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All the elitism and jokes aside, dub has come a long way in the last 20 years. Sub is still the better IMHO, but dubs are no longer something you have to actively tolerate.
Whole reason I have CR and HiDive is for the dubs. Though the latter has been slipping as of late, they still haven’t even dubbed the third and fourth seasons of Urusei Yatsura
Crunchyroll has 3 or 4 dubed episodes and then shows a popup saying no more dubs. I don’t want to wait till the season is over and don’t like to switch voice actors in the middle, so I always go with the subs from the start.
Yeah, this is a huge factor. Even if they’ve got dubs only a week behind, which was the case for season one of shield hero, I don’t want to sit and not watch the latest episode simply because it’s not dubbed. So subbed is what I went with constantly.
on Their Platforms
is doing all the lifting.
🏴☠️
Although I think it’s worth saying how much dubs have improved in the last decade, I’ve always been reasonably lightly into anime, but always had the odd niche recommendation on the go. Most anime I watch is still casual in tone, so I like to have it on while doing art or something, so I’m a big dub supporter.
A decade ago, you could probably have a rule that unless you’d see someone wearing merch of the anime in public, the dub would be shit, but I think because streaming services are paying so much for dunning themselves, it’s lightened the burden across the scene.
Also if over 50% of users watch dubs, I wonder what percentage of their users solely watch high budget, mainstream anime which has perfectly fine dubs.
𐑢𐑲 𐑸 𐑿 replying 𐑑 私 🧵 ?
Just make 𐑿r 𐑴𐑯 comment 𐑪 𐑞 𐑥𐑯🧶 .
I’m Japanese, I watch 𐑯 sub 𐑪 native 日本語。 𐑯 𐑞𐑟 IF I’m interested 𐑪 watch𐑙 𐑕𐑥𐑞𐑙. I 𐑮𐑞𐑻 𐑮𐑛 𐑞 scripts/novel. 𐑕𐑥🕰️ dub w/peers.
I watch sub’s, but when it’s my wife and I we watch dubs. we’re old af and will fall asleep if we’re reading everything on screen.
I can do it on my own because I’m watching shit that really torques my driveshaft and I’m invested in.
I watched vending machine-san first subbed, then rewatched with my wife dubbed.
best anime ever 💥💥💥LFG SEASON 2!!!💥💥💥
We should have gatekept harder.
Important context:
Crunchyroll Accidentally Reveals They’ve Been Using ChatGPT for Sub Translations https://www.cbr.com/crunchyroll-chatgpt-sub-anime/
Isn’t translation one of the few actually effective uses for llms? Or am I remembering wrong?
As with most AI/LLMs it’s about how much error you can tolerate.
Translating basic info, sure the user can infer any slight mess ups. Translating jokes, idoms, tone, cultural differences, etc. is hard assuming you even got the original text right.
just watched Nagatoro call Senpai a bitch.
it’s lore now, but was totally NOT what she said.
Aren’t they only doing that so they don’t need to pay for the sub licenses?
Only reason for why they refuse to have subs on their dubs
If you’re using it just to translate a few paragraphs of text on a website here or there, then yes, it’s much better than what we had before.
For anything complex however it can’t even begin to compare with a professionally done translation/localization.
To start with, Japanese is already one of the more difficult languages to localize due to a bunch of linguistic concepts that don’t translate well to other languages and need creative solutions that carry over the same intent.
More important however is consistency: Even if an AI translates some of the language ticks of the characters instead of completely glossing over them, it needs to do so consistently and apply the same translation across the whole script.
The same goes for any named items. If there’s a “Soul Stone” for example, you need to make sure to call it “Soul Stone” every single time and not “Spirit Rock”.
I 100% agree on consistency, but I actually suspect LLMs would be pretty decent at translating linguistic concepts. Their grasp of contextual language is always surprisingly good, as seen in how well they rewrite tone to very specific parameters.
I don’t use ChatGPT loads, but I do use it a little, often alongside a method of project that can’t hallucinate. The other week I was talking in one chat about the vocal tone of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, that has this laconic, worn down dialogue with old testament feeling prose. In another chat, I was prompting ‘sage advice’ for a matcha scone recipe I wanted to make where I was marbling strawberry directly into the dough. I got which chat I was responding in wrong and accidentally had it give me a the scone recipe in Cormac McCarthy’s writing style.
MARBLED SCONES
He measured two cups of flour into a bowl and cut in the baking powder with the side of his hand. Salt followed. It hung in the flour like stone dust. He stirred it with a fork and the dry mix turned over itself and fell still. He cut the butter into cubes and dropped them in and pressed them through with his fingers until the flour took the texture of packed soil. He added a spoon of matcha. The green of river weed. The taste of old things left out in the rain.
