@@HenshinFanatic Unfortunately they can vote, so they count legally. Well, most of em live in SoCal so I think they're busy with the consequences of their own voting actions.
@@broden4838RT is already dead, WB can't even sell anything of it, and RWBY may as well be a dead IP as they axed any future volumes (it was dead the moment Monty was TBH) All the people that made RT pretty much got their money and left, and the community that once liked RT has evaporated due to the handling of many of their projects after going corpo.
I do think something important will be lost, good localizations are a genuine treat to read, and I do fear that we will lose out on some potential greats. Realistically, the best translations were unofficial, and will likely remain unoffical ones even into the future
Part of making translations and localizations is taking an idiom and translating it into another idiom in the target language that not only translates the meaning but also the sentiment and general vibe. Is it serious? Is it sarcastic? How should the voice actor read and emphazise this thing? A proper translation should convey the feeling that needs to go into a dub. Even worse are things like double entendres and puns. Professional translators can’t do this because they have been politically captured. AI can’t consistently do this because it generally sucks and won’t have enough context to understand when something is a callback that it should riff on and sarcastically use the same expressions and intonation as an earlier episode etc. It perhaps will one day. AI as implemented in LLMs is non-deterministic; it ranks the alternatives by weight of likelyhood and uses a random number to pick according to weight. It is a sheer miracle how much clever sounding nonsense you can get from an LLM; sometimes it is even correct and factual. There’s no reasoning or understanding in the model. But that only takes you so far and when you’ve devoured the entire internet’s text resources as well as scanned books there’s nothing left; just garbage output by other AIs. For a long time fan translations (just the text) are likely to remain the gold standard. Dubs are universally kind of terrible; very hard to do and the people with the resources that they might get it right once in a blue moon don’t have the motivation.
Listen, if i would do the same i would lose my job in around 2 Days. Iam responsible for Airport Security, so it would be like that: I do not want to implement some laws and rules because i personally think they are stupid or would be better for the airport, like setting the room temperature to 13°C (~55 F°) while people need to undress and be controlled there because i personal like it cold. It's the same thing, it would be just about me, the company needs to cool it down in summer, Passengers would be shivering, my staff would not be happy either, its just me. But yeah, i would totally throw a tantrum when i lost my job because of THAT.
I'm over 9,000% for anime no longer needing localisers. Also, Japanese companies should always keep veto power over any translation process for their products.
If you pay attention, you'll see that most Japanese companies don't actually pay attention to what's being done with the product after it's handed off. From what I understand, their main focus is that the localizers don't physically alter anything that would make the product bad -- think 4Kids dubs, where they actively changed the visuals to be more western and censored for the viewers. They don't even think about the translation, which is why so many people in Japan lately have been surprised at hearing how much the localizers have been changing -- there's a reason they're only getting upset now, and that's because they never thought about it before, just like how you've probably never thought about how faithful our shows are translated over there.
A lot of them probably just have no idea about the absolute minefield American culture is right now. You could probably show higher ups examples of the translations, but, even if they speak English, they might not understand the cultural relevance of certain word choices. Words like "mansplain" might just sound like very specific Anerican slang to a Japanese person unless you take the time to tell them about fourth wave feminism and how the term is used almost exclusively by people from that movement. Changing calling a man "tsundere" to talking about his "fragile male ego" might make sense to a Japanese person in context enough to let it slide unless they know about the toxic gender wars in American media and how similar it is to "fragile masculinity", which is another fourth wave feminist buzzword. Basically, they may need to have it explained to them that changes they would otherwise probably let slide are examples of western idiots using their properties for political propaganda.
@RinaRetro Thank you for your efforts at home. It helps knowing that the people of Japan are aware of what we've been so tired of seeing. I'm American and I've loved the japanese culture and language anime/manga/light novels can show/teach people around the world. It kept me going all this time. It helps me get through my day especially after everything here is being destroyed.
Good riddance. I got REALLY tired of the mockery of the fans of the genre and it being used for political gain instead of supporting the creators and animators of the animes they've tainted to hell and back!
