It wound up being quite a large document!

But the thing to realize here is that, all of these subs have to be placed by hand. There are AI tools that can help you match in and out times, but they have a difficult time matching English subs to Japanese dialogue. So what you have to do is have a human with some small grasp of Japanese place each of these in/out times by hand.

If you’re really good you can do one 25 minute episode in about 35 minutes. But that’s ONLY if you don’t spend any extra time coloring and moving the subs around the screen (as you would song and sign captions).

Elite tier subs can take up to two or even three or four hours per episode. That’s why the best subs, are always fan subs! Because a business will never put in 8x more time on an episodes subtitles than “bare minimum.”

Crunchy roll looks to have at least gone halfway for a while… but multiply those times across thousands of episodes over X years… and you can see why some manager somewhere finally decided 35 minutes was good enough.

I am in the Product world now, and I do think this was a bad move. Anime fans LOVE anime. The level of customer delight (and hate) in the anime industry is like no other. I really miss the excitement that my customers would get (and happily telegraph!) when I launched a product in those days. Which is all to say, you HAVE to factor delight into your product. Especially with a super fan base like you have in anime.

And we're talking a difference of ~7 hours of labor. $200 difference at most?

Outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly on legal anime. From the article, 70% of new releases are exclusive to Crunchyroll. They're not losing customers to platforms with better subs, because customers have no alternative.

(Besides pirating, but I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over)

That's just because the legal options were easily available, right? Kind of like people stopped pirating as much when Netflix was actually decent. But now the tides are turning again, so maybe the fan subs will start coming back as well.

Still, though, I wonder if that mindset is still going to be around.

I remember seeing (I think Netflix release) of Komi-san can't communicate, noticing A lot of things being missed, like Komi's literal main manner of communication (A notebook where she writes) not getting any translation for some episodes, or a lot of things I'd have to fill others in that normally at least would have been a T/N in fansub

It was bad enough that I went looking elsewhere to see if I had missed more than I realized, and the fansub did have everything covered

Here's the answer right here...

* Shonen anime, which are consistently the most popular ones, are also on netflix and probably several other services. Eg, demon slayer, dandadan, etc.

* there are still shows that are japan-exclusive because nobody bothers to license them. Roboshinkalion is an entire franchise that nobody cares to import! We actually had to wait two extra years for gridman universe because nobody bothered to license it for English localization!

* just this year they failed to obtain the rights to Mobile Suit Gundam G-Quuuuuux and Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt because amazon outbid them. These are both new entries in well-established brands and they're both made by studios with large fan followings (khara for g-quuuuuux and trigger for panty and stocking).

* somehow Hulu ended up breaking harmony gold's 45-year blockade around the macross franchise and won exclusive streaming rights.

* netflix has a lot of exclusives these days, including Jojo stone ocean and the upcoming steelball run.

$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.

When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.

Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.

That’s the key right there.

They have 17 million paying subscribers. If they subtitled 1,000 episodes of content a month * 200$ = 200k / 17 million ~= 1 cent per subscriber per month. Actual cost per subscriber is well below that.

They should probably consider that this competitor is actually mpv playing the DRM-free blu-ray quality fully subtitled mkv files obtained for a grand total of zero dollars from organized groups of people who simply care about anime to an absurd degree.

"Paying customer" is a synonym for "fool" in this context. Paying for inferior products is just foolish. It is damaging to one's self-respect. It is even more damaging for the reputation of the corporation. A bunch of fans regularly put them to shame by releasing better products on a daily basis. That's just pathetic.

But still, I often find myself watching anime from fansub groups even though I have a legitimate, official way of watching them. Paying for a streaming service that is objectively, significantly worse than even the shittier pirate offerings does make me feel like a fool.

Not unheard of, but probably harder than hiring for a call center, and more need to prevent high rotation due to difficulty in finding replacements.

Edit: not that I disagree with your general idea, just pointing out potential issues.

These are the questions that would get played out in the decision process.

