This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!
I didn't find an answer skimming: are they actively deleting old good subtitles and replacing with low-quality ones (as the title seems to suggest), have they simply changed their process for new subtitles, not spending as much to make nice ones? If they're actively deleting old good ones, that seems malicious.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.
This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.
It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities
Obviously you probably thought about it but what about rendering the subtitles on top of the video stream? Was there a reason it was not possible (e.g DRMs?)
This kind of softsubbing is what Crunchyroll primarily does, but it has hardsubbed encodes for devices that cannot do softsubbed rendering of the ASS subtitles that Crunchyroll uses. I go over some ways in how they could do away with these hardsubbed variants in the article without any notable loss in primary experience quality.
I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to implement an ASS → PNG renderer (especially considering vibe coding is now a thing). Then, just need to split out subs that can be actual text somehow from the ones that have to be overlays.
Apart from that... surely they could at least keep ASS subs for the players that support it, and serve “fallback” subs for low-end devices?
If you hardsub the video, then you need to have a full copy of the video for every language. That's the opposite of what people want. They want a single textless video source that can then accommodate any internationalization.
The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.
To be more specific, basically all online streaming today is based around the concept of segmented video (where the video is already split into regular X-second chunks). If you only hardsubbed the typesetting while keeping the dialogue softsubbed (which could then be offered in a simpler subtitle format where necessary), you would only need to have multiple copies of the segments that actually feature typesetting. Then you would just construct multiple playlists that use the correct segment variants, and you could make this work basically everywhere.
You can also use the same kind of segment-based playlist approach on Blu-ray if you wanted to, though theoretically you should be able to use the Blu-ray Picture-in-Picture feature to store the typesetting in a separate partially transparent video stream entirely that is then overlaid on top of the clean video during playback.
It's incredibly fragile at the CDN level if deployed at scale for a start.
You'd see playback issues go up by 1000%.
In the nicest possible way, it is pretty clear that this article was written by somebody who has only ever looked at video distribution as a hobbyist and not deploying it at scale to paying customers who quite reasonably get very upset at things not working reliably.
What would be the problems? When I’ve looked into streaming video before (for normal, non ripping reasons), I’ve noticed that most are already playlists of segments. You’d just need to store the segments that are different between versions, which should be better than keeping full separate versions which is what they apparently do currently.
This is just an excuse. There needs to be a hard english sub and then keep other languages can be single video with different text file. Deleting 80% good things only to keep other 20% happy should not be an excuse.
Only english is the most popular and just keep it. Most of the good hard subs are made for english and that is what people want.
Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.
Per the article, on top of this, the Crunchyroll subtitle authoring tools and the Crunchyroll player both use ASS. So the directive to have the “master” copy be the more widespread and limited TTML… means that many new shows are doing ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS conversions! Quite literally the lowest common denominator of shared functionality.
>Yes, it really is called ASS. Its predecessor, SubStation Alpha, went by SSA, and since these formats were developed by enthusiast hobbyists, I believe they couldn’t resist the siren song of a little bit of cheeky naming.
IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.
The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.
That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?
The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.
It's an X*N*N problem: n_videos, bitrates, formats.
Assuming each video in its largest bitrate is... 2gb for example, and assuming S3 is $0.025/gb, that's a nickle per month or let's say $0.50/yr for that video.
Next up is reduced bitrates, assume you go from 2gb to 1gb and finally 500mb. Round up and you're at $1/video.
Now duplicate it to AV1 and MP4, and multiply that by English, French, and Spanish (oh, and let's say Japanese and Chinese too for good measure).
So a single 2gb video goes from $1/yr to $10/yr, and you're not doing "the dumb simple thing" for subtitles which would basically 4x your cost over "commodity subtitling services".
Or "simplify, simplify simplify", you reduce costs (cha-ching!), and become compatible for syndication or redistribution (cha-ching!)
... and they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Except ASS streams really aren't that big and don't have to be stored with each encode. They can just be in a separate file. And this is how cr used to serve them. Before they used hardware drm you could just download all of the separate sub tracks.
You don't need to multiply anything here, except the number of sub streams. One is ass, the other the primitive standards Netflix and other surges use.
Someone else was saying they maintained burn-in subs for devices that didn't handle ASS renderers. Even without accounting for the burn-in versions, using non-standard subs still bumps them off of commodity subtitling services and limits distribution/syndication.
Edit: and to the peer comment regarding S3 vs self host: regardless of 10x cloud cost, it's still 10x volume. Where 1TB local would do, now you need 10TB (10x the cost).
Lots of old CR content was fan subs which may or may not have followed any kind of "best practices". It was also a reason that CR struggled with legitimacy with the studios in the early days. They tried to remove content once a US company licensed a show as way to show they weren't pirates, but the friction was always there.
Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.
Does Netflix really only allow 2 lines of subtitling on screen at a time? That's really stupid.
Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.
Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.
Never used Crunchyroll, but this is a pretty interesting read! Did not finish it yet though.
I see you doing a ton of styling, which makes it a very pleasant reading experience, may I ask what techniques do you use? Is cyan just to replace bold or something else?
The cyan is basically just bold, but also a highlighter. I was using just plain bold initially but started experimenting with it and landed on this. Pairs quite nicely with the pink links, IMO.
> that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low
Would you pirate for better subtitles? Assuming Crunchroll has the legal rights to the content pinned down, that may be the only way to apply legitimate pressure.
Netflix implements "imgsub"[1] - it actually delivers a zipped archive of transparent images to the player. So technically they can pre-render positioned typesetted subtitles on server and render them as images overlay, as long as there's no animated text effects.
In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.
The priority of streaming service is extending their market reach, and I think Crunchyroll itself is facing the same challenge of market reaching.
I think the right solution is trying to get typesetted subtitles, and the end-to-end workflow - creation, packaging, delivery, rendering with adaptation (device capabilities, user preferences, localizations etc) all standardized. A more efficient workflow is needed, so a single source of subtitle is able to generate a set of renditions suitable for different player render capabilities. Chrunchyroll should actively participate in these standard bodies and push for adaption for more features and support in the streaming industry.
Unfortunately, as the link describes, Netflix only makes this available for a very limited set of languages, while everyone else is stuck with the extremely limited text-based standards.
Frankly, those text-based subtitle standards are quite maddening on their own. Netflix's text-based subtitle rendering seems to support a much wider set of TTML features than what it actually allows subtitle providers to use - so if these restrictions were to be slightly relaxed, providers could start offering better subtitles for anime immediately with no additional effort from Netflix.
What Netflix supports on their main website might not be what they care about, though; you used to be able to watch Netflix on the Nintendo Wii, and they probably still have some users on stupidly old smart TVs.
Fast forward to 2025 and BBC's streaming app on ApppleTV only just added subtitles; vastly more powerful hardware but so many restrictions from Apple on how developers use it.
> In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.
Surely if my mid-end phone from 2015 supported everything .ASS has to offer, they could do it either?
In any case... I don’t believe the problem is that Netflix and Crunchyroll have to support low-end devices, it’s that they don’t want to pay $$$ for typesetting. They are big enough now that they don’t have to care, so they don’t – just another example of enshittification.
I wouldn't bet that every smart TV Crunchyroll wants to be available on has more processing power than your phone from 2015 (some of those TVs might be older than that), but yes, it's probably less about hardware capabilities than about platform limitations that make the usual solution of compiling libass into a blob and integrating it into the player not so easy to implement.
In 2008 I was watching fansubbed anime with decent typesetting on a netbook with a shitass-even-for-the-time Atom processor, so I don't buy for one second that this is a device capabilities issue.
> 2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying.
I get that you might not like it, but it sure beats the option you didn't list:
4. Has auto-generated subtitles for the dub that fail in dramatic and distracting ways, especially for proper nouns or any kind of show-specific invented terminology
This is unfortunately the answer - VLC/MPV would allow you to select the dubbed audio and also select the EN-US subtitles that are based on the original audio.
GabeN saying that piracy is first and foremost a service problem is still right on the money.
Netflix is fine so long as you don't live in Japan (I wonder how other countries are). They only give Japanese subtitles for most anime here. Netflix produced anime do have a great breadth of options for subtitles and audio though.
