[bonecrusher2102]

Hah, this is my time to shine. I worked in anime subtitling and timing for a number of years. I helped write our style guide — things like how to handle signs, overlapping dialogue, colors etc.

It wound up being quite a large document!

But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.

If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).

Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”

Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.

I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.

[onoesworkacct]

How many customers watch each episode of popular shows? 100k+?

And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?

[bonecrusher2102]

I agree - this is the right take. Spend a little extra because your customers REALLY care.

[kace91]

That person would need, besides basic computer fluency for the timestamps, knowledge of Japanese and English.

Not unheard of, but probably harder than hiring for a call center, and more need to prevent high rotation due to difficulty in finding replacements.

Edit: not that I disagree with your general idea, just pointing out potential issues.

[whywhywhywhy]

You’re not competing with them being unable to watch it either. You’re competing with someone doing a better job for free out of passion.

[SecretDreams]

While I agree, it's all a our whether they can pass the cost off to the customer. Customers will care a lot for food quality - will they tolerate a price increase to preserve sub quality or accept lower quality for the same sub price? Are there competitors?

These are the questions that would get played out in the decision process.

[lasc4r]

Reminds me of products on Amazon with little to know information about the product and photoshopped images. Somehow it was worth making, but selling? Who can be bothered.

[alwaysdoit]

TBF, for the more popular shows, they are spending that money on an English dub (which is considerably more expensive).

[DrewADesign]

This is really what’s driving business AI products’ push by fleece vest set, though: knowing that they can make enshitification just that much more attractive.

[elihu]

...and that's for an episode that probably cost the original studio at least a hundred thousand dollars to produce, maybe a lot more.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Back in the 90s I attended an anime club where the main host had an amiga with genloc to generate subtitles, and we watched all the anime classics up to that era. The host had a basic understanding of Japanese while not being fluent, but it was good enough that he'd download and retime fansubs. He also funded his own translations with a couple local exchange students.

Even with stuff at this hobby/mature level, the difference in someone actually taking care with the subtitles is not even close to subtle. It makes a huge difference.

[asimovDev]

I love stories like this. I wish my school still had clubs when I was a student. My computer science teacher was speaking fondly of having doom and quake lan parties in the computer class in the evenings for students and teaching staff and even apparently some parents.

[matheusmoreira]

> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”

Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree.

Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with.

Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless encodings to the point of delusion.

I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region.

Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned:

https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/Project-4K77/

Always bet on guys who care. Corporations will never be able to compete. They simply do not give a shit. They want money for minimum viable products. These guys do it out of love.

[ohmahjong]

That's the first I've seen of 4k77 and related projects, thanks for sharing. A true labour of love.

[a-french-anon]

There's a direct equivalent in the world of anime: frame-per-frame restoration like the GITS Blu-Ray (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316985) or the '99 HxH anime and LaserDisc scans.

[inopinatus]

The Rakuten/Viki model appears to lean into this and just sponsor fansub groups directly and include their output in the licensed stream.

At least one of the Chinese streaming services (I think possibly iQIYI) crowdsources improved translations directly in the app, presumably relying on the irritation factor of early adopters stuck with the MTL-grade int'l subs supplied by many C-drama production companies.

[fifteen1506]

I'm more than a Trekkie than a... Warrie (?), but does Project-4K77 means I can finally see Han shooting first?

[buzer]

From what I remember TheFluff was arguably one of the best timers (and encoders) in the fansub scene in the past and he could time the dialogue in under 10 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00xX0PwGUg8

Karaoke and typesetting can of course take longer (I remember someone complaining about how much effort it was to typeset every single book name in some scene that had a bookshelf) though karaoke is usually ~3 minutes of unique content (OP & ED) per ~12 episodes. Typesetting depends heavily on anime, like isekais don't usually have a lot Japanese writing anyway.

[thaumasiotes]

> I remember someone complaining about how much effort it was to typeset every single book name in some scene that had a bookshelf

That seems like something you might legitimately skip. Most books that appear in the background of a scene aren't relevant.

On the other hand, the example image in the article, where there's a big banner hung on the wall reading "Rana-chan's Surprise Party", seems like something you'd want to translate.

[GoblinSlayer]

I'm frankly puzzled by this meme. Only Bakemonogatari is sensitive to timing, and not in a good way, the rest is a matter of habit and taste, so you can't improve it.

[thaumasiotes]

Viki is a platform to watch Asian TV with subtitles in various languages. Their policy on subtitles is, users are free to provide subtitles. Viki won't provide any itself. Their obligation begins and ends with making the video file available.

Each show is subtitled by a team of volunteers. (Generally one team per sub language.)

I watched 大江大河 ("Like a Flowing River"; the English name seems to have no particular relation to the Chinese name) on Viki. But between that series and the sequel (大江大河2), Viki lost the license to stream it.

So now both series are on YouTube, provided by some other party. Viki's subtitles are permissively licensed, so season 1 is up there still using the Viki subtitles.