Even with stuff at this hobby/mature level, the difference in someone actually taking care with the subtitles is not even close to subtle. It makes a huge difference.

Cannot overstate this enough. Fans are the ones who actually care. To an almost pathological degree.

Anime fansubbing is a major reason why our video players even have excellent subtitling support to begin with.

Many music fans will obssess over ripping quality and lossless encodings to the point of delusion.

I've seen people care so much about some film they they somehow spliced together two different blu-rays to make the ultimate version because some parts were better on the disc from a specific region.

Star Wars fans cared so much they spent tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives to resurrect negatives from the 70s that even the creator himself had disowned:

https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/Project-4K77/

Always bet on guys who care. Corporations will never be able to compete. They simply do not give a shit. They want money for minimum viable products. These guys do it out of love.

At least one of the Chinese streaming services (I think possibly iQIYI) crowdsources improved translations directly in the app, presumably relying on the irritation factor of early adopters stuck with the MTL-grade int'l subs supplied by many C-drama production companies.

Karaoke and typesetting can of course take longer (I remember someone complaining about how much effort it was to typeset every single book name in some scene that had a bookshelf) though karaoke is usually ~3 minutes of unique content (OP & ED) per ~12 episodes. Typesetting depends heavily on anime, like isekais don't usually have a lot Japanese writing anyway.

This statement is incorrect. All artistic endeavors are matters of habit and taste. You absolutely can improve at matters of taste

That seems like something you might legitimately skip. Most books that appear in the background of a scene aren't relevant.

On the other hand, the example image in the article, where there's a big banner hung on the wall reading "Rana-chan's Surprise Party", seems like something you'd want to translate.

3-4 hours of time for a sub must be a rounding error for the production costs of these shows. No?

However, there is somebody in charge of subtitles, and they don't really care about overall business outcomes. So if they can reduce the budget of their department by squeezing typesetting, they win on an objective metric at the cost of a subjective (ie ignored) one.

While it's true crunchyroll has a lot of the anime market, there are more streaming platforms than ever right now, and people don't just consume a fixed amount of legal anime episodes per week, forever unchanging. If they have it in their head that they cannot gain or lose subscribers, that's extremely short-sighted.

Good old substationalpha ssa/ass timing memories.

Nowadays SubsPlease floods the market with their Crunchyroll rips.

Also, I tried watching Komi-san on Netflix but it was atrocious - the timing and placements were so bad it was actually unwatchable.

except that it doesn't show up as revenue. That's where the problem is - people would obviously prefer to have elite tier subs, but not be willing to pay elite tier prices for it.

In fact, you might even consider paying less for crunchyroll subscription, and buy more of the merch of your favourite franchises.

In fact, the traditional model of television is that you give the show away for free and hope to make money on popularity.

If you produce music, there are multiple companies right now who sell the service of "we will upload your music to every streaming platform, so that anyone who wants to listen to it for free can do that".

The real problem with all these brand killing enshittification moves is the delay until consequences manifest.

Another thing that happens is time code shifts that come from differences in frame rate between source material and what the subtitlers end up with (eg 24 vs 23.98 if I’m remembering correctly), which can cause subs to have what we called “ramping” issues over time (timing gets less and less accurate). So you have to go through and reset all the lines anyway.

That being said, we DID do this sometimes, but maybe that takes your time down to 25 minutes, the hard minimum possible time to accurately subtitle a 25 minute show.

And translators hated having to add the times codes (or copy paste their translations over the CCs) — they preferred to just give a script to the subtitler and let them handle it. And actually, if it’s a really good subtitler, they can! In about 35 mins.

So I think the translators were probably right to push back, as it’s only 10 minute savings for probably >10 mins on their part.