CrunchyRoll did something like that to the Re:Zero dub's captions, and it's a disgrace. Every single proper noun is wrong. It messes up every fantasy item/place/monster/etc name, and can't distinguish between the Rem/Ram/Rom characters. It also has no concept of of which character is talking, and interprets dialogues as singular sentences.
Hianime? They have both dubs and subs at the same time. For non-english subs/dubs there're probably pirate versions too. And yes, subs and dub will be slightly different anyway because dubbers change it sligthly for better flow or lip sync if needed.
As someone who has spent decidedly too many hours in Aegisubs to create at least somewhat decent subtitles, for projects which have long ago gone the way of the DMCA, these changes feel quite insulting. ASS has been a perfectly cromulent subtitle format and should've been widely adopted.
Though on a related topic, on Netflix it is not just the subtitling that is bad, the translations are awful too. They are cutting every corner so hard I fear they might become a circle.
It's only a matter of time before the incorrect translations become standard english, and the correct translations become "formal" or even "archaisms".
We're truly seeded our language to a bunch of crappy algorithms...
Netflix dumps this task to third-party vendors. Theoretically, they should vet and verify the work quality but it's probably a race to the very bottom.
This article badly needs an editor. Even though it's a topic I'm very interested in (and with the perspective of being semi-fluent in Japanese), it's so rambling and visually messy that I gave up halfway through.
There was also a discussion somewhere where they switched off the OSS subtitling software they were using onto a commercial product that doesn't implement many of the features (mostly typesetting features) of the previous software.
Netflix has started showing simplified subtitles recently. We watch with subtitles on and these inaccurate subtitles are infuriating. It's part of their "second screen" strategy I think - people are on their phones while they're watching, so don't make them try too hard to read the subs.
> With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services.
Couldn't they also provide Amazon and Netflix a version of the video stream with baked in subtitles?
> Netflix requires a non-subtitled version of the content. Netflix defines “non-subtitled” as the presence of main titles, end credits, location call-outs, and other supportive/creative text, but no burned-in subtitled dialogue, regardless of the language in the primary video.
> Global packaging requires component asset packages to be delivered with a semi-textless video file that can be localized with discrete subtitles and audio dubbing.
> Also known as “Texted with no subtitles,” “Textless with main, ends, and graphic text,” and “Non-subtitled”, Prime Video defines semi-textless as a video master without burned-in subtitles, regardless of the language.
Those vendors likely won’t accept hardsubs, because it would mean 10 video files for 10 languages, instead of soft subs where you get 1 video file 10 languages (10 different subtitle files).
But here’s the other thing - CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors. You can save a master subtitle file in whatever format you want.
> CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors.
This is exactly what CR was doing for the past couple years, though you can't just automatically convert a fancy ASS file with typesetting into the limited kind of TTML subtitles that general streaming services expect, which is why Crunchyroll has been paying its subtitling staff extra to make those conversions semi-manually.
Though Crunchyroll could definitely improve its standard ASS workflows in ways that would make that conversion process significantly more automated with minimal extra effort on the subtitling staff's part. It wouldn't even be that hard, I've done something like that myself when I had to mangle ASS into limited WebVTT for some streaming work I did at one point.
> This is exactly what CR was doing for the past couple years, though you can't just automatically convert a fancy ASS file with typesetting into the limited kind of TTML subtitles that general streaming services expect, which is why Crunchyroll has been paying its subtitling staff extra to make those conversions semi-manually.
Surely automatically converting into a lesser subtitle format is a much better use of AI than machine transcription. I disagree with the idea that "you can't just automatically convert" at today's technology level.
A similar issue has been plaguing the manga industry since "The Great Scanlator Purge" that took place a few years ago, leaving only the "official" Viz media-contracted translators in the wake of the ruins. For some reason, this change came with a general unwillingness on the translators part to correct, or translate, concepts that virtually all fan translators would've been happy to do.
Here's some examples (there are many more):
1) the explanation of puns and hidden meanings in the kanji used to describe names, locations, special abilities, jokes, which honorifics are being used currently (if any), etc. of which there are usually many. Understanding/being aware of this context used to be absolutely vital to the experience of reading manga.
2) there's a relatively new manga called "Versus", in which humans from parallel earths, in parallel universes all merge into the same universe, and their planets are also merged together. In the english version, Viz translates one of those worlds as "Indignia", which doesn't mean anything. However, the Japanese for this world is "怒ど神しん界かい" (Doshinkai), which is literally interpreted as "World of the Angry God", or "Mad God World". They took it upon themselves to make similar changes for all the other worlds, obscuring their original meanings as intended by the author... why? Beats me. Now, one could make the argument that "Mad God World" doesn't sound good in english, so the Viz translators change is an improvement, which is not unreasonable. However, any half-decent fan translator would've simply left a footnote like "the literal Japanese interpretation is X; I changed it to Indignia because...". Problem solved! Don't just retcon things because you feel like it without explaining yourself. And if you won't explain yourself, then leave it as is.
3) english One Piece readers often have no idea just how many things are lost in translation; One Piece is filled to the brim with puns, double-entendre's, and foreshadowing, which has always been a significant part of its appeal, and is now nowhere to be found via the official providers.
4) Physical signs, such as things written on buildings, on somebody's clothing, or even on a stop sign, are usually not translated.
5) cover pages! You wouldn't know it anymore, but manga often has cover pages (often officially colorized) with extra comments and tidbits from the authors. Fans would include these pages in their scanlations. Viz pretends they don't exist.
I can only imagine the thought process of whoever's making these decisions at Viz (or its parent company Shueisha) resembles something like "westerners don't care about that stuff. Stop wasting precious time and resources trying to explain it". They don't quite seem to understand how badly they have diluted the manga reading experience in the west, especially for those of us that grew up reading this stuff, way before it reached mainstream popularity.
Footnotes and endnotes always carry a hidden burden: They interrupt the reading flow and direct the mind of the reader away from the characters and the plot and towards linguistics. If the translator follows a philosophy that prioritizes the subjective experience of the reader over a deeper understanding of the material, this "mode switch" is something he will try to avoid.
Personally, I tend to agree that a need to explain a translation represents a failure to come up with a satisfying equivalent in the target language.
The key to good endnotes is to make them a nice bonus for those interested rather than required reading for everyone. Basically, make the main text work on its own, then get into the weeds of translation details separately. It's the best of both worlds, though admittedly requires quite a bit of extra work to pull off.
Ohh, that's probably it. I had considered whether or not they were trying to incorporate indignant/indignation in some fashion when they came up with it, but never made the connection with "ia" being "land of".
Still, that's a bit complicated because it's missing something essential that the author had originally intended. It's like replacing "Mad God World" with "Unjust World"... well, they're very much all unjust, have to be more specific.
This is even more of a reason why they really should be explaining these self-insert puns to the readers, since they invented them. It's a nice touch is all, and fan translators made that (among the other things I mentioned) a standard practice.
Yeah, ASS rendering was a big problem for me when I was making some online subtitling software. I ended up on using https://github.com/ThaUnknown/jassub + using Mediabunny to render a "subtitles" media track on top rendered on a canvas.
How long did it take you to learn a language to arrive at a level where you can watch a movie/TV program with tons of idioms and cultural references and easily understand > 95% of it?
Tried watching some CR content on Amazon Prime. Unusable. The subs are garbage. Better quality from Netflix which is a freaking random host not even anime focused. Had to cancel the CR sub. Literally unwatchable
It has been a loooong time since that. I'm pretty happy they not only went the legal route, but also were successful doing it while retaining a relatively large library. They could have failed and shut down. Remember that back then, Japanese producers didn't take overseas demand seriously, many of them don't even know that it existed or that there were many fansubs.
They basically infringed copyright and ripped off Japanese animators, and took the legal route so they can extract more money… sounds like your run of the mill Taiwanese CD rip business back in the 90s..
The mass market has already responded that they want dubbed anime. It doesn't make sense to invest into subtitles. Maybe it's time to accept that you are not the target audience anymore of western anime distributors.
Quality typesetting is just as important for dubs as it is for subs, actually! All that on-screen text will be there regardless of which audio track you are using.
It baffles me how this is a thing. Not just regarding anime but any non-English language show or film. I've never come across a dub that wasn't at least five times worse in every way.