Visa has been blocking funding, and anime is infiltrated. There isn't any more mature high quality content. People don't see it, and even watch Netflix trash. If you think any of the Netflix animations are good, you're the problem. They're literally sabotaging anime and replacing it with Netflix. Netflix visual quality is superior, BUT the story and dialogue is woke or cringe trash. All while anime has no budget and mass produces low effort baby shows. Anime is dead. It's following the WOW playbook by exploiting normies.
@JohnDoe-ip3oq reminds me too much of Crunchyroll and their heinous bs. Like the time they used the money to fancy up their office and made their own "anime", if that's what you want to call it, while the REAL animators got gipped hard.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq True, but this was way before Netflix. The last good Anime-series and movies were made around 2005. So, nothing of value has been lost.
@ that warms my heart a little. Happy to hear he didn’t just quit the industry altogether. It’s a little sad that he has to work so hard to pave his own way though. Thank you for that little tidbit. If you get a moment, and the name of the company comes to mind, I’d love to look into it. Maybe buy a shirt or something.
@@jimmydean7219 No problem. I did a little search and this is what I found: Anime Matsuri - Is the name of the New Dubbing Studio for "Nippon Animation" films. The one I was talking about that either Vic is voicing in or promoting is called "Zip! Shimezo".
As a translator at risk of losing my job to AI, I'm fine with localizers no longer corrupting any form of media, but I must also warn that it could be used by the usual suspects with an agenda.
@MaverickhunterXZero Not train, more like the parameters they add to prevent certain conclusions. Google didn't train their sht on diverse notsees, they just told it to make the output "diverse" so the it did so for everything.
Difficult subject. Right now, Chat GPT kind of has a monopoly on quality AI translations in the gaming field, for example. Depending on an online model that they frequently update, with no way of archiving the model you're using, they can definitely make a mess of it. But if they do, I think people will just figure out another option, and it's a matter of time before offline models get the job done too, and everything can be done in-house with reliable models. The problem is if the developer gets too lazy to even do that, and we see an industry of "Hire us to do AI translations", and then the third party starts playing the fool. Which, if I've learned anything about business, it's that they love to outsource.
Except they're infiltrating anime directly, and all anime in general has gone massively downhill in quality and story. It's all low frame rate moe trash. Mature content is dead. They have been blocking money like Visa for years. If you can't see it, maybe you like watching woke slop. Good anime hasn't existed for a while. I know some people like the Netflix shows. If you can't see the problem with this, you won't see better content ever again.
@@jorgezaldivar3113 by itself no, but when there's nothing else? Trash. Also, quality dropped on everything left including that. They'll probably drop all animation, go to CG, then whoops live action with CG. Berserk went to CG. Half way there. Imagine CG moe. Would it even be moe? There's not going to be anything left in several years, just cocomelon slop, and people watching it will be cocomelon enjoyers. SMH? You don't deserve the privilege. That's for people who have taste and can recognize quality dropping.
@@rashira9610 Yeah. I couldn't care less about the fools that caused this, but AI doesn't understand context, word play, and so on. It'll likely be just another KIND of terrible, so... we lose either way.
Good! GET RID OF THEM! They’ve ruined enough games and anime with their ridiculous crap! I’m not happy they’re being replaced by AI, but gosh darn it they suck so bad at their jobs!!
That's where you're wrong entirely you make it sound like everybody who does localization is bad that cannot be further from the truth you're trying to love everybody together with the bad ones is unnecessary Siri
@@MordethKai To me, almost every English main character seems to have the same voice actor lol. Or like the same 10 english voice actors do all dubbing for all anime. Just mean I feel like we need more variety of voices in dubs.
I actually wonder if what started all this wasn't the whole Vic Mignona thing. If so, I am laughing at those idiots so hard. They wanted more power, they tried to sue someone for it, and they lost all their power in the process. 😂 Screw you Bulma.
Don't get me started on Monica Rial and that other female dog. They're two of THE main reasons why I'll never listen to a Funimation English dub again.
