Crunchyroll and the use of AI in anime subtitles

Understandably people are annoyed and upset about this news and while I personally don't watch subtitles often (Only if a show hasn't been dubbed or if the dub is of poor quality) I don't like this news either but unfortunately this is just the start of things, like others have mentioned. AI translations may be poor now but its only going to keep getting better with time, will they ever be as good as a real human? who knows. What I do know is in the coming years many people will lose their jobs with the advancement in AI.
 
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With regards to 'sus', I was definitely using it for many years before the Among Us fad and continue to use it now. And I am not even slightly cool; it's been used in some regions of the UK at the very least since I was a kid? I think there's a problem with formality levels which would make it look silly when spoken by a character who isn't likely to use slang but I don't think it especially dates a show.

The infamous Gamergate reference was stupid, though, and obviously dates the script. I'm not a fan of overly-specific referential humour, especially when the humour comes from outside of anime culture and will require liner notes for future generations to know what the heck was going on. Language should be accessible to as many people as possible, not pointlessly memey.

R
 
CommanderZx2 said:
You are conflating the issue. What matters is if the the original dialogue said something of equivalent meaning. Frieren is also an anime from the 2020s would you be happy to see the subtitles have her refer to the demons as 'sus' or have Fern say she is 'on fleek'? Himmel can talk about his 'drip' when he's posing for the statues. This is what people want right?
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What I want is to be able to empathise and understand in my language the attitude and culture of the person speaking. If that person is aware of Millenial or Gen Z culture in mid 2020s then they would likely say "sus" if something was odd.

If its a medieval-esque fantasy world, I expect the upper class and lower class characters to have different speech patterns and that should be reflected in the subtitles.

Different people talk different ways and that should be reflected in how things are translated so the idea of what they are saying and how they speak is informed to the viewer/reader.
 
This news brought back good memories of an official visual novel using machine translation, each "episode" was QC just using the machine translation and ended up with not only weird translations and errors but also each episode feeling like it was translated by completely different people

Would be interesting if AI would make similar stupid errors where one episode would call a character Yuki while another Yuuki. Or other inconsistancies like using things like Baka vs Idiot vs Moron
 
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