After hearing it from multiple different people, I've discovered that apparently many people are watching video content in background. And I don't mean music or podcasts style content with no graphics, but actual TV shows, anime, movies etc. And apparently they do that while doing something else demanding attention, like work, gaming, reading(!) etc. I have never managed such a feat, but it seems it is popular nowadays. That may be the reason, I guess.
Very odd. I definitely do that with podcasts and miscellaneous YouTube videos (like the latest LegalEagle video or whatever) but the idea of doing it with a show/anime/movie is unthinkable to me.
I like watching anime, as opposed to reading anime, and I don't know Japanese. Every dub I've watched has been fine for me, I haven't noticed it being bad. Sure, if I knew Japanese well enough to keep up with the dialog, and watched both versions, I'd probably notice a difference, but for me, it comes down to whether I want to listen to an anime in English, or read an anime in English. I also sometimes want to do something while watching anime that means I can't devote my entire time to looking at the screen, and I don't want to have to keep rewinding so I can read what I missed. With an English or dubbed show, I can do things like put it on a second monitor while I'm playing a game, but that doesn't work with a subbed show. Yes, I know the solution is just to learn Japanese, but I've always struggled with learning languages and I barely have time to watch anime these days, let alone learn another language
But... people who only speak English and no other languages watch shows and films in other languages all the time. That's what the subtitles are for. I would guess 99% of anime watchers who listen in the original audio don't know any Japanese.
I'm sorry but it's so strange to me. To me it's like putting on your favorite song, but it's in Spanish so it's dubbed by a much worse singer who sings it in English.
I also don't understand why one would watch a film or show on one screen while playing a game or something on another screen. Either the film or show is so boring and trite that you need something else to distract you - in which case why ever watch it at all? - or you're missing out by not focusing on something good.
If it's a 4-hour podcast or a random infotainment YouTube video, sure, it makes sense to put that on while playing a game or programming or whatever. But an actual polished show? I don't get it.
If something is my favourite song, I will listen it in the language where it is my favourite song. I generally don't have favourite songs in other languages.
I have ADHD. I struggle to concentrate on anything. I would rather have the ability to be distracted for a bit and still be able to follow the show, than have to rewind it constantly or force myself to concentrate on something (which my brain doesn't enjoy). I don't need a distraction from a boring show, I need something else to keep me engaged.
I'm not sure why you are putting infotainment youtube videos in their own category, I treat them just the same. If it has visuals that I want to see, I'll put it on my second monitor and watch it while I'm doing something else. Not while programming, because that requires its own focus, or a narrative game, but more a sandbox game like minecraft or factorio
Dubs can be good in shows where there's a lot of fast dialog; it's hard for subtitles to keep up. The loquacious protagonist of Steins;Gate benefits _significantly_ from a dub, for example. I watched the show twice when I realized the subs had skipped half his dialog.
Period accents are another place dubs can have an advantage, particularly in shows like Baccano! where the characters are ostensibly speaking English to start with.
It can also vary by localization studio. I didn't care for the English Spy x Family dub, but to my ear the Chinese dub is just as good as the original Japanese. For some reason the actors in many English dubs seem to have a hard time "really going for it" when a scene requires an over-the-top outburst of emotions.
Apologies if this seems snarky or rude but I would be very, very, very surprised if any part of the dub for Steins;Gate sounds better than any part of the original audio.
That number varies depending on who you ask, with CR being one of the sources that claims a heavier share of dub watchers, but half their business is now dubbing/localization (by way of Funimation merger) so it may not be the most objective source.
Either way it’s bad business to throw some of your most loyal customers under the bus, regardless of how big of a portion they represent. Dub viewers tend to be more casual and fickle and will largely evaporate once the zeitgeist of popular media moves from anime onto something else.
I am saying that they can get away with lower quality subtitles in such places because the average user does not care that much about it. The target audience is not the same as when they first started doing subtitles and it doesn't make business sense anymore. Anime is not special. If the rest of the video streaming industry can get away with simpler subtitles, then Crunchyroll can too.
People that are into anime are into anime because it is special. JoJo's Bizzare Adventure is cool when Marvel movies aren't because JoJo was made by one mangaka and a Marvel movie is made by a committee of committees.
As someone who doesn't watch anime, this article reminds me of when a coworker sends a screenshot with zero context and says something like "is this supposed to be like this?" Maybe it's a spectrum thing, but I find it beyond lazy and insulting.
In the article, there's zero explanation of what the actual issue is, at least in the first few paragraphs. It just seems to say the subtitles are bad with some examples and puts the burden on the reader to determine why.
Is the issue the subtitle's location on the screen ? Contrast or font? Quality of translations? Again, it's probably a spectrum thing, but without any context I find it overwhelming and overstimulating.
The article is just long, and rambly, clearly from someone on the inside of the issue, not targeting complete outsiders.
The gist of it is this: Subtitles were a huge part of anime culture.
1. Subtitles were great at one point. Demonstration is this video: https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/klk-underwater-1.mp4 The English subtitles are so well integrated, that they feel like they are part of the original scene. But actually, they are added in post!
In these times, great subtitles were done by a vibrant, legally grey, dedicated subculture. Subtitling, at this point, is about craftsmanship, and appreciation of culture. Anime at this point is a niche, even though becoming more and more popular in the West.
Anime at this point is mainstream in the West. This is the corporate version of the same, where subtitling is seen as a problem to be solved as cheaply as possible. The culture around it seems to be dissolved, as the subtitles are now determined by corporate issues, not craftsmen, or connoisseurs.
Well... the very first paragraph of the article does say with highlighting how "the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive". And then it shows visual examples of the new bad quality and gives comparison screenshots demonstrating good quality shortly after.
A small suggestion: ask a friend of yours who don't regularly watch anime to read your article for 20 seconds, and see if they can explain what it is about.
I spent quite some hours on CR, yet it was maybe until 30 seconds later before I realized what the "nosedive" refers to exactly. In fact, I kept thinking "quality" refers to "translation quality" and I was puzzled I could not see obvious issues.
It doesn't need to be that. Anyone given side-by-side screenshots without additional contexts should immediately tell you what's happening, and I've read lots of blog posts like that.
More specifically, the article provides 4 bad screenshots at fitst. I actually went through 3 of them. I kind of guessed what you meant but wasn't sure. Then there is another gallery of good ones. Why? Just provide good vs bad at the top, explicitly explain what's the expectation, and if needed, provide more examples. That'll be 200% better than this.
The article says there's a nosedive. But by what standard(s)? See the questions I already posted in my original response.
Both the "good" and "bad" quality examples contain subtitles with no discernible difference. All examples contain legible subtitles. So where's the "nosedive"?
There's clearly some anime-specific context and nuance that is NOT communicated with context-less screencaps.
Perhaps the article wasn't written for someone unfamiliar with anime, and I'm not meant to understand, but it would be helpful to have the difference explained. Not to mention the improved accessibility for screen readers or folks with sensory processing issues like myself. At a minimum, marking up the image would be helpful. Circle things. Arrows. Help me understand, don't drop me into unfamiliar territory and leave me to guess.
The difference is that when there is text on the original video material, in the good examples the translations are positioned in the proximity of the original texts, and styled similarly, which makes it easier to understand what is translation of what, and generally improves immersion.
In the bad examples, the translations for the texts are mixed with the lines the characters are speaking, which makes it harder to follow.
I agree, I didn't see that much of a difference between the good quality and bad quality examples. Is it the fonts, or the translation, or the placement of the text?
Thanks for the response. I was feeling a little crazy. The rest of responses to my comment so far are either dismissive or don't seem to understand what I was trying to communicate, but you seem to have the same issue I have.
The article definitely could be improved. I kind of guessed what the author to say at the beginning, but it was not really clear until much later. Had the author shown a side-by-side comparison at the beginning, it would have helped.
In what way? They both have subtitles. The issue with "quality" is not clear to at least me, and I'm guessing that's because I don't watch crunchyroll or much anime.
I also grew up where 90% of TV was subtitled (Finland, where, incidentally, the author of the article is from too), but I find the "good" anime subtitles better – for the simple reason that they make it easier to see which translation corresponds to which text.