@@lancekemal8989 I might play a bit of a Devil’s advocate here. When I first started watching Anime back in 2010, she’s one of the VAs I would know by name. So really, I grew up listening to her in roles. And maybe It’s just me, but for some roles, I liked her take. Like when I hear an English dub, there are characters she does which I would always think of her as the first thing. I found out that she played a role in an Anime called Baccano! As a French woman. And maybe it’s just my simple brain at the time, but I thought it was cool she could pull off a French accent. Then I thought both she And Jamie Marchi knocked it out of the Park in the roles as Panty and Stocking. But. Later down the line, I also started watching Dragonball some time in 2015. And I distinctively remember watching the version Where Monica did not voice Bulma. I forgot the name of the original English VA (Was it Tiffany?) but I am more use to her than I am to Monica. When it comes to an English Bulma, the OG VA is who I picture. Because truthfully. Monica’s voice just slowly began too grating for me as Bulma. Like her voice would more suit the whiny old lady characters who nag on you all the time. And while Bulma has her moments, she is still a genius who rightfully takes some pride in her own work.
The fact that it's VLC of all things makes this somehow even more hilarious, considering that's the player pretty much everybody uses for their media they've got on the high seas...
I will never understand why companies like Crunchyroll and Sentai Filmworks never just fired these localisers. Surely they’d know that all their mistranslations would do is drive up piracy. But I guess now it doesn’t matter that much now that the actual player comes with AI subtitles. Should have just done their jobs right in the first place instead of incorporating their cringy fan fiction into official translations.
Because the companies (at least the western departments) agree with them. This is why all those twitter weirdos were seething at that jelloapocolyse guy even through he was one of their own cuz he snitched the quiet part out loud that all these western anime/mange publishing and streaming sites like Crunchyroll, Retrocrush and even the more niece ones like Discotek media all encourage this activist BS. You truly can't trust any of these snakes.
They haven't been paying attention. Japan doesn't (Didn't) care about translations until just recently, and the only reason their noticing now is because the outrage began to grow so loud the Japanese community started to get curious why everyone was so angry, and then THEY got angry, which lead to the companies getting curious and seeing why everyone was so angry, which -- like before -- lead to THEM getting angry. From what I understand, Japanese companies rules for editing are typically aimed towards altering the art, not so much altering the script. They're trusting the localizers to translate their work into a medium that is easier to understand by non-Japanese speakers, so some alterations are to be expected. It's only because the Woke Mind Virus began to infect everything that things got bad enough for them to actually stop and look at what the translations were actually saying.
That doesn't make any sense at all one thing people like you will never understand is you make it sound like every single localization is a bad person that could not be further from the truth some of them have been doing their good job recently so what makes sense for all these English companies to just fire everyone have your information send them have done their job correctly
Any one of us would be fired for doing deliberately bad jobs at work and then bragging about it in the open. This was a long time coming for these ego maniacs.
They wouldn't be in this mess had they focus on translating this without putting their woke activist in it. Now they get to join the increasing number of Hollywood folks on the unemployable line.
The neat thing about AI is that anyone (provided they have loads of GPUs at their disposal) can build and train a model. The frameworks are ubiquitous now. Many of them are open source.
“How accurate is this?” Well, unless the AI brings a shovel, it’s not going to be any lower than the bar that’s been set by the localizers in the west.
there is a difficult ballance to "localization." People generally don't mind the slight shifting of cultural context to make certain things make sense in translation, but when you start peddling politics that have nothing to do with the direct translation, that's when we have a problem. Unfortunately, bad localization has been a thorn in the side of every gamer and fan of any form of forign media since this practice began. Many people would happily take AI translations, or even AI dubs if they're more accurate and don't peddle the politics. I'm sure we all would prefer a person to do the job but as we are finding out, people can't be trusted.
Never lie about other country's culture. Saying otherwise is like saying it is fine to talk about Bill Clinton in an anime set in Japan, which makes no sense.
Adult Swim’s take on Shin Chan was a great example of a conversion WITH injecting local politics …despite some of the differences. But that was when we weren’t at each other’s throat and people still had senses of humor. And when the Left hadn’t completely left the reservation.
Localization is never needed and should be cast away. Simply add a translator note off tot he side, this has worked in the past and it'll work just fine in the future. We don't need some goon adding "bruh" to every sentence in the name of "localization" just because the character used "aibo" once. Many fan translators for manga actually devote a panel/page at the end of each chapter to further explain cultural significance of certain references made in that chapter. Shouldn't people rather be willing to learn about another culture than completely rewriting it to suit their ignorant lifestyle? If you're indulging in another culture's media, have the decency to actually be willing to interact with it. If i'm watching another country's show, I want to hear that country's slang.