He poured in buttermilk and cream. A little at a time. He stirred it slow with a blunt knife and the dough pulled together like it didn’t want to be one thing.
In another bowl he took a handful of flour and mixed it with strawberry powder. A drop of red dye like blood in water. He stirred in cream until it held. He pressed the green dough flat on the counter and laid the red over it and folded. Folded again. The colors turned but did not blend. Like veins of ore in a dark stone.
He shaped the dough into a slab and cut thick rounds with a glass. Each one imperfect. Some leaning. Some split. He set them on a tray lined with paper. The oven was already hot. He did not preheat it. It was always hot. Four twenty five. He watched the scones rise through the glass. They broke along the seams. Green and red and gold. They looked like they’d been dug up.
He split one open while it was still warm. He spread pistachio butter across the inside. It melted into the crumb. Then clotted cream. Then jam. The weight of it brought the top half down slow.
He took it outside and sat in the dirt to eat. There was no sound but the breeze. The sky was wide and empty. The scone was good. The scone was all right.
Now this is actually super easy to critique as a recipe, because it fucking sucks. In adaptation, it’s lost a lot of critical instruction. This is effectively a translation that must adhere to narrow and specific tone to achieve a meaning that cannot be translated without grasping a meaning to language that exists beyond the words.
Obviously this is English to English, but a big difference is that there is far more Japanese out there than Cormac McCarthy.
That being said, nothing cements what you’re saying about consistency more than how badly butchered the underlying instructions to this recipe are.
True! Consistency is definitely something they aren’t great at
Not for anything involving art. Real humans flub shit often enough, I don’t trust an llm to convey any important context.
It seems like my monolingual perspective led me to underestimate the complexity of translating! I have a lot more respect now for the people who do it
Maybe that works if you’re translating large blocks of text, but when it’s small bits of isolated text where the viewer is expected to have visual context which the LLM won’t have it’s a hot mess. I tried experimenting with some translation software on a page of manga and it got a lot of stuff wrong.
Makes sense!
Whelp that’s completely different than a decade ago.
The big streaming platforms probably get pretty much all of the casual watchers, who favour dubs, but have to split the more hardcore fans who favour subs with the high seas. That’s going to skew the stats a bit.
If the dub is good I see no reason not to watch it dubbed.
Earlier anime used to have absolute garbage dubbing. But these days that’s not the case anymore.
I still prefer to watch subbed because even if the main characters have decent VAs in the dubbed version, it’s way more common to have some disappointing performances among supporting cast there.
Same with Japanese original VAs. I’ve experienced it so many times that some side character or passer by sounds like they’re either voicing for the wrong series or just found the cheapest intern in the animation office.
And then you have me, who’s so hardcore I was forced to sign up for Netflix so I could watch the Dutch dub of Tonari no Totoro . If I was any more hardcore, I’d figure out how to rip it from there, because it’s the only home release it ever got, as far as I can tell. Can’t even find a second-hand VHS (wouldn’t be acceptable quality anyway).
But that whole situation means I’m a Netflix subscriber who “prefers dubs” for their stats, even though I rarely watch a dub.
I mean, you don’t have to learn how to rip from Netflix… People do it for you 30 minuted after the official release, you can find it on the usual site.
For the English dub, yes. I even found Italian, French, German, Spanish and Russian. But none of the pirates set their VPN to Netherlands to get the Dutch dub.
And the spanish version is usually from spain so I have to go down a fucking rabbit hole trying to find the latinamerican spanish version (es-419) even for the subs.
People Don’t watch Sub⁉️
How Uncultured‼️burn them‼️
I watch the subs out of either impatience or avoiding certain English VA/character pairings that I absolutely cannot stand. I can muddle my way through the shittiest of subs rather than put up with localized VA’s who sound NOTHING like their Japanese counterparts…
I used to be staunchly dubs. But then VAs stopped being people who were hired, and became personalities that controlled. And then I just learned to watch subs. Either I read faster, or rewind.
Either everyone’s Rimuru(good-enough VA I guess, but mis-cast/shoe-horned a LOT), or they’re taking characters(girls mostly, like Kazari Uiharu) who are shallow, bat-shit insane and sound so in Japanese, but giving them reasonable English voices that try to make their obsessions with rules and feeding sardines to their absolutely uninterested crush sound profound …
I normally have a show on in the background to cut the silence while I’m doing hobbies and such. I don’t know enough Japanese to make that work without dubs.
To me, it explained Netflix’s decision to delay The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity. They don’t want the dub watchers be spoiled by the sub watchers. On the flip side, they may be (somewhat?) aware that this could be a hit.
