True, they are doing the work of translating twice.
And sometimes there are existing two types of subtitles, but the standard case is that it’s based on the original language. For learning italian i searched a lot for subtitles that are based on the italian dupped version. It often has a “forced” in the filename (and is unfortunatly quite difficult to find)
My native language is German and I never had a problem with it. But i think compared to Japanese the German language is fairly easy and German is also much more similar to English than Japanese. So not only Translating but also dubbing and subtitles are much easier to do.
Maybe in your example the translators didn’t know it better or were underpaid. I also don’t know how well the dubbing and subbing to japanese are overall level is. In german the level is quite high… i was onlynoticing that movies were translated and not origially german when i was like 11-13. (That could also just mean that i was a stupid child, but i think it’s the combination between that and the good dubbing)
About the different challenges between subtitles and dubbing i can recommend a Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c
Tom Scott made a enjoyable video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c
tl:dr dubbing and subtitles are made by diffent teams and each one has their own limitations.
Dubbing has to line up with lip movement. Subtitles were in the past summeries and struggle for example when multible people are talking at the same time
I fail to understand why it should be bad for small companies.
In my experience most small companies don’t have public AI summaries. And even if they do i still think it’s their obligation to check what they make public.
You mean the problem that almost all media is controlled by right-wing billionaires?
yes, thats big problem. But it’s good to at least take away some power from the party