- Japanese has very different word order and word lengths, and furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel. (Vice versa as well, of course, but that’s not really a problem here.) To give a sense of the alienness at play here, Japanese is essentially postfix throughout, that is the most literal counterpart of “the car [that you saw yesterday]” is “[[you SUBJECT] yesterday saw] car”; and it also has no way to join sentences that would not make one of them potentially subordinate to the other (like the “and” before the semicolon does in this sentence). Virtually anything longer than a single line has to be retimed (and occasionally edited for length).

- “Forced” subtitles for captions, on-screen text, etc. are simply absent in the original, for lack of need. True believers (like GP apparently used to be) will try to match the positioning and even typesetting of the on-screen original, either replacing or supplementing it. (Those aren’t your run of the mill SRT subs, ASS is a completely different level of functionality.)

  * Almost all Japanese subtitles include subtitles for every noise made as well as including SDH-like information about sounds. This means that a naive attempt to just match up subtitle timings won't work -- the English translation will have fewer subtitles and you will have to skip Japanese lines that do not have an equivalent in the English transcript.
  * Most translated subtitles simplify things and have to re-organise sentence structures to match the target language, which means that you often have to pick different timings for how a sentence is broken up in English than in the original Japanese. Sometimes a very short Japanese phrase requires two sentences to accurately translate, sometimes a long Japanese sentence can be translated into a fairly short English phrase.
  * Higher-quality subtitles will also provide translations for signs and other on-screen text (ASS supports custom placement, fonts, styles, and colours -- it is powerful enough to the point where some of the really good fansub jobs I've seen make it look like the video was actually localised to English because all of the signs look like they have been translated in the original video). The original timings don't help with this.

[1]: https://github.com/kaegi/alass

And yet I can't think of a single large corporation that actually has this mindset anymore. The current mindset of management is that any delight your customers take in the product is a sign that either the price should have been higher or costs cut until the product is merely satisfactory rather than delightful.

Nvidia has garnered a lot of hate from the gaming community. Completely dishonest marketing, purposefully gimped hardware that barely gets enough RAM to function. Everyone wishes there would be more competition in this space.

Sure some studios still care about their customers but any huge corporations is bound to become a rotting corpse of its former self over time.

Of course, the typesetting would take 8 hours, but timing was always easy.

I mean I guess there's a very long tail of mediocre shows as well that get thousands of streams at best, but still.

Each show is subtitled by a team of volunteers. (Generally one team per sub language.)

I watched 大江大河 ("Like a Flowing River"; the English name seems to have no particular relation to the Chinese name) on Viki. But between that series and the sequel (大江大河2), Viki lost the license to stream it.

So now both series are on YouTube, provided by some other party. Viki's subtitles are permissively licensed, so season 1 is up there still using the Viki subtitles.

Viki never got to show season 2, and the new publisher had to provide those subtitles itself. Unfortunately, they tend to be unintelligible gibberish. I was eventually able to watch season 2 after I found a set of fansubs on reddit.

I've noticed that Netflix and Amazon Prime now offer Korean dramas, and it made me wonder if that had something to do with Viki's struggles. But this wasn't even a Korean show.

On the topic of crunchyroll, they could fix their subtitle problems while spending less money by just moving to Viki's system.

Just according to keikaku.

Translator's note: "Keikaku" means plan

Similarly there are some phrases which are probably unavoidably awkward. Like when translating vaguely as “that guy”.

funny to see the comment. I was rewatching JoJo, this time in dub, and just came across a line like this. (the context is a fight between two 19th century British characters in a very theatrical setting):

Sub: "Stop the futile, useless resistance. Don't hide in the curtain's shadows and come out!"

Dub: "You're behind the curtain, like Polonius. And, like Polonius, it is there that you shall meet your end."

I was so surprised that they threw in the Hamlet reference it's what made me look up what the original Japanese line was. The English dub writing often strikes me just as straight up better the more I watch of it.

It is quite tricky and this Shakespeare reference might be a little bit out of context...

"Are you not a student?"

In English, the non-student speaker would respond with "No", short for "No, I am not."