Me and my wife were watching a Korean soap yesterday and they used an American term in the subs and it totally ruined the setting and tone of the show. So, I will have to respectfully disagree with needing to fit the nation you are subbing for.
ADV suck. I never laughed at the implication that Ayumu Kasuga from Azumanga Daiou is a Southern US girl. Mentioning Bill Clinton makes no sense in an anime set in Japan.
@@LuigiTheMetal64 Osaka as a region is analagous to the American south, so the southern accent makes sense. The Clinton bit didn't work out, but that's one bad example. Have you ever tried reading machine-translated Japanese, or even direct-translations without touchups for grammar? At best, it's off-puttingly mechanical sounding. At worst, it's gibberish
@@PsychicWarsyeah at least there was a genuine attempt to keep the Osakan accent culturally relevant by trying to mimic what it would be like as an American. That kind of stuff i would give extreme leeway so long there was an attempt made to translate in good faith. Another thing that would be hard to translate is that one scene in Black Lagoon Revy spoke English in the Japanese dub. The reason she spoke English is because she was Chinese American if I remember correctly. The equivalent would be that a Spanish person was speaking Spanish in an area where everyone else was speaking English. Just so that everyone else didn't know what was being said and she was playing dumb with the guy. I wouldn't even know how to adequately translate that scene. Think they had her speaking broken English in the English translation.
I think at the end of the day the studios will have to take responsibility for doing their own translations. A simple case of "if you want it done right do it yourself".
I've always loved anime, and always hated localization. If I wanted something from my region I wouldn't be watching foreign shows I'd be watching shows from my region.
Localization is not inherently "take thing from culture X and replace it with thing from culture Y," when done properly it's just "convey the intent of the line in a way that sounds natural to an English speaker." People just don't talk about examples of good localization because most people don't even know the first thing about Japanese so they don't ever notice it. There was a video that came up on my feed recently of someone talking about a Sonic Adventure line. It was translated as, "Ah, yeah! This is happenin'!" while the original line was, "グレート！ごきげんだね！" The direct translation of the line is, "Great! I feel good!" but the exact connotation of Sonic's line is to convey "coolness" (his usage of the English loanword 'Great'), a sort of cheeky, confident and deliberately meant to sound kinda jokey. "グレート" to "Ah, yeah" is the same general idea, an exclamation of excitement that sounds generally more cool and casual. And "ごきげんだね" to "This is happenin'" has the same general vibe - Sonic is excited and cheekily saying something to nobody in particular but just out of his own sense of passion, and using that 90s/2000s slang is entirely within the image of the character. It's a line that in terms of a direct translation has changed every single part of it, but in terms of an actual translation of the line's intent it captures the subtext of the line way more than a direct translation ever could. The purpose of the localization isn't to replace the Japanese, it's to show nuance of the line that a literal translation simply can't. To quote the video, "it's not about what the character says, it's what the line says about the character." I'm something of a hobbyist myself and let me tell you that if you do any level of translation even casually you run into these lines where you're like, "Damn. How do I convey THAT?" and have to really pick apart the line piece by piece.
Dude, there is no good translation without some degree of localisation. Like the person above said, the issue is bad localisation and straight-up purposeful mistranslations by bad actors. Even these AI software are localising the translation. Do you honestly think they're just using basic machine translations? Did you forget what those are like? You have no idea how odd sht sounds and how much awkwardness exists without it. I mean completely without it. 你吃了吗？literally: Have you eaten? But the English local equivalent is a greeting, so you will have whatever greeting is appropriate based on the context of the interaction used as the translation. That's all localisation is. Not everyone is good at it or understands it, apparently.
@@Zetact_ That is when done with passion and knowledge. Some of the recent anime done by the so called translation? You might as well have MTL at that point.
@@Zetact_ Yeah, I guess the important thing is to keep the spirit of the original dialogue. I remember Dragonball Z having some weird translations in my country, they would even mention tv shows and other stuff from my own country, but that just made it more hilarious. It was about fun, not activism.