Note that anime has generally more text on the screen that many western shows, so I think subtitling practices of some subtitle-heavy western countries, while informed and proven by time, don't necessarily represent optimal practices for anime.
But I think you are correct about the subtitle preferences of anime fans. The "general wisdom" of audiovisual translations is that great translations manage to convey the important point very succinctly, and a professional translator knows how to shave off the fluff to achieve subtitles that are quick to read and "fade in the background" in the sense that you don't even realize that you are reading them.
Ultimately what one would really want is not better subtitles but a localized version with on screen text replacement by overlay. The kanjis would simply disappear. A lot of shows were successfully translated and localized in the 80's and 90's in various countries, there is no reason we couldn't do that anymore. The only reasons they aren't doing it anymore is cost reduction.
"...I find it beyond lazy and insulting." Using the words "lazy" and "insulting" in this way sounds rude, insulting, entitled and arrogant.
They are very negative words and it is rude to use them when referring to someone else's work or things similar to that work.
TFA is certainly not lazy (and it's very obvious to an NT that a LOT of effort went into it).
We should ideally all be producing content in an accessible way when possible. But doing so is difficult and is a learned skill set.
Making things accessible to NDs can be difficult because normal written English heavily utilizes things that NDs can be unable to intuitively process.
There is also often a trade-off involved in making work accessible. Aesthetically specifically, artistically generally, or in terms of brevity or convenience to others.
Your inability to read the context clues and process the visual information is your inability to do something. A thing that the vast majority of people can do. TFA clearly wasn't intended as insulting and your interpretation of it as insulting is unfortunate.
Your very specific needs are not the needs of the vast majority of people who are reading it. If you cannot see the difference in subtitles between the two sets of examples and tell that one is bad, then you are not the main target audience.
The new generation of subtitles are bland and poorly integrated with the context.
Previous subtitles were attractive and well integrated, with colours, typefaces, orientations and locations picked to best suit the content. Everything (including background signs) are translated with attention paid to details.
The article uses a lot of visual examples to explain this. It is written in a way that is intuitive and easy to digest for most people. I can literally skim this and understand it.
If you wished to write your comment in a way that wasn't rude to the OP, you could provide the same important information without using negative language:
"I am autistic and don't watch anime. I've read the first few paragraphs and I'm finding it overwhelming and overstimulating to precisely identify the problem.
What is the exact issue? The subtitle's location on the screen? Contrast or font? Quality of translations?"
Relevant parts of TFA that explain are:
>...translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom. Lots of on-screen text is even left straight up untranslated.
>The amount of it varies from series to series, but almost every anime out there makes use of on-screen text at one point or another, with some featuring downright ridiculous amounts of signs (what on-screen text is called for short). With all this on-screen text, it is also very common for there to be text visible on the screen potentially in multiple positions, even when characters are speaking.
>At bare minimum, when subtitling anime, you should be able to do overlaps (multiple lines of text on the screen at the same time) and positioning (the ability to freely place subtitles anywhere on the screen).
>Overlaps and positioning are really just the bare necessities for dealing with on-screen text in anime though – ideally, you should also be able to use different fonts, colors, animate text in various ways, etc. Making use of all these possibilities is an art unto itself, and this art of on-screen text localization is commonly referred to as typesetting. Typesetting is important even when dubbing anime, as all that on-screen text is going to be there in the video all the same!
>[Crunchyroll started] mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services [Netflix and Amazon Prime].
Seems like you were so quick to jump to the defense of the author (who likely doesn't need your white knighting) you completely misunderstood or are misrepresenting what I said was lazy and insulting which was the hypothetical coworker example, and NOT the article itself.
With that in mind, I don't have the energy to read the rest of your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to respond, and I'm sorry if my phrasing wasn't clear. I'm sure it's a great article, and I meant in no way to insult the author.
I'm just not equipped to gather much meaning from it the way the information is presented.
This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!
I didn't find an answer skimming: are they actively deleting old good subtitles and replacing with low-quality ones (as the title seems to suggest), have they simply changed their process for new subtitles, not spending as much to make nice ones? If they're actively deleting old good ones, that seems malicious.
I did find instances of them actively deleting old subtitles and replacing them with lower quality ones in the back catalog, yes. Which seems indicative of Crunchyroll wanting to eventually get rid of good subtitles altogether.
What possible incentive could they have for doing this?
I worked at crunchyroll.
Keeping the "hard subs" content is a lot of videos as the subtitles were encoded into the video stream.
This makes CDNs and other systems more difficult to utilize because we have a ton of video streams with just caption changes as opposed to just the Japanese audio source + caption files.
It's one of those things that doesn't seem that problematic till you include all the video_qualities to support streaming bandwith. So you also get a #hardSubLanguages * #videoQualities
Obviously you probably thought about it but what about rendering the subtitles on top of the video stream? Was there a reason it was not possible (e.g DRMs?)
This kind of softsubbing is what Crunchyroll primarily does, but it has hardsubbed encodes for devices that cannot do softsubbed rendering of the ASS subtitles that Crunchyroll uses. I go over some ways in how they could do away with these hardsubbed variants in the article without any notable loss in primary experience quality.
They could borrow a trick from Netflix mentioned elsewhere in this thread: https://netflixsubs.app/docs/netflix/features/imgsub
I’m pretty sure it’s not too hard to implement an ASS → PNG renderer (especially considering vibe coding is now a thing). Then, just need to split out subs that can be actual text somehow from the ones that have to be overlays.
Apart from that... surely they could at least keep ASS subs for the players that support it, and serve “fallback” subs for low-end devices?
ASS can have frame-by-frame animation IIRC, so a stream of PNGs could end up being quite high bitrate with high complexity files
It is harder than you think and will break on many more devices than you think.
If you hardsub the video, then you need to have a full copy of the video for every language. That's the opposite of what people want. They want a single textless video source that can then accommodate any internationalization.
The article claims that you can slice up the video and only use language-specific hardsubs for parts that need it. I'd be interested if there are technical reasons that can't be done.
Technically it's possible.
We did do inlaid server-side ads that way for a while.
IT just takes an excessive amount of work.
The real solution is just the full support of ASS/TTML/VTT subtitles on all platforms. Usually smart devices are kind of only partially supported.
For instance - casting to a chromecast fallsback to SRT.
To be more specific, basically all online streaming today is based around the concept of segmented video (where the video is already split into regular X-second chunks). If you only hardsubbed the typesetting while keeping the dialogue softsubbed (which could then be offered in a simpler subtitle format where necessary), you would only need to have multiple copies of the segments that actually feature typesetting. Then you would just construct multiple playlists that use the correct segment variants, and you could make this work basically everywhere.
You can also use the same kind of segment-based playlist approach on Blu-ray if you wanted to, though theoretically you should be able to use the Blu-ray Picture-in-Picture feature to store the typesetting in a separate partially transparent video stream entirely that is then overlaid on top of the clean video during playback.
It's incredibly fragile at the CDN level if deployed at scale for a start.
You'd see playback issues go up by 1000%.
In the nicest possible way, it is pretty clear that this article was written by somebody who has only ever looked at video distribution as a hobbyist and not deploying it at scale to paying customers who quite reasonably get very upset at things not working reliably.
What would be the problems? When I’ve looked into streaming video before (for normal, non ripping reasons), I’ve noticed that most are already playlists of segments. You’d just need to store the segments that are different between versions, which should be better than keeping full separate versions which is what they apparently do currently.
This is just an excuse. There needs to be a hard english sub and then keep other languages can be single video with different text file. Deleting 80% good things only to keep other 20% happy should not be an excuse.
Only english is the most popular and just keep it. Most of the good hard subs are made for english and that is what people want.
Guess how well supported soft subs are on smartTVs etc? :)
It's really tough when you need to scale these things across 20 platforms.
What reason would there be for removing old, loved subtitles? Licensing fees?
Crunchyroll is currently using a subtitle rendering stack that is highly unique in the media industry, being based on the Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle format. It seems that the current executives would like to replace this unique stack with something more "industry standard" (and far less capable), but they can't do that as long as their back catalog is full of ASS subtitles - if they just switched stacks without doing anything else, all of these back catalog subtitles would just stop working completely. Which is why in order to perform such a stack switch, all old subtitles would need to be replaced with worse ones to make them compatible with the less capable new stack.
