All the cool effects, honorifics, translator notes that explain references that you might miss as non-japanese viewer… Whoever put this much effort for free more than 10 years ago, thank you! It was so refreshing seeing this in the era of corporate sloppy subtitles!
Not a fansub, but the pop-up references on the Excel Saga DVDs were great. It’s like reading two rapid fire shows at once!
I didn’t know the official sub had references! Well to be fair older releases had less money involved so there were less strict guidelines and more people with passion so I guess it’s not impossible.
A lot of the people who get hired to do subs are the people who used to do fansubs back in the day. There’s a lot of passion, but they aren’t usually given the time to go above and beyond. It’s kind of a shame; these days I’m noticing Crunchyroll doesn’t even bother paying someone to proofread.
These days? Did they ever?
No idea. I’m definitely noticing more obvious errors when watching new shows than old shows though. Sometimes they’re even errors that aren’t issues with translation but could just be typos or bad English grammar for example. Things any native English speaker should be able to catch. Since Sony took over and put the geniuses who ran Funimation into the ground in charge of Crunchyroll I’m guessing they’ve been having their employees do the classic “do more work for no additional pay” thing corporations love to do.
Yup, they always were low quality but right now it’s so bad it’s hard to even watch.
From AI translations, through weird localized translations, rushed scripts to just putting dub audio description as subtitles… It’s depressing.
I’m honestly not so sure about that. I really like the subs for Yakitate! Japan for example.
That’s definitely an exaggeration. I’ll notice something is off maybe once an episode, and even then it’s usually pretty clear what was meant. It’s really not that big of a deal.