I've seen live a translation app used instead of a human translator for multiple languages in a conference I went to last year. Worked very decently. I could tell a few idioms from French and Spanish were not quite right, but it was surprisingly decent. The app could even contextualize the field (medicine) and choose the appropriate words quite well. It has hugely improved in the last few years as models have become much better. I have a cousin who is a professional translator (Spanish-French-English) and she is changing careers because all she does nowadays are fixes to AI-translated texts. This is a dying field, no matter what anyone says. I have never liked "localization" in dubbing/subtitles anyway. If I am watching something from another country, I do not want their culture erased from it to fill it with western concepts and ideas, I want the "otherness" - that is part of what is interesting about it.
Time to celebrate!!!! 🙌🏻 OMG I remember Boys over Flowers, the anime and the live action!!! The live action for Mars manga was great for being made back in the day, I’d love to see the manga animated. Truck-kun does show up in several shows 😂, No Longer Allowed in Another World actually gives a reason for the truck everyone gets hit by 😂
I really liked "No longer allowed in another world". The premise reminded me of a manga that was cancelled by the first chapter due to the villains looking too similar to other ip heroes. The depressing protagonist was a breath of fresh air and his coffin travel reminded me of Dragon Quest's party member coffin mechanic.
Ever since Netflix retranslated Evangelion I stopped watching anime on mainstream platforms altogether. Thank God I brought the old DVD's when I got the chance
As an old-school Otaku, I have always preferred fan translation to official because I would learn new terms or honorifics. I love dubs as those were more available and cheaper then sub.but the translations have gotten way to western politics when I know for a fact there is little chance that was in the original content. If you are going to do something filled with western references and politics make it more like Ghost Stories where the translation team got the ok to make up thier own story and fit it too the series.
I remember watching Combatants Will Be Dispatched on Crunchyroll early last year, and I was thinking "WTF?!" Because the dub for a buffed tiger was talking about getting transitioning and saying he had certain feelings about little boys.
Even if they use AI, they’re still probably going to need humans to proofread the translated scripts to make sure there aren’t any typos or grammatical errors.
One of them is having different dialects, honorifics, ending phrases, and onomatopoeias. Imagine AI trying to translate Pretty Cure where the mascots are known for the made-up ending phrases that even the Star Twinkle human characters notice "lun" and "yan" being said.
Yeah but that can be done in house by a smaller group of bilingual people who know enough about English to proofread and correct the errors instead of having to depend on whole groups of people that may try and shove current Western politics into something where those politics aren't.....like that whole "Patriarchy" thing from Dragon Maid.
Good honestly the Voice Acting industry is one of the most vain, enititled, arrogant and overall toxic when it comes to entertainment. They get what they deserve.
I'm not saying voice acting isn't a hard job and that there aren't people who are great at it, but some of them have Hollywood Actor egos. Anime dubbing used to be niche and the actors were grateful for fan recognition. Nowadays, you get dub VAs acting like they co-created the characters.
This just reminded me of a fan translation of an isekai story (an elseworld story, think Narnia, for people who don't know the terminology). It was about a Japanese guy who was turned into a game character who was a turn-based wizard in a real time world. And out of nowhere in one chapter, it started talking about US politics from the 90s. It was jarring and out of nowhere. For a Japanese born main character to monologue about.
"Piracy isnt a prizing problem, its a service problem" -Lord Gabe If pirates can give better translations and soon better dubs, then why would we fans go to legitimate western distributers? Id say its your duty to pirate, then go donate to things like Animators Dormitory or import merch from your favorite Anime/Manga.
@@LatitudeSky There are several stores in the US that specialize in it not to mention ton of import stores that and have been making business of this for over 20 years. For example Mitsuwa Marketplace and Kinukuniya USA are physical stores in the US you can go to specialized in it. Kinokuniya also has online ordering whereas Mitsuwa Marketplaces are effectively mini-malls/grocery stores that include videostores where you can find the original releases of asian media including anime. There are also several stores for this online if you just look. So yes it is fairly easy. There are also other slightly more complicated ways as well such as sites that specialize in providing local storage in Japan to foreign (US) customers for things sellers normally don't sell out of the country. They then combine things stored in order to ship overseas allowing users to also save some on international shipping. These are all examples I have and still personally use.