Per the article, on top of this, the Crunchyroll subtitle authoring tools and the Crunchyroll player both use ASS. So the directive to have the “master” copy be the more widespread and limited TTML… means that many new shows are doing ASS-to-TTML-to-ASS conversions! Quite literally the lowest common denominator of shared functionality.
Well the subtitles are ASS, alright, I'll give em that!
who in the world thought that a .ass file extension would be a good idea, sigh.
https://fileformats.fandom.com/wiki/SubStation_Alpha
From submitted article:
>Yes, it really is called ASS. Its predecessor, SubStation Alpha, went by SSA, and since these formats were developed by enthusiast hobbyists, I believe they couldn’t resist the siren song of a little bit of cheeky naming.
IIUC, it comes down to simplifying playback/subtitle rendering to the lowest common denominator among the various western streaming platforms.
The good/old subtitles in the ASS format required a more complex playback system than what Netflix/Hulu (and maybe blueray players) currently offer. This could be worked around by burning the subs into the video stream, but then you need to keep separate copies of your (large) video files for each subtitled language.
That doesn't seem like it'd be such a huge problem to me, but what do I know?
The post does a good job explaining the effective monopoly system at play that prevents real competition to provide any pressure to improve or maintain the prior quality.
It's an X*N*N problem: n_videos, bitrates, formats.
Assuming each video in its largest bitrate is... 2gb for example, and assuming S3 is $0.025/gb, that's a nickle per month or let's say $0.50/yr for that video.
Next up is reduced bitrates, assume you go from 2gb to 1gb and finally 500mb. Round up and you're at $1/video.
Now duplicate it to AV1 and MP4, and multiply that by English, French, and Spanish (oh, and let's say Japanese and Chinese too for good measure).
So a single 2gb video goes from $1/yr to $10/yr, and you're not doing "the dumb simple thing" for subtitles which would basically 4x your cost over "commodity subtitling services".
Or "simplify, simplify simplify", you reduce costs (cha-ching!), and become compatible for syndication or redistribution (cha-ching!)
... and they would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Except ASS streams really aren't that big and don't have to be stored with each encode. They can just be in a separate file. And this is how cr used to serve them. Before they used hardware drm you could just download all of the separate sub tracks.
You don't need to multiply anything here, except the number of sub streams. One is ass, the other the primitive standards Netflix and other surges use.
Someone else was saying they maintained burn-in subs for devices that didn't handle ASS renderers. Even without accounting for the burn-in versions, using non-standard subs still bumps them off of commodity subtitling services and limits distribution/syndication.
Edit: and to the peer comment regarding S3 vs self host: regardless of 10x cloud cost, it's still 10x volume. Where 1TB local would do, now you need 10TB (10x the cost).
S3 is >100x more expensive than hosting it yourself. You shouldn't argue about things being expensive using cloud prices.
Lots of old CR content was fan subs which may or may not have followed any kind of "best practices". It was also a reason that CR struggled with legitimacy with the studios in the early days. They tried to remove content once a US company licensed a show as way to show they weren't pirates, but the friction was always there.
Without knowing for sure, a conceivable strategy would be making it so that users who don't know that "good subs" can exist more readily accept "bad subs" as the standard. Same playbook as Google lobotomizing search and the index that search can access because that traditional search product is more efficacious than Gemini, which Google is trying to push on users.
Does Netflix really only allow 2 lines of subtitling on screen at a time? That's really stupid.
Also I remember when CR killed the Kodi plugin, that irked me enough to stick to DVD imports + fan subs for a while.
Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show, it got me to resubscribe to CR after not having subbed for years. If they screw with its subs I'm gonna root for this mess to bankrupt CR for good.
See for yourself: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...
> 4. Line Treatment
> 2 lines maximum
> Ruri Rocks
This could be the toughest show to sub with all the geological explaination and jargon the adapter must be familiar with.
Adding to that the line limit, The bar to cross sounds quite hard.
Not to mention the whole informative slideshow between the scene.Can't imagine how can they achieve that with only 2 lines.
Do you know if there are plans to dub it at some point? I was looking forward to watching it, but I prefer dubs to subs (yes I know I'm weird)
> Finally, Ruri Rocks is such a good show
I only had time to skim the article, so adding this show to my to-do list has been my main takeaway so far.
Never used Crunchyroll, but this is a pretty interesting read! Did not finish it yet though.
I see you doing a ton of styling, which makes it a very pleasant reading experience, may I ask what techniques do you use? Is cyan just to replace bold or something else?
The cyan is basically just bold, but also a highlighter. I was using just plain bold initially but started experimenting with it and landed on this. Pairs quite nicely with the pink links, IMO.
> that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low
Would you pirate for better subtitles? Assuming Crunchroll has the legal rights to the content pinned down, that may be the only way to apply legitimate pressure.
Irony is Crunchyroll, started as a pirate service.
So did Spotify.
Netflix implements "imgsub"[1] - it actually delivers a zipped archive of transparent images to the player. So technically they can pre-render positioned typesetted subtitles on server and render them as images overlay, as long as there's no animated text effects.
In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.
The priority of streaming service is extending their market reach, and I think Crunchyroll itself is facing the same challenge of market reaching.
I think the right solution is trying to get typesetted subtitles, and the end-to-end workflow - creation, packaging, delivery, rendering with adaptation (device capabilities, user preferences, localizations etc) all standardized. A more efficient workflow is needed, so a single source of subtitle is able to generate a set of renditions suitable for different player render capabilities. Chrunchyroll should actively participate in these standard bodies and push for adaption for more features and support in the streaming industry.
[1]: https://netflixsubs.app/docs/netflix/features/imgsub
Unfortunately, as the link describes, Netflix only makes this available for a very limited set of languages, while everyone else is stuck with the extremely limited text-based standards.
Frankly, those text-based subtitle standards are quite maddening on their own. Netflix's text-based subtitle rendering seems to support a much wider set of TTML features than what it actually allows subtitle providers to use - so if these restrictions were to be slightly relaxed, providers could start offering better subtitles for anime immediately with no additional effort from Netflix.
What Netflix supports on their main website might not be what they care about, though; you used to be able to watch Netflix on the Nintendo Wii, and they probably still have some users on stupidly old smart TVs.
Also fun fact - subtitles did not work on the Wii at all if you were running a video streaming service!
The BBC spent literally years trying to engineering something that did not result in it being unable to playback video smoothly and failed.
Fast forward to 2025 and BBC's streaming app on ApppleTV only just added subtitles; vastly more powerful hardware but so many restrictions from Apple on how developers use it.
> on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles.
So render them only on high end devices? Computers allow making dynamic choices.
> In general, streaming services have to ensure maximum compatibility when playing their contents on all kinds of devices - high end and low end. For which on low end device it could be very resource constraining to render typesetted subtitles. There are other platforms where all video playback have to be managed by the platform system frameworks with limited format support, and streaming services can't do much about it.
Surely if my mid-end phone from 2015 supported everything .ASS has to offer, they could do it either?
In any case... I don’t believe the problem is that Netflix and Crunchyroll have to support low-end devices, it’s that they don’t want to pay $$$ for typesetting. They are big enough now that they don’t have to care, so they don’t – just another example of enshittification.
I wouldn't bet that every smart TV Crunchyroll wants to be available on has more processing power than your phone from 2015 (some of those TVs might be older than that), but yes, it's probably less about hardware capabilities than about platform limitations that make the usual solution of compiling libass into a blob and integrating it into the player not so easy to implement.
In 2008 I was watching fansubbed anime with decent typesetting on a netbook with a shitass-even-for-the-time Atom processor, so I don't buy for one second that this is a device capabilities issue.
It's so hard finding dubbed anime WITH subtitles. Like actually ridiculously hard.
My wife is deaf and I like dubbed so I can use my laptop while we chill but she literally needs subtitles so it's super annoying when a show either
1. Has no subtitles for dubbed.
2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying.
3. Has subtitles for some episodes but none for others seemingly randomly.
Lack of closed captions and dubtitles are definitely very real issues as well, though this article is solely focused on subtitles.