In Japanese, the non-student speaker would respond with "Yes", short for "Yes that's correct."

A literal translation would make this mistake.

French draws this distinction; ordinary 'yes' is oui; 'yes' contradicting a negative is si instead.

Mandarin gives you a variety of options for how to respond. You can use equivalents of 'yes' and 'no', but it's more common to echo the verb in the question.

你喜欢吃辣的吗？("Do you like eating spicy food?")

不喜欢 ("[I] don't like [it].")

Here we have no need to worry about whether the question was positive or negative; if I like the food I'll say 喜欢 and if I don't I'll say 不喜欢.

It's also possible to say 对 "correct", in which case it does matter how the question was phrased.

The specific question here, 你不是学生吗 "Are you not a student?", might be a little odder than usual because the verb 是 is also what's used for a simple "yes". But for "No, I'm not" 不是 is unambiguous, and I have a vague gut feeling that 是啊 would probably be taken as "Yes, I am". And of course you have the option of continuing your response ("yes, I'm a student, I've been enrolled here for two years") if you feel the short answer was too cryptic.

(Native American English speaker.)

P.S. For an example of when "yes" might really mean "no", I heard an anecdote. An American guy had been hired by a Japanese company to work in their offices in Japan and be a liaison to foreign businessmen. He was attending a meeting once where everyone but him was Japanese. The boss presented an idea. There was silence for about 10-15 seconds, then people said things like "Yes, that's a good idea, let's do that." The American left the meeting thinking that the idea had been approved, only to have his Japanese colleague explain to him that the key part was the silence. The boss clearly heard and understood the message that his employees didn't think it was a good idea, and the idea was dropped and never mentioned again.

So I could see a case where the character says "Yes" but the subtext is "No", and that would be clearly understood by a Japanese viewer. Different translators would choose different approaches there; some might translate the text, and some might translate the subtext. I'm curious to know if this was a case like that, or if it was a clear-cut case of one translation being right and the other one being flat-out wrong.

IIRC it was the DVD release of Tenchi Forever.

I guess I could be the odd one out but I'm not keen on the 'localisation' efforts that replace the cultural elements of the underlying media, e.g. how in Ace Attorney ramen is replaced with t-bone steaks (iirc?), prompting the meme 'Eat your hamburgers, Apollo'

“You didn’t go?” → “No, I didn’t go” (agreeing) or “Yes, I went” (disagreeing).

In Japanese, you should say “yes, I didn’t go” or “yes, I didn’t go”:

行かなかったんですか。→ はい、行きませんでした。(agreeing with the negative) or いいえ、行きました。(disagreeing with the negative)

(This difference possibly shows the more fundamental difference in the cultures, where one values truth more, and one values agreement/harmony more.)

I’m not saying that’s what happened to you, just that it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to see it.

I'd be extremely wary of ascribing any cultural significance to the language modes here. Negation and especially affirmative/negative responses to negative questions is just extremely variable among languages. Even languages in the same language family just end up doing it differently.

In Japanese, you should say “yes, I didn’t go” or “no, I did go”:

In Australia, AnimeLab used to be the gold standard. It had a polished app and dedicated team, mainly because it started out as a piracy site and went legal, keeping the passionate team etc.

They got bought out by Funimation and the app was shelved in favour of Funimation’s far worse but still usable one. Then Funimation was bought out by crunchyroll and their app was also shelved for crunchy’s terrible one. I kept paying for a while after that but after a few instances of missing subs and poor releases I gave up and just kept my Japan side subscriptions going, while getting my Australian side content ‘elsewhere’.

I’m sad the market doesn’t seem big enough to support a new competitor with a focus on quality, but as mentioned in TFA, exclusivity deals make this even harder than it otherwise would be. Shame really, as lately the releases from even the various smaller anime studios have been rather excellent.

