You folks may remember I did a post about the Crunchyroll monopoly back in November last year, and since then, things with Crunchyroll have gotten worse. A whole lot worse. In a recent interview with technology news website The Verge on its Decoder podcast, Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll, has confirmed the company is testing generative AI for its subtitles and closed captions, to assist users in personalising their experience and discovering titles, and in general for different workflows of the company. This does not sound good.
AI translations have so many issues. The translations are done with a machine, which basically guesses the translations, and lead to either stilted or just outright inaccurate translations, and takes away the livelihoods of actual translators. In comparison, when humans do the translations, most of the time you can really tell that work has been put into them. Of course, not every translation has been perfect. There have been some questionable translation choices (e.g. certain localisations, certain words being left untranslated, literal translations that don't always make sense, etc.), and while I don't agree with certain translation choices, I would rather a human do the translations than a machine any day. And to be fair, there are certain factors for why certain human made translations were subpar (and for some, that might be putting it lightly), ranging from work conditions, tight scheduling, experience and pay (and Crunchyroll are notorious for underpaying their staff).
Crunchyroll already had complaints for using AI translations. Last October, when The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons came out on Crunchyroll on the day of its release, it had considerable errors in the subtitle translation, resulting in many complaints. Following this, Crunchyroll took the episode down without making a statement about it. Later that day, they restored it with the same subtitles in the United States, but not in other countries or territories. They later told Anime News Network the next day that they were working with the licensor of the series for updated subtitles. The following Wednesday, the episode was re-uploaded with an updated, more improved subtitle translation, so surely they should've known that AI translations were a bad idea since then.
But that's not the end of it. There were many subtitling issues on the Crunchyroll add-on on Prime Video. One example, as seen on this screenshot from the Anime UK News forums below, mentions various subtitling errors on Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba - Entertainment District Arc, and within the first minute the character of Kyojuro Rengoku was misspelled as Goku and Rococo amongst other things. It was also mentioned that the subtitles occasionally read like the auto-translated subtitles seen on YouTube, which would mean the subtitles are possibly AI translations. Interestingly, they're not the same subtitle translations as on Crunchyroll itself, so it's unknown if either Crunchyroll or Amazon are at fault with this one. And it seems it's not an isolated incident as people have complained on Twitter about the subtitle translations in recent months as well.
Crunchyroll aren't the only offenders regarding AI subtitle translations. Recently, the official Garo Project YouTube channel has been uploading episodes of the currently-airing series Garo: Heir to Steel Armor, with English subtitles, the same way Tsuburaya has been uploading recent Ultra series as each one airs. The only problem is, however, the subtitles are AI translated. This has understandably caused upset for some tokusatsu fans, although others weren't as fussed about it and still chose to watch it with the AI subtitles anyway. From the bits I've seen (I only watched portions of the episodes to check the translation), the subtitle translation was a bit stilted. It's a real shame that something like this has happened. It should be noted that, as of this writing, only episodes 1, 2, 6 and 7 are available, with episodes 3, 4 and 5 taken down, so if people never got the chance to check out those episodes, or if they would rather not watch it with the AI translation, they might have to resort to fansubs (and yes, there is a fansub group out there, whose name I will not be mentioning on here, translating the series). And by the way things are going, if Crunchyroll makes AI translations a long term thing after testing it, it could lead to more people resorting to fansubs for these titles, and this can't be good for business.
I thought after the debacle with The Yuzuki Family's Four Sons that Crunchyroll have learnt their lesson. How wrong I was. People could lose their jobs because of this, all because a big company wants to save money by cutting corners on translations. Pure capitalism right there. And I don't think this will limit to their streaming service. I reckon home video releases will be affected later down the line too, but I would like to be proven wrong. I just hope the AI tests fail, because if they succeed, then I reckon more people will resort to piracy, and that won't be a good look on them at all.
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