> 2. Their subtitles are just the subbed version's subtitles which are drastically different from what the dubbed VAs are actually saying.
I get that you might not like it, but it sure beats the option you didn't list:
4. Has auto-generated subtitles for the dub that fail in dramatic and distracting ways, especially for proper nouns or any kind of show-specific invented terminology
Whilst sometimes distracting, I prefer auto-generated subtitles to none at all
at this point you're probably better off going to a torrent site and search for 'dual-audio'
This is unfortunately the answer - VLC/MPV would allow you to select the dubbed audio and also select the EN-US subtitles that are based on the original audio.
GabeN saying that piracy is first and foremost a service problem is still right on the money.
I was pretty happy with all the animes produced by Netflix I watched ; they had a good choice of both audio and subs
Netflix is fine so long as you don't live in Japan (I wonder how other countries are). They only give Japanese subtitles for most anime here. Netflix produced anime do have a great breadth of options for subtitles and audio though.
If you ever need to hack some subs by yourself, whisper.cpp can output .srt files and you can run the small or medium models even on modest hardware.
CrunchyRoll did something like that to the Re:Zero dub's captions, and it's a disgrace. Every single proper noun is wrong. It messes up every fantasy item/place/monster/etc name, and can't distinguish between the Rem/Ram/Rom characters. It also has no concept of of which character is talking, and interprets dialogues as singular sentences.
None of the models I've seen can actually do proper timing. It's all idiotic.
I've seen it with a few pirate releases that have two subtitle tracks for the same language, one being the dub.
Gaben proven right yet again.
Hianime? They have both dubs and subs at the same time. For non-english subs/dubs there're probably pirate versions too. And yes, subs and dub will be slightly different anyway because dubbers change it sligthly for better flow or lip sync if needed.
As someone who has spent decidedly too many hours in Aegisubs to create at least somewhat decent subtitles, for projects which have long ago gone the way of the DMCA, these changes feel quite insulting. ASS has been a perfectly cromulent subtitle format and should've been widely adopted.
Though on a related topic, on Netflix it is not just the subtitling that is bad, the translations are awful too. They are cutting every corner so hard I fear they might become a circle.
Sort of unrelated, but has anyone else noticed that there are a lot of subtitling errors in netflix shows recently? Two I noticed yesterday:
"natural world" -> "national world"
"cede power" -> "seed power"
I guess they're just machine transcribing it without oversight now?
Yes. Even in their kinda flagship title right now, A House of Dynamite:
[14:08] "I'm told high, Jerry." -> "I'm told… Hi, Jerry." (in response to being asked "What's your level of confidence on that?")
I always wonder why they don't have a way to upload the shooting script as a starting point so they could then make changes from there.
It's only a matter of time before the incorrect translations become standard english, and the correct translations become "formal" or even "archaisms".
We're truly seeded our language to a bunch of crappy algorithms...
Netflix dumps this task to third-party vendors. Theoretically, they should vet and verify the work quality but it's probably a race to the very bottom.
Welcome to the future! Do you feel disrupted yet?
This article badly needs an editor. Even though it's a topic I'm very interested in (and with the perspective of being semi-fluent in Japanese), it's so rambling and visually messy that I gave up halfway through.
Most streaming companies are forgetting what they were competing with when they started out.
Arr, well, ‘tis high time they be rememberin’!
Relevant discussion from a previous post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45497900
There was also a discussion somewhere where they switched off the OSS subtitling software they were using onto a commercial product that doesn't implement many of the features (mostly typesetting features) of the previous software.
The linked article here goes over all of that in great detail!
Netflix has started showing simplified subtitles recently. We watch with subtitles on and these inaccurate subtitles are infuriating. It's part of their "second screen" strategy I think - people are on their phones while they're watching, so don't make them try too hard to read the subs.
> With such typesetting-hostile standards to deal with, Crunchyroll had basically two choices for how to make sublicensing to Amazon and Netflix work with their existing subtitles that feature actual typesetting: Either 1) try to negotiate with the services for permission to make use of more TTML capabilities (that the subtitle renderers of said services should already support!) or 2) start mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services.
Couldn't they also provide Amazon and Netflix a version of the video stream with baked in subtitles?
Both services explicitly disallow this by default in their delivery specifications, unfortunately.
Netflix: https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215...
> Netflix requires a non-subtitled version of the content. Netflix defines “non-subtitled” as the presence of main titles, end credits, location call-outs, and other supportive/creative text, but no burned-in subtitled dialogue, regardless of the language in the primary video.
Amazon: https://videocentral.amazon.com/support/delivery-experience/...
> Video
> Global packaging requires component asset packages to be delivered with a semi-textless video file that can be localized with discrete subtitles and audio dubbing.
> Also known as “Texted with no subtitles,” “Textless with main, ends, and graphic text,” and “Non-subtitled”, Prime Video defines semi-textless as a video master without burned-in subtitles, regardless of the language.
Those vendors likely won’t accept hardsubs, because it would mean 10 video files for 10 languages, instead of soft subs where you get 1 video file 10 languages (10 different subtitle files).
But here’s the other thing - CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors. You can save a master subtitle file in whatever format you want.
> CR could have used the ASS subs on their website and given the less-dynamic sub files to their vendors.
This is exactly what CR was doing for the past couple years, though you can't just automatically convert a fancy ASS file with typesetting into the limited kind of TTML subtitles that general streaming services expect, which is why Crunchyroll has been paying its subtitling staff extra to make those conversions semi-manually.
Though Crunchyroll could definitely improve its standard ASS workflows in ways that would make that conversion process significantly more automated with minimal extra effort on the subtitling staff's part. It wouldn't even be that hard, I've done something like that myself when I had to mangle ASS into limited WebVTT for some streaming work I did at one point.
> This is exactly what CR was doing for the past couple years, though you can't just automatically convert a fancy ASS file with typesetting into the limited kind of TTML subtitles that general streaming services expect, which is why Crunchyroll has been paying its subtitling staff extra to make those conversions semi-manually.
Surely automatically converting into a lesser subtitle format is a much better use of AI than machine transcription. I disagree with the idea that "you can't just automatically convert" at today's technology level.
A similar issue has been plaguing the manga industry since "The Great Scanlator Purge" that took place a few years ago, leaving only the "official" Viz media-contracted translators in the wake of the ruins. For some reason, this change came with a general unwillingness on the translators part to correct, or translate, concepts that virtually all fan translators would've been happy to do.
Here's some examples (there are many more):
1) the explanation of puns and hidden meanings in the kanji used to describe names, locations, special abilities, jokes, which honorifics are being used currently (if any), etc. of which there are usually many. Understanding/being aware of this context used to be absolutely vital to the experience of reading manga.
2) there's a relatively new manga called "Versus", in which humans from parallel earths, in parallel universes all merge into the same universe, and their planets are also merged together. In the english version, Viz translates one of those worlds as "Indignia", which doesn't mean anything. However, the Japanese for this world is "怒ど神しん界かい" (Doshinkai), which is literally interpreted as "World of the Angry God", or "Mad God World". They took it upon themselves to make similar changes for all the other worlds, obscuring their original meanings as intended by the author... why? Beats me. Now, one could make the argument that "Mad God World" doesn't sound good in english, so the Viz translators change is an improvement, which is not unreasonable. However, any half-decent fan translator would've simply left a footnote like "the literal Japanese interpretation is X; I changed it to Indignia because...". Problem solved! Don't just retcon things because you feel like it without explaining yourself. And if you won't explain yourself, then leave it as is.
3) english One Piece readers often have no idea just how many things are lost in translation; One Piece is filled to the brim with puns, double-entendre's, and foreshadowing, which has always been a significant part of its appeal, and is now nowhere to be found via the official providers.
4) Physical signs, such as things written on buildings, on somebody's clothing, or even on a stop sign, are usually not translated.
5) cover pages! You wouldn't know it anymore, but manga often has cover pages (often officially colorized) with extra comments and tidbits from the authors. Fans would include these pages in their scanlations. Viz pretends they don't exist.
I can only imagine the thought process of whoever's making these decisions at Viz (or its parent company Shueisha) resembles something like "westerners don't care about that stuff. Stop wasting precious time and resources trying to explain it". They don't quite seem to understand how badly they have diluted the manga reading experience in the west, especially for those of us that grew up reading this stuff, way before it reached mainstream popularity.
