443712
https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/687685252706254848 (See whole thread, the translator for this most definitely was not up to the task, it was likely FUNi outsourcing again (I've heard (go to "That industry tho") they have only 4 or so in-house translators))
https://mageinabarrel.com/2016/06/26/a-comparison-of-translations-for-concrete-revolutio/
https://twitter.com/ultimatemegax/status/426116174674268161
https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/658559214965551107 (FUNi's translation IIRC never explained what "aitsu" (which as I understand it is apparently a rude way of saying "they/them") and "ichijinsa" are)
http://www.gpforums.co.nz/threads/147378/page1 (And this is on a disc release, and from back when there was way less anime being translated in R1)

Possible Oregairu S2 spoilers: http://puu.sh/hVinZ/4daeba7921.jpg (How Commie handled it)

Spoilers for Erased:
https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/711016379151847424
https://twitter.com/Xythar/status/711017609827758080

Then you've got crap like this (and I heard the Blu-ray from Sentai didn't fix very much of this).
https://get.google.com/albumarchive/103684072635496603058/album/AF1QipNvIN88tFzQ28eTZHmkZZX9DTYl_QmpQZalIuvR?source=pwa

And for the record, I'm not expecting perfection, especially in this kind of industry where things are already hectic enough (from the workload, to the low pay, to the tight deadlines, particularly when the episodes are barely meeting the TV broadcast in Japan). Errors will always slip through, you just want as few of them as possible so you don't get stuff like what I showed above. Stuff like the above makes me very paranoid about if I'm losing the original meaning of what was said in the shows I watch, and makes me want to become fluent in Japanese (which is most definitely not an easy task, and even the pros are still always learning more) so I don't have to constantly keep worrying about it.

Though it means less money to be made, fewer simulcasts can mean better QC. If I ran a legit CR-like streaming site and it had 150 people under the pay roll, I think 5-8 seasonal shows (to start out with) means that more quality control might be assured.

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