low effort so that the blurays sell for more later probably
In all seriousness, there might be style guidelines that explicitly say to not translate proper nouns like character names that have literal translations.
And in most cases this probably makes sense. Frieren is reportedly a bit cringy for people who know German because the series uses on-the-nose German words for basically every character and place. Frieren = freezing, Himmel = heaven, Stark = strong, Fern = far/distant, Heiter = cheerful. There are probably similar examples for Japanese characters in other series, though I can’t think of any at the moment.
Chainsmoker Cat is an ideal show to bend that rule though. “Thanks for the help, Chainsmoker Cat!” is legit a better line than “Thanks for the help, Yani Neko!”
It’s like that scene in Coffee and Cigarettes where GZA and RZA from the Wu-tang Clan meet Bill Murray in a cafe and they constantly refer to him by his full name. Never “Bill” or “Mr Murray”, always “Bill Murray”. It’s not always funnier to do that, but sometimes it just is.
I assumed OP was talking about the white rectangle that says "Penname: Ochinpo Tatsuo (Dick Tatsuo) Real Name: (I have no idea how to read that sorry Japanese names are hard)
Yep, I meant the white rectangle that is why I said untranslated.
I think it’s Tatsuno Saori, but don’t quote me on it.
Oh, whoops lol :3
“Thanks for the help, Chainsmoker Cat!”
Chainsmoker Cat?
There are probably similar examples for Japanese characters in other series
yeah for example every name in komi san can’t communicate is a japanese pun or a play on words that describes the character and they are also better left untranslated
Netflix is notoriously bad at this. CR gets a bad rep, but compared to Netflix they’re a godsend.
It’s annoying when Netflix or Amazon gets exclusive rights to a show. You either need to wait for fansubs (and you’ll only get them for the most popular shows after a wait) or deal with this bullshit.
I used to do fansub work a lifetime ago. Is it still a thing? Might look into it if so. But I remember there was weird issues with copyright, like your hard work was basically illegal and got deleted randomly
There is still demand (from me!) and fansubbers are organized pretty well these days, I haven’t heard of any takedowns for a while.
Fansubs are way less common than they used to be, because in the last years Crunchyroll’s subs were just good enough. People are not waiting for new fansub releases, but go for what’s available right now. There’s no point doing something that nobody cares about, so no wonder many fansub groups ceased their work. That said, there still are some groups that make fansubs, but very often they base their work on already existing Crunchyroll subs and mostly just apply different typesetting, provide/improve translations for on-screen text, and fix some awkward dialogues/timing. For example in the last season Commie group was releasing The Ghost in the Shell with improved subs, because Amazon subs did not translate on-screen text. As for legality, they’re providing releases via torrents, of course it’s illegal. I don’t know who and from where is supposed to delete your subs. I guess, nyaa could get taken down…
There’s no point doing something that nobody cares about, so no wonder many fansub groups ceased their work
There is another reason: a lot of the people doing official subs used to do fan subs.
I looked it up and it seems that A.I. stole this old hobby of mine as well lol
There are some people who try to provide MTL subs, but they all have abysmal quality and no person with an iota of self-respect watches these
That’s great to hear. It always makes me sad when LLMs keep stealing all my hobbies 😂 maybe I’ll transcribe an obscure movie or something for old time’s sake…
Most official subs are AI these days. Companies are feeding the show’s transcript into the machine and it’s spitting out translations for all the different markets. If it’s not dialogue, it’s not getting translated.
You have any source at all for that? I’m pretty sure the subs would be way worse if that were actually the case.
I don’t have an exact source, I think last I heard on it was over a year ago, but I bet if you search “Crunchyroll” and “ChatGPT Said” it’ll come up. Basically, Crunchyroll was so lazy with the AI translation for an episode that it actually left the ChatGPT Said: in the sub. Idk if Netflix is doing AI as well, they haven’t been caught so blatantly, but I’d be surprised if they weren’t looking into it since I have heard they’ve been looking into AI recently.
Also idk if you’re just lucky but holy hell I’ve seen some dogshit subs recently. Like, fucking up the main character’s catchphrase levels of bad. idk how much worse that can get.
So yes, there was one show where this happened, but IIRC Crunchyroll put a statement out that that was the translator they hired being lazy, not Crunchyroll choosing to use AI subs.
idk maybe that’s what they said to cover their asses but when the CEO is doing interviews with variety and talking about how excited they are by AI and machine translations, I find myself not trusting their statement that it was a one-time thing.
Do you have a source for that? All I’m seeing is an interview last may where he said they won’t use generative AI tools for the production of their subs and dubs. https://animecorner.me/crunchyroll-ceo-says-anime-creators-can-use-whatever-technology-they-want-but-its-a-no-for-ai-subs-and-dubs/
Lack of love?
Lack of money. I’m sure most translators would be happy to do a better job if they were given the time and money necessary to do so.
Also I’m not certain Crunchyroll’s new player can even render the subtitles while also rendering more English text for the name. There was a lot of concern about that when they switched tooling.
CR’s new player can actually do this, but Chainsmoker Cat is not done by CR. This is on Netflix
That’s a relief!
Lack of love by whoever paid for the translation.
Well I can agree with that. Crunchyroll has been on the decline ever since Sony bought them.
Ain’t no way they named the cat Yoni Neko