Footnotes and endnotes always carry a hidden burden: They interrupt the reading flow and direct the mind of the reader away from the characters and the plot and towards linguistics. If the translator follows a philosophy that prioritizes the subjective experience of the reader over a deeper understanding of the material, this "mode switch" is something he will try to avoid.
Personally, I tend to agree that a need to explain a translation represents a failure to come up with a satisfying equivalent in the target language.
The key to good endnotes is to make them a nice bonus for those interested rather than required reading for everyone. Basically, make the main text work on its own, then get into the weeds of translation details separately. It's the best of both worlds, though admittedly requires quite a bit of extra work to pull off.
>"Indignia", which doesn't mean anything
It's a combination of indignation and the suffix ia, meaning land of.
Ohh, that's probably it. I had considered whether or not they were trying to incorporate indignant/indignation in some fashion when they came up with it, but never made the connection with "ia" being "land of".
Still, that's a bit complicated because it's missing something essential that the author had originally intended. It's like replacing "Mad God World" with "Unjust World"... well, they're very much all unjust, have to be more specific.
This is even more of a reason why they really should be explaining these self-insert puns to the readers, since they invented them. It's a nice touch is all, and fan translators made that (among the other things I mentioned) a standard practice.
I was wondering why chunchyroll subtitles were dirt when viewed through prime.
Yeah, ASS rendering was a big problem for me when I was making some online subtitling software. I ended up on using https://github.com/ThaUnknown/jassub + using Mediabunny to render a "subtitles" media track on top rendered on a canvas.
The result works pretty well, e.g. https://www.translate.mom/app/task/2UicdIqRBg0f
Related discussion from three weeks ago: Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse? – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45458973
Incredibly detailed article, thanks for that. The blog software still uses example.com in html head, RSS feed and sitemap XML.
Good catch, thanks - I literally built the site alongside the article, so there's still some rough edges here and there.
There is a solution: learn Japanese!
I guess it's easy to type it out on the keyboard.
How long did it take you to learn a language to arrive at a level where you can watch a movie/TV program with tons of idioms and cultural references and easily understand > 95% of it?
Tried watching some CR content on Amazon Prime. Unusable. The subs are garbage. Better quality from Netflix which is a freaking random host not even anime focused. Had to cancel the CR sub. Literally unwatchable
Considering how Crunchyroll started out by streaming ripped off anime content, hope they fail
It has been a loooong time since that. I'm pretty happy they not only went the legal route, but also were successful doing it while retaining a relatively large library. They could have failed and shut down. Remember that back then, Japanese producers didn't take overseas demand seriously, many of them don't even know that it existed or that there were many fansubs.
They basically infringed copyright and ripped off Japanese animators, and took the legal route so they can extract more money… sounds like your run of the mill Taiwanese CD rip business back in the 90s..
Let me guess: AI?
The mass market has already responded that they want dubbed anime. It doesn't make sense to invest into subtitles. Maybe it's time to accept that you are not the target audience anymore of western anime distributors.
Quality typesetting is just as important for dubs as it is for subs, actually! All that on-screen text will be there regardless of which audio track you are using.
It baffles me how this is a thing. Not just regarding anime but any non-English language show or film. I've never come across a dub that wasn't at least five times worse in every way.
After hearing it from multiple different people, I've discovered that apparently many people are watching video content in background. And I don't mean music or podcasts style content with no graphics, but actual TV shows, anime, movies etc. And apparently they do that while doing something else demanding attention, like work, gaming, reading(!) etc. I have never managed such a feat, but it seems it is popular nowadays. That may be the reason, I guess.
Very odd. I definitely do that with podcasts and miscellaneous YouTube videos (like the latest LegalEagle video or whatever) but the idea of doing it with a show/anime/movie is unthinkable to me.
I like watching anime, as opposed to reading anime, and I don't know Japanese. Every dub I've watched has been fine for me, I haven't noticed it being bad. Sure, if I knew Japanese well enough to keep up with the dialog, and watched both versions, I'd probably notice a difference, but for me, it comes down to whether I want to listen to an anime in English, or read an anime in English. I also sometimes want to do something while watching anime that means I can't devote my entire time to looking at the screen, and I don't want to have to keep rewinding so I can read what I missed. With an English or dubbed show, I can do things like put it on a second monitor while I'm playing a game, but that doesn't work with a subbed show. Yes, I know the solution is just to learn Japanese, but I've always struggled with learning languages and I barely have time to watch anime these days, let alone learn another language
But... people who only speak English and no other languages watch shows and films in other languages all the time. That's what the subtitles are for. I would guess 99% of anime watchers who listen in the original audio don't know any Japanese.
I'm sorry but it's so strange to me. To me it's like putting on your favorite song, but it's in Spanish so it's dubbed by a much worse singer who sings it in English.
I also don't understand why one would watch a film or show on one screen while playing a game or something on another screen. Either the film or show is so boring and trite that you need something else to distract you - in which case why ever watch it at all? - or you're missing out by not focusing on something good.
If it's a 4-hour podcast or a random infotainment YouTube video, sure, it makes sense to put that on while playing a game or programming or whatever. But an actual polished show? I don't get it.
If something is my favourite song, I will listen it in the language where it is my favourite song. I generally don't have favourite songs in other languages.
I have ADHD. I struggle to concentrate on anything. I would rather have the ability to be distracted for a bit and still be able to follow the show, than have to rewind it constantly or force myself to concentrate on something (which my brain doesn't enjoy). I don't need a distraction from a boring show, I need something else to keep me engaged.
I'm not sure why you are putting infotainment youtube videos in their own category, I treat them just the same. If it has visuals that I want to see, I'll put it on my second monitor and watch it while I'm doing something else. Not while programming, because that requires its own focus, or a narrative game, but more a sandbox game like minecraft or factorio
Dubs can be good in shows where there's a lot of fast dialog; it's hard for subtitles to keep up. The loquacious protagonist of Steins;Gate benefits _significantly_ from a dub, for example. I watched the show twice when I realized the subs had skipped half his dialog.
Period accents are another place dubs can have an advantage, particularly in shows like Baccano! where the characters are ostensibly speaking English to start with.
It can also vary by localization studio. I didn't care for the English Spy x Family dub, but to my ear the Chinese dub is just as good as the original Japanese. For some reason the actors in many English dubs seem to have a hard time "really going for it" when a scene requires an over-the-top outburst of emotions.
Apologies if this seems snarky or rude but I would be very, very, very surprised if any part of the dub for Steins;Gate sounds better than any part of the original audio.
Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle just set records for western anime distribution, and 55% watched it subtitled.
https://deadline.com/2025/09/box-office-demon-slayer-infinit...
The market has spoken, indeed.
That number varies depending on who you ask, with CR being one of the sources that claims a heavier share of dub watchers, but half their business is now dubbing/localization (by way of Funimation merger) so it may not be the most objective source.
Either way it’s bad business to throw some of your most loyal customers under the bus, regardless of how big of a portion they represent. Dub viewers tend to be more casual and fickle and will largely evaporate once the zeitgeist of popular media moves from anime onto something else.
Those who only want dubbed anime will be limited to a smaller catalog of shows. Their loss.
you still need to subtitle the japanese text in signs, chat messages and other places that appear on the screen.
I am saying that they can get away with lower quality subtitles in such places because the average user does not care that much about it. The target audience is not the same as when they first started doing subtitles and it doesn't make business sense anymore. Anime is not special. If the rest of the video streaming industry can get away with simpler subtitles, then Crunchyroll can too.
People that are into anime are into anime because it is special. JoJo's Bizzare Adventure is cool when Marvel movies aren't because JoJo was made by one mangaka and a Marvel movie is made by a committee of committees.
As someone who doesn't watch anime, this article reminds me of when a coworker sends a screenshot with zero context and says something like "is this supposed to be like this?" Maybe it's a spectrum thing, but I find it beyond lazy and insulting.
In the article, there's zero explanation of what the actual issue is, at least in the first few paragraphs. It just seems to say the subtitles are bad with some examples and puts the burden on the reader to determine why.
