Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
Kind of miss how much effort went into fan subs, with notes explaining things that didn’t exactly translate without context…
Not just the notes, but I feel like they put more effort into making sure the text doesn’t blend with what is on screen. Instances on Netflix of some shows where there will be white text with a white background, and the text has no drop shadow or black border.
Oh man, I remember seeing things go from burned in subs to sub tracks with all kinds of nice functional markup and managed font color schemes and such to… Slapping white text with no border/shadow in the bottom middle of the video unconditionally without formatting…
Well the advantage of having the subtitles be a text overlay over the video is that the subtitles can be separated from the video; like, you can switch them off and on and change languages (which i sometimes do as i speak multiple languages and am interested in how they translated it) without having to store multiple GB-sized video files - one for each language - for the same episode.
What are you talking about? You can do text styling even with toggleable subs. It’s why fansubbers started using .ass/ssa for subtitles back in 2005. No one sane has burned subs into the videos for more than 20 years at this point.
I can’t imagine an anime like detective conan or school rumble without translator notes. They would be unwatchable
^ this