I wonder if this is why hit pieces are starting to appear now describing the genre as 'problematic'? I covered one recently and am now starting to put two and two together.
When I first started using subtitles on RUclips they were bizarre. One actual example is when I was watching Uk’s Time Team, about the Ancient Roman Empire, and the subtitles were about naked mosquitoes going to a birthday party. I was just happy if I got the basic jist of whatever video I was watching. Now it’s almost never wrong. The last time I had wrong subtitles it was on a live TV news program. They have come such a long way. RUclips has released the auto translate feature. I haven’t checked it out yet so I’m unsure how accurate it is but it’s a pretty cool feature.
Awesome! So this could eventually become something like a "universal translator" akin to stuff we've seen on Star Trek, or a tech version of the babel fish from Hitchhiker's Guide, or the TARDIS' translation circuit? 😄
This should have happened years ago! Should have been translated by the people who made the anime. Not a 3rd party to screw it all up. It was a simple job. Incompetence.
Best case scenario: This forces localizers to be accurate in order to compete with automation. Most Likely scenario: Industry screams about how this is evil and demands audiences keep paying for deceptive edits. An activism campaign starts to demand the AI be politically correct and censor content.
I’ve always preferred subtitles on anime or foreign movies, since you hear the emotion or personality in the voice it makes it more natural and genuine.
Hmm...it might not be over for fan-subs at the very least. Japan has these honorific attachments to names depending on your relation to the person you're speaking to or their gender, or the other person's title/ranking in a hierarchy. Usually fan-subs keep those titles as is because Japanese anime is based on Japanese culture. I've seen Google translate and other translation sites butcher those honorifics and try to get an English equivalent, but it isn't normal much for a person in their family to call their own siblings as 'brother' or 'sister' as often as an anime does; people in the West just addresses their siblings by their first name. I think all this will do is just make an anime fan-translator's job easier. As for localizers, I've never appreciate their job because of their tampering with scripts. I think this is a win-win for fan translations and fans. If VLC only needs minor adjustments to their translations, then fan-subbing will be much easier in terms of checking and translating and fan groups would probably increase their output on translated shows too. Other than this, this might be good for non-anime shows as well. There are small fan groups that translate variety shows, other TV shows or movies, so this would be great in general if it works.
with these shifts, the voice technology mentioned doing AI dubs can provide the voicework for the community cleaned subtitles making accurate dubs a reality for those blind/low vision anime fans who are completely cut off from the more accurate world of subtitled anime.
@@GlitchedVision Yeah, I think it's good as well. If it gets to this point, dubbers and localizers will be out of a job. But hey, if they want to complain, just make great animations in America a thing again. The only way to compete with foreign animation is creating a great animation work with a good narrative and characters. I really do not want far left or far right talking points on politics in fictional works that I enjoy. Just keep the story down to Earth and driven by common sense and I'll enjoy it.
Funny enough I could probably see some fansub groups getting in on this action. VLC is highly modular as far as user input goes, so I would imagine it would also support user-based AI training as well. Meaning fansub groups that were always dedicated to providing accurate quality subtitles could probably train an AI to do the work for them.
I think it will be easier since it’s not live. It’s essentially giving ai a book and saying translate this and take as much time as you need. Live translation is what’s still wonky
there have been bad official localizer for decades, they like to change meaning of scenes or lines ( eg Disney but great voice acting). So fan sub has been they best way for years
But then who will lord their false moral superiority ober me and tell me what a horrible person I am for buying the products that give them their jobs in the first place?
This is great news, I expect some minor issues early on, but it will get better with time. Now we need AI software to do the same for games, books, and manga so we can cut out the anti fan localizers.
I'm excited for when we get to the point where the AI can actively translate the VA themself into whatever language you're looking for. That's going to be peak.