Is the issue the subtitle's location on the screen ? Contrast or font? Quality of translations? Again, it's probably a spectrum thing, but without any context I find it overwhelming and overstimulating.
The article is just long, and rambly, clearly from someone on the inside of the issue, not targeting complete outsiders.
The gist of it is this: Subtitles were a huge part of anime culture.
1. Subtitles were great at one point. Demonstration is this video: https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/klk-underwater-1.mp4 The English subtitles are so well integrated, that they feel like they are part of the original scene. But actually, they are added in post!
In these times, great subtitles were done by a vibrant, legally grey, dedicated subculture. Subtitling, at this point, is about craftsmanship, and appreciation of culture. Anime at this point is a niche, even though becoming more and more popular in the West.
2. Subtitles are becoming more like this: https://daiz.moe/content/crunchyroll/mha-funi-hulu.jpg
Anime at this point is mainstream in the West. This is the corporate version of the same, where subtitling is seen as a problem to be solved as cheaply as possible. The culture around it seems to be dissolved, as the subtitles are now determined by corporate issues, not craftsmen, or connoisseurs.
Well... the very first paragraph of the article does say with highlighting how "the presentation quality for translations of on-screen text has taken a total nosedive". And then it shows visual examples of the new bad quality and gives comparison screenshots demonstrating good quality shortly after.
A small suggestion: ask a friend of yours who don't regularly watch anime to read your article for 20 seconds, and see if they can explain what it is about.
I spent quite some hours on CR, yet it was maybe until 30 seconds later before I realized what the "nosedive" refers to exactly. In fact, I kept thinking "quality" refers to "translation quality" and I was puzzled I could not see obvious issues.
It doesn't need to be that. Anyone given side-by-side screenshots without additional contexts should immediately tell you what's happening, and I've read lots of blog posts like that.
More specifically, the article provides 4 bad screenshots at fitst. I actually went through 3 of them. I kind of guessed what you meant but wasn't sure. Then there is another gallery of good ones. Why? Just provide good vs bad at the top, explicitly explain what's the expectation, and if needed, provide more examples. That'll be 200% better than this.
The article says there's a nosedive. But by what standard(s)? See the questions I already posted in my original response.
Both the "good" and "bad" quality examples contain subtitles with no discernible difference. All examples contain legible subtitles. So where's the "nosedive"?
There's clearly some anime-specific context and nuance that is NOT communicated with context-less screencaps.
Perhaps the article wasn't written for someone unfamiliar with anime, and I'm not meant to understand, but it would be helpful to have the difference explained. Not to mention the improved accessibility for screen readers or folks with sensory processing issues like myself. At a minimum, marking up the image would be helpful. Circle things. Arrows. Help me understand, don't drop me into unfamiliar territory and leave me to guess.
The difference is that when there is text on the original video material, in the good examples the translations are positioned in the proximity of the original texts, and styled similarly, which makes it easier to understand what is translation of what, and generally improves immersion.
In the bad examples, the translations for the texts are mixed with the lines the characters are speaking, which makes it harder to follow.
That makes sense. Thanks very much for the clarification.
I agree, I didn't see that much of a difference between the good quality and bad quality examples. Is it the fonts, or the translation, or the placement of the text?
Thanks for the response. I was feeling a little crazy. The rest of responses to my comment so far are either dismissive or don't seem to understand what I was trying to communicate, but you seem to have the same issue I have.
The article definitely could be improved. I kind of guessed what the author to say at the beginning, but it was not really clear until much later. Had the author shown a side-by-side comparison at the beginning, it would have helped.
I think the before and after screenshots are pretty stark.
In what way? They both have subtitles. The issue with "quality" is not clear to at least me, and I'm guessing that's because I don't watch crunchyroll or much anime.
My understanding is, people who only get subtitles from anime have very particular subtitle preferences.
As someone who grew up where 90% of TV was subtitled I find the “bad” anime subtitles much better.
I also grew up where 90% of TV was subtitled (Finland, where, incidentally, the author of the article is from too), but I find the "good" anime subtitles better – for the simple reason that they make it easier to see which translation corresponds to which text.
Note that anime has generally more text on the screen that many western shows, so I think subtitling practices of some subtitle-heavy western countries, while informed and proven by time, don't necessarily represent optimal practices for anime.
But I think you are correct about the subtitle preferences of anime fans. The "general wisdom" of audiovisual translations is that great translations manage to convey the important point very succinctly, and a professional translator knows how to shave off the fluff to achieve subtitles that are quick to read and "fade in the background" in the sense that you don't even realize that you are reading them.
However, many anime fans actually LIKE so-called foreignizing translations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignizati... ). I think this plays into the fancier subtitle preferences too.
Ultimately what one would really want is not better subtitles but a localized version with on screen text replacement by overlay. The kanjis would simply disappear. A lot of shows were successfully translated and localized in the 80's and 90's in various countries, there is no reason we couldn't do that anymore. The only reasons they aren't doing it anymore is cost reduction.
"...I find it beyond lazy and insulting." Using the words "lazy" and "insulting" in this way sounds rude, insulting, entitled and arrogant.
They are very negative words and it is rude to use them when referring to someone else's work or things similar to that work.
TFA is certainly not lazy (and it's very obvious to an NT that a LOT of effort went into it).
We should ideally all be producing content in an accessible way when possible. But doing so is difficult and is a learned skill set.
Making things accessible to NDs can be difficult because normal written English heavily utilizes things that NDs can be unable to intuitively process.
There is also often a trade-off involved in making work accessible. Aesthetically specifically, artistically generally, or in terms of brevity or convenience to others.
Your inability to read the context clues and process the visual information is your inability to do something. A thing that the vast majority of people can do. TFA clearly wasn't intended as insulting and your interpretation of it as insulting is unfortunate.
Your very specific needs are not the needs of the vast majority of people who are reading it. If you cannot see the difference in subtitles between the two sets of examples and tell that one is bad, then you are not the main target audience.
The new generation of subtitles are bland and poorly integrated with the context.
Previous subtitles were attractive and well integrated, with colours, typefaces, orientations and locations picked to best suit the content. Everything (including background signs) are translated with attention paid to details.
The article uses a lot of visual examples to explain this. It is written in a way that is intuitive and easy to digest for most people. I can literally skim this and understand it.
If you wished to write your comment in a way that wasn't rude to the OP, you could provide the same important information without using negative language:
"I am autistic and don't watch anime. I've read the first few paragraphs and I'm finding it overwhelming and overstimulating to precisely identify the problem.
What is the exact issue? The subtitle's location on the screen? Contrast or font? Quality of translations?"
Relevant parts of TFA that explain are:
>...translations for dialogue and on-screen text aren’t even separated to different sides of the screen – everything is just bunched up together at either the top or the bottom. Lots of on-screen text is even left straight up untranslated.
>The amount of it varies from series to series, but almost every anime out there makes use of on-screen text at one point or another, with some featuring downright ridiculous amounts of signs (what on-screen text is called for short). With all this on-screen text, it is also very common for there to be text visible on the screen potentially in multiple positions, even when characters are speaking.
>At bare minimum, when subtitling anime, you should be able to do overlaps (multiple lines of text on the screen at the same time) and positioning (the ability to freely place subtitles anywhere on the screen).
>Overlaps and positioning are really just the bare necessities for dealing with on-screen text in anime though – ideally, you should also be able to use different fonts, colors, animate text in various ways, etc. Making use of all these possibilities is an art unto itself, and this art of on-screen text localization is commonly referred to as typesetting. Typesetting is important even when dubbing anime, as all that on-screen text is going to be there in the video all the same!
>[Crunchyroll started] mangling subtitles with typesetting into something compatible with the awful subtitling standards of the general streaming services [Netflix and Amazon Prime].
Seems like you were so quick to jump to the defense of the author (who likely doesn't need your white knighting) you completely misunderstood or are misrepresenting what I said was lazy and insulting which was the hypothetical coworker example, and NOT the article itself.
With that in mind, I don't have the energy to read the rest of your reply. I appreciate you taking the time to respond, and I'm sorry if my phrasing wasn't clear. I'm sure it's a great article, and I meant in no way to insult the author.
I'm just not equipped to gather much meaning from it the way the information is presented.