One of the most anticipated titles of the summer 2024 season, “My deer friend Nokotan (Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan)”, got off to a rocky start amid widespread criticism and debate over the quality and origins of its subtitles. In particular, the major streaming service Crunchyroll has received heavy criticism for its alleged role in maintaining low-quality anime translations.

The English, French and German subtitles were particularly criticized on the various platforms that broadcast the series, highlighting that these translations did not undergo the quality review standard that fans are accustomed to. Veteran voice actors have pointed out the oddity of this situation, as the voice actors appear to be using a script that is nearly identical to the English subtitles. Although the subtitle and dub scripts are designed to match the characters' lip movements, The use of identical scripts has led some to say that the dubbing sounds unnatural.reflecting unfairly on artists.

Crunchyroll has faced most of this criticism as it is one of the largest anime platforms in the West that streams the series. Although it is very likely that the subtitles were not done by Crunchyroll, many point to the licensor REMOW (owner of Anime Onegai) as responsible for their treatment, other services such as ADN in France have redone the subtitles, while Crunchyroll has so far maintained the initials. Crunchyroll's history of using lower-quality third-party subtitles resurfaced as criticism from fans, while others recalled the “The four children of the Yuzuki family“, which the company removed from its website, but denied using AI.

Despite the controversy,My deer friend Nokotan” continues to generate great expectations for its future episodes. The opening song “Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan” It went viral and sparked an online trend. Posted five days ago, the uncredited version currently has over 9 million views, while the licensor REMOW hopes to make the series “the most widely available new anime of 2024”transmitted in Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime Video, DNA, Anime Onegai and much more.

Shueisha, Shogakukan and others recently invested in machine translation start-up Orange, which expects to take 50,000 titles overseas over the next five years. Both companies are also backing another startup, Mantrathat provides official translations with AI for “One Piece” and “Spy x Family” in select territories. The Japan Association of Translators (JAT) recently spoke out following news of the Mantra investment, highlighting serious concerns about such moves.

• «I've seen some clips from the dubbed episode and no joke, the Japanese subtitle script AND the dub script are 100% identical! So this isn't just affecting the subtitled version, but the dubbed version as well!».
• «I don’t think Shikanoko’s translation is AI or machine translation. It’s sloppy, yes, with weird punctuation and capitalization, but a computer wouldn’t have been able to spot “ノツ” as a greeting (“horn” backwards in Japanese) as “nroh”, that’s pretty smart/human. I think it was just a rush job.».
• «The lack of oversight for third-party subtitles has been a known issue for Crunchyroll since basically their inception as a legal service 15 years ago, and they've done absolutely nothing about it in that time, so I wouldn't count on it changing any time soon.».
• «Crunchy Roll You really need to think twice before agreeing to stream an anime licensed by someone else without overseeing the translation. When a show arrives with someone else's dubbed subtitles that literally haven't been checked for even basic grammar, it only reflects poorly on them.».
• «I saw these in German and they looked really weird to me. I knew they were outsourced because they didn't have any credits, whereas Crunchyroll Germany usually does. Also, while I can't say they were machine translated, they definitely looked like a rebroadcast translation, the subtitles were probably machine translated from English. They accidentally left an internal edit note, which for some reason is in English».
• «I felt like I was going crazy, haha, they looked really weird when I was watching them (with English subtitles)… I’m not skilled enough in Japanese to judge the actual translations, but there were a lot of grammatical issues. Missing capital letters, commas, and so on. I’ve never seen that before in a Crunchyroll show. (Apparently that’s what happened in previous seasons with Migi & Dali and Tonbo too, but I haven’t watched them so I can’t say much about that. It seems to have something to do with the distributor REMOW)».
• «Don't these stupid distributors realize that if they provide a shitty automatic translation, we can also hack the program with our own shitty automatic translation? The whole point of the service is to provide subtitles and they are skimping on that, you greedy lazybones.».
• «Again with these subtitles provided by the shitty licensor? It's the four children of the Yuzuki family again».
• «So I wasn't the only one who noticed that? Okay, I'm glad to know I'm not crazy. Those subtitles were terrible... At the beginning of the episode, everyone was asking if it was "shoujo" and the subtitles were translated to "lady", which they didn't understand at all... Then, a few minutes later, the same joke again about "shoujo" but this time correctly translated to "virgin"... Those subtitles, besides being terrible, were very inconsistent... I can't believe people pay for a service like that... Even fansubs are better! (Although I miss fansubs)».
• «This is probably true, but I should point out that it is not uncommon to not give credit to translators. Their work is often not credited in anime, video games, and so on. Sometimes the name of a translation company is mentioned, but not the name of the individuals, sometimes nothing at all.».
• «If this is the same version I saw, the translation was very bad and full of errors. Luckily, I understand most of what they say in Japanese, but I feel sorry for those who have no idea.».
• «MTL = Machine TransLation, it means someone ran something like Google Translate (I just found out that Google Translate uses AI for a while now, so it's not a good example of MTL to use) instead of a person translating and localizing the dialogues. ADN is a German (I think) French anime streaming site».
• «This is why the localization industry is a nightmare. Not because what the culture war profiteers preach is bad, because we are in a sublicensing hell where everyone is competing to reduce costs. Just a dozen middlemen outsourcing to other middlemen, down to a few interns running a script through DeepL and calling it a day.».
• «The anti-localization folks are pretty quiet now that we have shitty AI subtitles to replace real translators».
• «Crunchyroll is a disgrace. I'm sick of so many corners being cut on a service that people pay for. It's like they want anime fans to sail the seas».

Source: reddit