Initially, the two had a deal where Funimation would allow subtitle-only versions of series to appear on Crunchyroll, while Funimation would focus on the dub audience. In November 2018 some corporate hijinks happened, and the alliance was considered no longer viable. Funi pulled about 240 series from Crunchyroll, amounting to nearly 20% of Crunchyroll's library at the time.

When the merger happened in 2024, Funimation's shutdown FAQ implied that Funimation's content would be available on Crunchyroll, and even encouraged users to cancel their Funimation subscription and subscribe to Crunchyroll going forward. However, there are still some 182 series which never made it back to Crunchyroll, even though they had been there before. There are just a bunch of anime that aren't legitimately available on any streaming service any more.

Was always fun reading the top comments on big episodes. Finding those few other ppl who noticed that one small thing at timestamp 14:30, dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai... etc

> dunking on the first episode of the latest garbage isekai

I was literally reaching to see if somebody else had already made a lame-ass “Truck-kun” joke on the first episode of No Longer Allowed in Another World or if I was going to have to provide a fill when I saw the change.

It was a deliberate choice that removed some of the value of the service and wiped out yet another swath of Internet history. The core is of course the videos, they can coast on that for a while, but it’s the changes like that add up that make Crunchyroll less competitive going forward, especially as other larger services acquire larger anime libraries.

And.. it's actually better if absolutely everything is on Crunchyroll. One subscription and you're set. Or I am, at least. Having to hunt around to figure out where some particular show can be found.. subscribe there only for watching that particular one.. mostly it can't be done, in my region, and I absolutely don't want to.

Which of course also gives CR no competition, and that's the price we pay. When the quality has gone down enough, the alternative isn't moving to a competitor, it's to give up on anime altogether.

Plan B is of course to get my Japanese up to a level sufficient to be able to turn off the subs, at least any potential problem there will be gone.

I pay much less for CR than for Netflix, I would rather pay more on Crunchyroll if this could guarantee a certain quality. Netflix, on the other hand, is basically a giant waste of money for me. That I haven't cancelled yet is just lazyness.

I'm sure there was an extremely vocal minority that threw a fit when they killed it off, but I doubt their overall subscriber numbers were significantly impacted. The majority of people are just there to watch anime. There's plenty of subreddits that are vastly more suitable to discussion.

Calling the Crunchyroll anime comment section a community is a bit of a stretch, it's like saying that the comments under a TikTok video are a community.

My original point stands.

Am I missing something here? (I don't use TikTok).

- The comment section under a youtube video is a community.

- The comments on the side of Instagram pictures is a community.

- Twitch chat is a community.

- Even Imgur has a community. I'm surprised that's a thing, but they do.

A company gets successful off the back of community engagement and builds great shared sentiment with its customers. They get bought, the incoming board members start cutting costs, accidentally cutting the artery they didn't realise fed the heart of the brand.

The company loses an edge the board didn't realise it had, and people slowly lose that connection, which allows them to painlessly jump ship to the next company with the same catalog but better sentiment brand.

Australia is a tiny market but before the big american companies bought them out, our local AnimeLab offering was one of the worlds best. If a new similarly oriented offering could launch and compete I’d love to see it, but sadly only pirate operations can do so, and are doing so effectively.

completely agree - i think the gov't regulatory body should change the landscape to what film and cinema have; such that distributor of media cannot own and monopolize the broadcast rights on their own platform, and publisher of media be forced to sell/license at the same price to all distributors.

This way, a streaming service can always know and pay for a broadcasting license for _any_ media, and all media must be license-able for any streaming service (at the same price), thus no monopoly can exist under this system.

Which is what we have on the music side of things. You can choose Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music etc based on how their service works for you rather than what music you want to listen to.

And don't get me wrong I love concerts and merch, but I'd rather people earn a reasonable living without needing to be on tour basically in perpetuity.

There was a lot of unrealistic hype that software magic could make everything between the consumer and the producer practically free, and that just hasn't happened and probably never will. Engineers need to get paid and infrastructure needs to get maintained too.

