this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025

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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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They don't want people to pirate, but this is the service they want people to pay for. (thephrasemaker.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 5 days ago (4 children)

I remember the days of high quality fansubs by people who were just doing it for free because they loved it.

Those still exist and still give you a better consumer experience than these fucking dogshit streaming services.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 5 days ago

Yeah, there are so many Japanese shows out there that only have subs because people liked them so much that they wanted to share them. It's basically the reason that anime and manga even became relevant in the west.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 days ago

Yeah I still rely on fansubs for all my jdramas that don’t get official releases outside Japan (which is still most of them). The quality is instantly obvious compared to machine-generated crap.

Cultural context and an understanding of tone and narrative coherence is critical for subtitles if you want to do justice to the quality of the writing in the original language.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

ML will never throw an explanation on screen because it doesn't know there needs to be one.

[–] skisnow 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah the irony of it all is that professionally subtitled shows were already inferior to fansubs, because the fansubbers were a self-selecting group of people who were fans of that show specifically. I guess Crunchyroll realized that their subs sucked anyway so why pay money for them?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

Don’t forget that those fansubbers also want the watchers to get the feeling of the Japanese dubs, switching out sentences to match the voiced lines and still bring you the message, while non-fans just translate it.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Just let us buy the files DRM free. Why is that so hard? The music industry did it. The games industry did it. Why won't TV or Film?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago

At this point I'm done even asking.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Some parts of the gaming industry did, the vast majority still won't provide content drm free.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Fair, but it seems the TV and Movie industry hasn't even tried at all.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Time to cancel my Crunchyroll subscription. Oh wait I don't have one, I simply torrent my series.

Seriously now. The anime fansubbing scene is one that makes me genuinely happy. It shows me there are plenty amateurs out there that are as good or better than plenty professionals like me.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

Sadly the german fansubbing scene basically evaporated when simulcast became a thing. 15 years ago you got some amazing subs, with signs translated (even when moving through the screen) and cultural information shown when it was needed to understand a scene or joke

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If they could figure a way to make you pay without providing any service at all they absolutely would.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, that's what landlords figure

[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 days ago

And capitalism continues to ruin everything

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If anyone trusted Crunchyroll after they removed comments and reviews, it's honestly kind of their fault, as much as I hate victim blaming. They have shown who they are time and time again, it's not hard to believe them.

Though, I think anyone in this community very likely already knows exactly who they are.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They removed comments and reviews yikes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Yeah, they didn't want to moderate them so they just removed the functionality entirely. The one thing that website had going for it lol

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago

I think they need to step back a little and address their quality control before they try to embrace the AI bandwagon on captions/subtitles.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

They can want me to pay for it all they want, Crunchyroll has never and will never see a penny from my ass.

Shit, the last time fucking Funimation saw a penny from me was back when the DBZ orange box sets were on shelves, motherfuck Crunchroll lmao

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

As much as people hate on dubs, this one reason I’m glad I tend to focus on them. The ADR team does a great job of translating and localization. Is it word for word the same as Japanese? No, if you want that, use AI. This keeps the spirit while making sure it’s more culturally understandable.

[–] skisnow 12 points 5 days ago

Just wait, AI dubs are next

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

I don't watch anime but I do dislike greedy companies. I have a couple hundred gigabytes to spare, how can I help?

[+] [email protected] -25 points 5 days ago (6 children)

I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used. If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Translating art is still art. It requires cultural knowledge and contextual understanding to be done well, and no soulless bot can do that.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago

This. There's a huge different between AI's shallow transliteration and an actual translation that respects the culture and context.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

A good human translator is always the best solution.

But if the choice would be between crappy google translate or a LLM I would take the LLM translation.

There's no excuse for a big studio, they should hire translators. But for indie creators without a budget it can be the best way to get their creation to more people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Even if it could it wouldn't matter, what makes art so valuable is the amount of work put into it. It's the highest effort form of communication you can imagine, it can express so much. An LLM chat bot could never do that.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I don’t see what the problem is with using AI for translations. if the translations are good enough and cheap enough, they should be used.

Because machine translations for any large chunk of text are consistently awful: they don't get references right, they often miss the point of the original utterance, they ignore cultural context, so goes on. It's like wiping your arse with an old sock - sure, you could do it in a pinch, but you definitively don't want to do it regularly!

Verbose example, using Portuguese to English

I'll give you an example, using PT→EN because I don't speak JP. Let's say Alice tells Bob "ma' tu é uma nota de três pila, né?" (literally: "bu[t] you're a three bucks bill, isn't it?") . A human translator will immediately notice a few things:

It's an informal and regional register. If Alice typically uses this register, it's part of her characterisation; else, it register shift is noteworthy. Either way, it's meaningful.
There's an idiom there; "nota de três pila" (three bucks bill). It conveys some[thing/one] is blatantly false.
There's a rhetorical question, worded like an accusation. The scene dictates how it should be interpreted.

So depending on the context, the translator might translate this as "ain't ya full of shit...", or perhaps "wow, you're as fake as Monopoly money, arentcha?". Now, check how chatbots do it:

GPT-4o mini: "But you're a three-buck note, right?"
Llama 4 Scout: "But you are a three-dollar bill, aren't you?"; or "You're a three-dollar bill, right?" (it offers both alternatives)

Both miss the mark. If you talk about three dollar bills in English, lots of people associate it with gay people, creating an association that simply does not exist in the original. The extremely informal and regional register is gone, as well as the accusatory tone.

With Claude shitting this pile of idiocy, that I had to screenshot because otherwise people wouldn't believe me:

[This is wrong on so many levels I don't... I don't even...]

This is what you get for AI translations between two IE languages in the same Sprachbund, that'll often do things in a similar way. It gets way worse for Japanese → English - because they're languages from different families, different cultures, that didn't historically interact that much. It's like the dumb shit above, multiplied by ten.

If they’re not good enough, another business can offer better translations as a differentiator.

That "business" is called watching pirated anime with fan subs, made by people who genuinely enjoy anime and want others to enjoy it too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

This is such a great response. I learned something from you today, thank you.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

That's a really awesome explanation.

Also, r/suddenlycaralho.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago

The issue is that they're almost certainly going to be cheap, and therefore companies are going to use them even if they're complete dogshit.

But I think the bigger issue is saying "no ai" and then... using AI.

[–] inconel 15 points 5 days ago

If you need translation for just getting facts and information for say math equation and its annotation translated, there's little margin in variety, what you need is database - that's mostly fine.

Pieces need translation are usually not like that. They have cultural context, pun, wordplay in rhymes, structural parallel, underlying tone, a lot of things only work in the language originally written. Translation is always a (nearly impossible) challenge for the translator to reconstruct all of them in target language.

I did game translation for a while. Translation is a field where AI hit first and honestly I've seen people lowering standards. The criteria of "good enough", "passable" is not the same compared to pre-AI days, and will keep changing. I'm almost sure this trend is happening in every industry the same way, and "just translation" is a slippery slope.

[–] skisnow 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I don’t know why it’s so difficult for these Ayn Rand readers to understand that almost no market is perfectly free, efficient, contestable or optimal. When it comes to licensing IP in particular, the overhead of trying to get permission for a show that’s already licensed by a competitor is an insurmountable barrier to entry for anyone who isn’t already a huge media conglomerate.

The only realistic alternative to shitty subtitles is piracy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

They're fine if no official translation exists and they're free. If you're paying for a service, you are owed much better.