Viki never got to show season 2, and the new publisher had to provide those subtitles itself. Unfortunately, they tend to be unintelligible gibberish. I was eventually able to watch season 2 after I found a set of fansubs on reddit.

I've noticed that Netflix and Amazon Prime now offer Korean dramas, and it made me wonder if that had something to do with Viki's struggles. But this wasn't even a Korean show.

On the topic of crunchyroll, they could fix their subtitle problems while spending less money by just moving to Viki's system.

[koolba]

> Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”

3-4 hours of time for a sub must be a rounding error for the production costs of these shows. No?

[recursivecaveat]

It's the kind of penny-wise and pound-foolish behaviour that happens in any large business. As you say, the productions cost dwarf the costs of subtitling so much it is ridiculous. Every unique frame of that show was literally hand drawn and colored by someone, to say nothing of all the writers, the voiceover, the marketing, etc. To refuse the light penny-shaving required to present the final product in a good light is completely non-sensical. If you have so little confidence then why are you licensing and paying for bandwidth to show it?

However, there is somebody in charge of subtitles, and they don't really care about overall business outcomes. So if they can reduce the budget of their department by squeezing typesetting, they win on an objective metric at the cost of a subjective (ie ignored) one.

While it's true crunchyroll has a lot of the anime market, there are more streaming platforms than ever right now, and people don't just consume a fixed amount of legal anime episodes per week, forever unchanging. If they have it in their head that they cannot gain or lose subscribers, that's extremely short-sighted.

[kcexn]

Presumably the company translating and subtitling anime is licensing the show, not producing it. So subtitling and translation costs for a business like Crunchyroll would be most of their production budget (assuming licensing fees are not egregious).

[aidenn0]

I sampled a couple of shows on Netfix and I couldn't find any anime subtitled in English; just closed-captioning of the English dub. Netflix's selection I would describe as "fine," so the quality of the subtitles is, IMO a big differentiator for Crunchyroll and given that my household is looking to reduce the streaming services, this change makes the decision of "which one" a lot easier.

[sergers]

I was on the animeone[AonE] team 2001 to 2007 atleast.

Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.

[silicon5]

Why don't they take the timings from the closed captions of the original Japanese broadcast?

[bonecrusher2102]

It’s a great question actually, and the answer has mostly to do with Romanization. Japanese and English are sufficiently structurally different, that even the sentence length won’t necessarily be one to one (eg subject and object inverted).

Another thing that happens is time code shifts that come from differences in frame rate between source material and what the subtitlers end up with (eg 24 vs 23.98 if I’m remembering correctly), which can cause subs to have what we called “ramping” issues over time (timing gets less and less accurate). So you have to go through and reset all the lines anyway.

That being said, we DID do this sometimes, but maybe that takes your time down to 25 minutes, the hard minimum possible time to accurately subtitle a 25 minute show.

And translators hated having to add the times codes (or copy paste their translations over the CCs) — they preferred to just give a script to the subtitler and let them handle it. And actually, if it’s a really good subtitler, they can! In about 35 mins.

So I think the translators were probably right to push back, as it’s only 10 minute savings for probably >10 mins on their part.

[mananaysiempre]

Two issues:

- Japanese has very different word order and word lengths, and furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel. (Vice versa as well, of course, but that’s not really a problem here.) To give a sense of the alienness at play here, Japanese is essentially postfix throughout, that is the most literal counterpart of “the car [that you saw yesterday]” is “[[you SUBJECT] yesterday saw] car”; and it also has no way to join sentences that would not make one of them potentially subordinate to the other (like the “and” before the semicolon does in this sentence). Virtually anything longer than a single line has to be retimed (and occasionally edited for length).

- “Forced” subtitles for captions, on-screen text, etc. are simply absent in the original, for lack of need. True believers (like GP apparently used to be) will try to match the positioning and even typesetting of the on-screen original, either replacing or supplementing it. (Those aren’t your run of the mill SRT subs, ASS is a completely different level of functionality.)

[cyphar]

Some of the issues you often run into with Japanese subtitles are:

  * Almost all Japanese subtitles include subtitles for every noise made as well as including SDH-like information about sounds. This means that a naive attempt to just match up subtitle timings won't work -- the English translation will have fewer subtitles and you will have to skip Japanese lines that do not have an equivalent in the English transcript.
  * Most translated subtitles simplify things and have to re-organise sentence structures to match the target language, which means that you often have to pick different timings for how a sentence is broken up in English than in the original Japanese. Sometimes a very short Japanese phrase requires two sentences to accurately translate, sometimes a long Japanese sentence can be translated into a fairly short English phrase.
  * Higher-quality subtitles will also provide translations for signs and other on-screen text (ASS supports custom placement, fonts, styles, and colours -- it is powerful enough to the point where some of the really good fansub jobs I've seen make it look like the video was actually localised to English because all of the signs look like they have been translated in the original video). The original timings don't help with this.