Ideally, like music, we'd get multiple vendors offering downloads that are high quality copy of video that isn't DRM encumbered.

But currently, we don't get this, and the closest legitimate way (modulo the DMCA...) to get video as a file is to buy physical media and rip it.

Serious shades of Gabe Newell's "it's a service problem, not a pricing problem" around all of this.

I'll be shocked if anime isn't available on YouTube.

You can also interpret that as I'll be shocked if AI doesn't result in every mangaka becoming their own small studio and distributing via YouTube.

In 2002 it was and I really liked it then.

No fuss. It’s basically a 1-click operation. $2.99 or whatever to watch your movie in good quality.

https://youtu.be/wyyXL__Awlk

You can look to the past to see what this might look like in the future:

- Publishing in the digital publishing era.

- Indie Gaming in the Steam Greenlight era.

- Indie music in the digital recording / DAW era.

- Trying to make it as an actor or musician in general.

- YouTuber careers vs. "YouTube poop"

- Trying to make it as a streamer / influencer

Novelty, self-promo, luck, preparation, right place/right time, likeability -- there are lots of things that can come together to make it work. But it's still a lot of work.

And there's your answer. Bet they're replacing most of their artisinal subtitlers with AI.

Back when they had software developers they were rapidly improving the app but someone decided they needed more executive bonuses and laid everyone off. Their software hasn't moved an inch since.

Funimation had the same idea. They bailed out of VRV (Crunchyroll's attempt at an anime "marketplace" all-in-one app) and released their own garbage app that is somehow much much worse.

It is the classic "we have exclusives so these drooling morons will take whatever we deign to give them because we're the only ones with show X/Y/Z" move.

For its own translations in Germany, CR uses freelancers which are VERY GOOD at their job, do not confuse them with the US Crunchyroll which consists mostly of the infamous Funimation staff.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1lqzdva/crunchyroll_...

They probably went with a "lowest bidder" approach and then didn't sufficiently check the quality of work being submitted.

People use either some flavor of W3C's Timed Text or WebVTT instead (and it was already a pain to get them to drag their feet into them and drop the old analog broadcast formats). Now, here's the thing. WebVTT isn't radically different in format and features to (A)SSA and it has plenty of styling options... but, once again, a lot of platforms and software are dragging their feet to support them.

So the industry has been sloooowly doing the right thing moving to the W3C standards (not a huge fan of Timed Text myself, but it exists for a reason), but only with the most basic and safe features. Which are also about as many features you get out of plain speech to text output, so it's even easier to make that decision.

- Japanese distributors wouldn't need middle-men for airing their shows abroad. They'd just stop region gate it and let fans inject the translation through their players. That could be the toughest pill to swallow for Japanese production houses, many are just allergic to opening up, but that would be so great.

They could still license in specific countries (US?) or specific purposes (theatrical release, BD etc) provided it isn't exclusive.

- good translators would have a shot at asking for more money. Fans who don't give a damn could still get freeish half auto translated stuff, while the deeper fandom could support their people.

- "long tail" countries could get their translations as well. There's just no way CR ever does Zimbabwe subs, but a few hundreds of fans could pay some guy to make it for them against a canonical video file bought from the content owner. win-win.

Ultimately, there will be a concern that it devalues the translation process, leading to translators getting paid less, not more.

Anime viewers tend to be passionate, I think there's a reasonable chance to have groups emerge with a reputation to defend and getting paid more than they are now (which could be 0)

This already exists today -- translation groups rush to be the first to translate a new series, and some fans have strong preferences around which groups provide the best translations (both in terms of accuracy and style). You can see the set of groups doing translations on the AniDB page for any Anime you like.

Make sure the editorial board is paid a living wage and the translators are too. Set up a marketplace for a dozen such organizations, and let them compete. All the incentives align.

There already is (at least for subs). In the wise words of Gabe Newell, piracy is a service problem.

Strange to see an article describing the issue - degrading the subtitle quality, which affects all the content due to this licensing ~monopoly - while simultaneously rejecting its existence.

