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NEWS: Crunchyroll's German Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show Subtitles List 'ChatGPT'

Aleximonious wrote:

loveliver wrote: I should tell you, Cygames (this anime's licensor) provided the translations to Crunchyroll, and either one didn't even proofread. One of Cygames' company photos showed a computer with DeepL (AI Translation software) on a desktop. I say BOTH Crunchyroll and Cygames are at fault here. Yup, Crunchyroll should, at a minimum be QCing licensor subs. I also find it bad that the "ChatGPT said" is in English, which suggests they may have been using AI for pivot translations, without anyone actually speaking the language. Finally, since you mentioned DeepL, why the fudge did they not use that, using a general-purpose LLM instead of a dedicated translation model is salt on an already wide open wound

I don’t think Crunchyroll should be required to check other people’s work. If a book store is given books to sell should they be required to check the quality of that book? No because it’s not their job.

To be fair, sometimes there's stipulations that CR cannot edit the subs in any way, even if there's stuff really wrong with the supplied subtitles. But that may not apply to this case. If it doesn't then they really dropped the ball on QCing.

paulchaested wrote:

I'm in agreeance that CR deserves some flak here. This is the third time where their QA failed to prevent this. 1st time: The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons, the subs were provided by Avex Pictures and they were machine translated. CR had to fix them after they got heat. 2nd time: Nokotan, the subs were provided by Remow which was actually translated by a real human but the subs were god awful. CR had to fix them after they got heat. 3rd time: Necronomico, datamined files suggest that Cygames provided the subs. You would think after the first two times, their QA will try a little harder lol. Regardless, it's gonna get fixed and I'm pretty sure everybody will most likely forget about this and move on

Four times, though last one not involved AI - Killing Slimes for 300 Years S2, which was notorious for providing wrong subtitles for the episodes and fixing it after some time... literally every single week up until the very finale. Yeah, even when they get flak, they still stepped on the rake every single time.

Well, my idea is that Japanese licensors care close to zero about using AI for translations.
There is the manga service with machine translations by Orange.
Then Shueisha's Manga Plus editor said (roughly) that translations were expensive and they expected AI translation to improve to increase the number of languages and series. And now they use "studio Mikan" for translating all their one-shots

So if anyone thinks that Cygames cares, or that is just a CR thing, you are very wrong.

Fifth time: Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction originally launched with dubtiltes provided by the Japanese rights holder. Those were eventually replaced by a proper translation, but it's again something that someone should've caught before it went live.

After reading about this, and seeing how chaotic AI-facilitated translation and subtitling can cause this. This is not going to look any better then any fansubber or scanlators (the one that give bad or seriously bad translation or throwing bunch of profanity like F-word in there when that's not correct) when they go off the bonkers with their translation.

Well, even if CyGames provided the subtitle file to Crunchyroll there should have been at least ONE person to proof read the dialogues and correct mistakes if there are any (which is most likely the case when AI is used).

And it's not even the English version but the German version which means no one here probably even watched it. Not proof-reading them seems to have worked out well for the vast majority of their releases.

Elfensjón wrote:

Well, even if CyGames provided the subtitle file to Crunchyroll there should have been at least ONE person to proof read the dialogues and correct mistakes if there are any (which is most likely the case when AI is used).

Proof-reading a script doesn't help if you don't have the original to compare it to or the knowledge of Japanese to confirm if things are translated right if it otherwise seems grammatically correct even if it's inaccurate.

It also doesn't help if the changes are intentional. Pointing out they subtitled "Crazy Diamond" instead of "Shining Diamond" in JJBA doesn't help since it's an intentional mistake. Nor would it help if you point out a character did not say "Aura Farming" in Japanese if the English script was intentionally changed to include slang like that.

I find it reasonable for them to assume a third party company who licensed the show translated it the way they wanted it to be and any kind of second-guessing would be a waste of time in most cases. For all the people complaining about this this is one show out of thousands they have subtitled. And it's not even the English version but the German version which means no one here probably even watched it. Not proof-reading them seems to have worked out well for the vast majority of their releases.

Some fansubbers have already been doing machine translations/auto subtitling for years, but it's become even more prominent recently. (Heck, one series that I watched this past season that was only available in fansubs regularly had this problem.) The results, as you might expect, are often barely comprehensible.

Granted, nowhere near all fansubbers do that, but that's why I don't trust fansubbers to be any more authentic.