I should mention that I have used tools like alass[1] to re-time subtitles between languages before (including retiming Japanese subtitles to match English ones) so this is not an unreasonable idea on its face, but those tools mostly work with already existing subtitle tracks that have correct timings. My experience is that if you have tracks with very different timings (as opposed to chunks of subtitles with fairly fixed offsets) you start getting rubbish results.

[1]: https://github.com/kaegi/alass

[Phelinofist]

I remember the Gintama fan subs. They were awesome. They had a lot of explanation that really made the show accessible for someone not all to intimate with Japanese culture. That also helped with getting some jokes that would've went over my head otherwise.

Nowadays SubsPlease floods the market with their Crunchyroll rips.

Also, I tried watching Komi-san on Netflix but it was atrocious - the timing and placements were so bad it was actually unwatchable.

[slackfan]

>If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. I miss the days of hand-timing 25 minute episodes in about 20 minutes in Aegisub because I learned to read the waveform, and had custom snap-to-keyframe commands set up in Aegisub.

Of course, the typesetting would take 8 hours, but timing was always easy.

[chii]

> The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other.

except that it doesn't show up as revenue. That's where the problem is - people would obviously prefer to have elite tier subs, but not be willing to pay elite tier prices for it.

[a-french-anon]

Personally, I won't pay to stream anime, but if Blu-Rays had subs as good as what dedicated fansubs can output (incl. a possibly optional more literal translation with honorifics) AND SSA subtitles somewhere on them to be used by computers, I'd actually buy them; if they aren't butchered QTEC crap (https://github.com/LightArrowsEXE/QTEC), of course.

[eviks]

How would you even know? Is there any single company that prices that service separately so you can tell how many customers are willing to pay for it?

[riffruff24]

it does show up. Just like star wars, the toys and figurines and sometimes it even spread into the VAs, authors and other artists adjacent to the projects.

[heisenbit]

I believe it does. In the comic world there were famous collaborations between visual and text artists. When the latter died the comic withered. Anime is about story telling - much harder to do well with images alone.

The real problem with all these brand killing enshittification moves is the delay until consequences manifest.

[Arnavion]

See also unanimated's typesetting guide: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm

[slg]

>Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product.

And yet I can't think of a single large corporation that actually has this mindset anymore. The current mindset of management is that any delight your customers take in the product is a sign that either the price should have been higher or costs cut until the product is merely satisfactory rather than delightful.

[barry-cotter]

Nintendo, Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon. I’m sure there are many others in creative industries since you have to delight customers at least some of the time there. A large part of the reason Nvidia is a big deal is that they were willing to make the best drivers, that they just cared more about making a quality product. Lots of companies well exceed minimum quality necessary to keep customers from switching.

[kibwen]

Profit motives inherently optimize for consistent, regular, barely-acceptable slop. In order to optimize for quality, you need people to take pride in their work, and not merely take a profit.

[mmaaz]

Fascinating insight into the industry. Thanks for sharing.

[commandersaki]

Can't pry my Ani-Kraze fansub of Area 88 from my cold dead hands.

[zenlot]

> Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”

Thank you for this. Great perspective.

[wk_end]

> That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs!

It's wild to hear someone - especially someone in the industry - say that. Fans definitely bring the most enthusiasm to their work, but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.

[Barrin92]

>but fan subs are notorious for mistranslations and awkward hyperliteralism.

funny to see the comment. I was rewatching JoJo, this time in dub, and just came across a line like this. (the context is a fight between two 19th century British characters in a very theatrical setting):

Sub: "Stop the futile, useless resistance. Don't hide in the curtain's shadows and come out!"

Dub: "You're behind the curtain, like Polonius. And, like Polonius, it is there that you shall meet your end."

I was so surprised that they threw in the Hamlet reference it's what made me look up what the original Japanese line was. The English dub writing often strikes me just as straight up better the more I watch of it.

[bnjms]

I used to like what I assume is the hyper literalism and f fan subs. The certain phrases with consistent and repeated translations would gain their own color. I don’t know but it felt like that context was somehow carried over.

Similarly there are some phrases which are probably unavoidably awkward. Like when translating vaguely as “that guy”.

[baobun]

Let's just say the variance is high. Great stuff and groups out there but the bar has been lower (until now, I guess).

Just according to keikaku.

Translator's note: "Keikaku" means plan

[xboxnolifes]

There are a lot of bad fan subs, but the best subs I come across are always fan subs.

[bonecrusher2102]

That’s why I said the SUBS are awesome… not the translations ;-)

[kalleboo]

To be fair, official translations are equally notorious - "Jelly Donuts Are My Favorite" and so on

[Ekaros]

I take hyperliteralism over agenda pushing any day. I do not want my foreign media to be entirely rewritten to some other foreign media. Just so that some overly political person can make a point...

[Cthulhu_]

I don't get it - these shows and their subtitles get streamed tens of millions of times across decades, but 4 hours per episode is too expensive?

I mean I guess there's a very long tail of mediocre shows as well that get thousands of streams at best, but still.