I will mention that youtube has pretty good subtitle capabilities, even if they're rarely used.

What's the point of writing a full article when the answer is literally in the eighth word?

More likely the translators, probably native English speakers, intentionally decided to use 'authentic', 'historical' Chinese names (as modern mandarn speakers would write them in pinyin) rather than the Japanese ones?

I agree that the effect could be really confusing though, and it's not what I would do!

(IIRC the fan translations of the Manga also gradually decided to change to use Chinese versions of the historical names, which I also found confusing - especially as they have kept some of the old Japanese names ones, so...it's a weird mix...)

For instance the current PRC chairman, Xi Jinping, has an alphabet reading close to Chinese, but Japanese news will call him along the lines of "Shu Kinpei", which sounds absolutely nothing near the original name, but is how someone would read the name assuming it was Japanese and with no pronounciations hints. They just don't care much about the sounds when it comes Asian names, even in official settings.

Colourful, expressive, well timed subs really add something to the experience.

> This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience

Quality concerns aside, I've always disliked having text on the top and bottom of the screen simultaneously. My eyes are focused on the bottom of the screen, so I sometimes don't even realize that there's text at the top and have to pause/rewind to figure out what I missed.

I think putting both speakers' captions at the bottom with some kind of differentiator makes more sense.

A generous explanation would be that the localized subtitles under the Japanese audio are licensed for use with that audio only, but that’s pure conjecture, and even if that’s the case, there is no excuse for how terrible the captions can be.

The official translator should in theory have the Japanese closed captioning and copies of the anime's original manga or light novel to work from, as well as a direct line to the original studio for clarifications on spelling. In practice, I suspect they aren't given enough resources (particularly time) to do this, and the exact romanization of fictional names is not always clear from the katakana or so. Lately there are so many fantasy series where characters have made-up European-sounding names which don't translate unambiguously from katakana - is it Chilchuck or Chilchack, for example?

Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.

Less money to pay for quality.

I definitely wish we were back in the era of "keikaku means plan".

Or rather, I am, but I'm still right about the subtitles.

If only. I wish they would stop localizing it. Just give me the raw episodes. It seems like every site outside of Japan insists on ruing it by putting English on top of it. Unfortunately the economics of the situation means that sites will server the interests of tourists instead of otaku, so it's unlikely to ever change.

I'd be willing to wager Netflix, which has a fair amount of anime, can do the same.

What site(s) are you referring to?

I flip pretty frequently between Chinese and English subs and it'll remember the last setting between episodes / shows / etc.

I feel like one reason is that subtitles in Japan never match what the characters actually say. A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese) Not sure why but the Japanese subtitle industry is just terrible in so many ways.

Funnily enough, the complaints you have here actually apply more to English subtitles in my experience. Modern English subtitles tend to accurately transcribe what was said, but if you look at official subtitles from the mid-2000s and earlier you'll see that most subtitles are made much shorter than the original text. Tom Scott's video on subtitling talks about this historical practice and how it is different today[1].

Are you sure that the subtitle services you used are actually using official subtitles, and that they aren't actually translations or from some other source? How old are the shows you're watching (I believe some movies from the 70s I watched were character-accurate but that might not have been as common in the past)?

[1]: https://youtu.be/pU9sHwNKc2c?t=124

This is standard in closed captions and is not specific to Japan. So perhaps the service you're talking about only has closed captions and is incorrectly marking them as subtitles.

If you don't understand the above, then you don't want raw episodes after all.

One question if you have a minute. Why is it アメリカだけに吹き替えされている instead of 英語だけに吹き替えされている?

英語に吹き替える to dub in English (the base case of 吹き替える)

英語だけに吹き替える to dub just in English (だけ + に)

アメリカだけに吹き替える to dub, just because it's America / as you'd expect of America (だけに grammar https://tanosuke.com/n2-dakeni)

Good luck in your studies.