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This Week in Anime - The Crunchyroll Sub Flub

But there's another element that's been on my mind as well: will newer viewers care about the quality drop? From looking at Solo Leveling's sweep of the Anime Awards to Miles Atherton's look into the silent majority that powers isekai's popularity, I'm left with a sinking feeling. One that tells me, "as long as the wider audience still gets their product and it's halfway legible, who cares?" And man, Lucas, that's way more cynical than I like to feel about any issue regarding my Japanese cartoons.

Pretty obnoxious to call perceived terrible taste analogous to being perfectly fine with terrible service. Just because someone buys a book you don't like doesn't mean that they'd be happy if the book fell apart when they turned a page.

mdo7, that would be me wrote:

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.

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.

mdo7, again me wrote:

So fansubbers has been using AI translation too? That's not a good look for them, great you just gave me another reason for me to stay away from fansubs (except the reputational one I trust).

I can't speak for fansubs (though the fansub industry has changed a lot since when I was watching fansubbed stuff over 10 years ago), but for fan scanlations, stuff like google translate/chat gpt/deepL are used a LOT.
I don't like it but if it's unofficial fan scans/subs I can at least understand it as they're (usually) not making any money off of it. For companies that are asking for money (like Orange) though, if they're gonna use AI (which I would rather they didn't) they need to be extra critical on their QC work, including doing sense checks on context and consistency.
I can only imagine using AI for fansubbing is even worse since fansubbers won't have access to a script so it'd have to go off of the audio, which lacks so much context and can be misheard.

I haven't watched any anime from CR in a while, but I'm already aware of the subtitle fiasco after reading this back in July. And if any of you are thinking about using fansubs, they're not any better, and I have heard of fansubbers using ChatGPT or AI to do the translation and being lazy about it per from what I was told:

Key wrote:

mdo7, that would be me wrote: 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. 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.

harminia wrote:

mdo7, again me wrote: So fansubbers has been using AI translation too? That's not a good look for them, great you just gave me another reason for me to stay away from fansubs (except the reputational one I trust). I can't speak for fansubs (though the fansub industry has changed a lot since when I was watching fansubbed stuff over 10 years ago), but for fan scanlations, stuff like google translate/chat gpt/deepL are used a LOT. I don't like it but if it's unofficial fan scans/subs I can at least understand it as they're (usually) not making any money off of it. For companies that are asking for money (like Orange) though, if they're gonna use AI (which I would rather they didn't) they need to be extra critical on their QC work, including doing sense checks on context and consistency. I can only imagine using AI for fansubbing is even worse since fansubbers won't have access to a script so it'd have to go off of the audio, which lacks so much context and can be misheard.

So think twice before watching anime in fansubs, because we don't know how many fansubbers are using ChatGPT, and other AI translation and just assume they're flawless (which they're not), and not bother to check if they have misspelling, or wonky translation in almost the same manner like CR's subtitle are doing.

Very few do it for the love of anime or wanting to do it for fun. It's all about money and fake internet fame now.

Pretty obnoxious to call perceived terrible taste analogous to being perfectly fine with terrible service. Just because someone buys a book you don't like doesn't mean that they'd be happy if the book fell apart when they turned a page.

Quote:

But there's another element that's been on my mind as well: will newer viewers care about the quality drop? From looking at Solo Leveling's sweep of the Anime Awards to Miles Atherton's look into the silent majority that powers isekai's popularity, I'm left with a sinking feeling. One that tells me, "as long as the wider audience still gets their product and it's halfway legible, who cares?" And man, Lucas, that's way more cynical than I like to feel about any issue regarding my Japanese cartoons.

Pretty obnoxious to call perceived terrible taste analogous to being perfectly fine with terrible service. Just because someone buys a book you don't like doesn't mean that they'd be happy if the book fell apart when they turned a page.

The best days of the industry were decades ago now.

People who are claiming to be fansubbers A) don't know a word of Japanese and generally do not have English as a first language, and/or B) have been known to use MTL, AI or just make up words. They'll also ask for money.

Very few do it for the love of anime or wanting to do it for fun. It's all about money and fake internet fame now.

Glordit wrote:

Very few do it for the love of anime or wanting to do it for fun. It's all about money and fake internet fame now.

That's extremely pessimistic and negative. There's plenty of people who translate stuff unofficially for fun or because they want to.

Also, that too. Do the writers actually believe that "liking Solo Leveling" = "I don't care about subtitles"?