How things are translated changes the story, and this affects the artist content. The localizers decided to insert the Woke cult agenda at the same time AI was maturing, and this is their fault.
cant be much worse then "let that child alone" there are so many old animes i wanted dubs for macross is a big one i just wish i could tell the ai to make Vic the voice actor for max sterling
I wouldn’t be too quick to jump on that. This is going to put localizer is out of work. RUclips is trying a similar AI thing with RUclips videos. They had to stop because the AI could batch video titles and translations.
This concept is VERY fascinating to me. With some of the international audience I’ve been fielding in my own line of work, this feature has been implemented into Zoom already with surprising success and accuracy for live subbing. As a medical clinic we always default to real living simultaneous translators whenever available for maximum accuracy, but that’s only consistent for Spanish Italian and Japanese audiences. Our Chinese and Arabic families have actually seen surprising success with the feature over several months so I trust that accuracy is fairly passable. If this is being standardized in applications like VLC or even QuickTime, and it’s more accurate than the BS you see in IG Reels or RUclips shorts which is often more wrong than right, it will be an immediate gamechanger.
"Boys Over Flowers" I watched some of the subbed version of the Hana Yori Dango anime on DVD years ago (switched to the English dub for a few minutes and chuckled at how one of the main guys, IIRC Tsukasa, said the name "Tsukushi" in English) and never once did I think there would be a live-action version of that. XD
If they are adding soul, then they aren't making an accurate translation. To a degree I can see what some people say. Maybe they make the language more colorful in some areas, but considering today's climate I think most people want an honest 1-1 whenever possible. What does t carry over just needs to be close enough.
I hope they trained the AI to not Anglicize names, and to keep the -chan, -san, oppa, unni and whatever appellations we have learned to recognize over the years.
Hopefully it can output the raw text. There's a subtitle program that can transcribe using ai and it gives you both the transcription and the translation at the same time.
Hold on... doing this for subs is one thing. But I usually watch dubs, at least for the first watch. I can't pay attention to the show and read subtitles at the same time. But I don't want to hear an AI generated robot voice. I want actual voice actors, actually reading from an actual script. If they use AI to translate the Japanese into English (or whatever) subs, and also into a script which is then acted by real voice actors, I guess I can live with that (even though I generally think AI is evil and will eventually be the end of us all). BTW, the Korean show I like is Gyeongseong Creature. It's a little like a Korean Stranger Things, or Dean Koontz novel.
As someone who usually watches dub over sub due to (professionally diagnosed) ADHD, I get where you're coming from. That's why I want AI to replace translators, not voice actors. Sure, fire the obnoxious Twitter/BlueSky VAs and replace them with professional ones. But don't replace VAs altogether.
AI can clone people's voices now dude. Don't you remmeber how AI cloned jordan peterson's voice? Now imagine the original jpaanese voice actor's voice being cloned by AI, and you just feed that into a translator into enlgish and then the cloned voice of the original voice actor can say the lines in english using their cloned voice? Pretty neat. This is what I think is the future. AI can only improve from here on. So you will get original japanese voice actors that don't kno english, and hear their voice in english through AI which cloned their voice. No need to read subtitles. They will definitely need an editor to handle grammer and other things like specific terms, names and labales unique to the lore of the series that doesn't exist in our real world. (fantasy and science fiction often has made up science and magick systems that don't exist so the editor's job is to correct the AI when it makes a mistake here)
Used to look up to the ADV voice actors, now because of Vic, I can only watch anime subtitled. They railroaded the guy. Now with your phone, you can translate whole anime books in only a few hours, compared to the laborious process that took ages before then.
Not a fan of the localizers that shove in their personal opinions and politics, subverting the work done by the creators... But won't AI subtitles, especially ones in real-time, come out poorly? Like really bad Google Translate? Even if it can be improved, I feel like more accurate subs/dubs would be far from now.
Trust me, Google translate has made leaps and bounds in the past decades. Granted, some problems won't be completely solved, but then again, ai and humans cannot fix bad incoherrent writing period.
Free services also tend to be cheaper made then paid ones. I wouldn't be surprised if people have already spent time making more expensive ai translator services. Probably not for this specific situation, but yeah. Well have to wait and see. Edit: real time will probably just have more issues though. Since different sentence structures might mean it either has to delay a bit or worry about the order of words.
@@lightningpenguin8937 true, but if the human translators refuse to do their job, even the cheapest translation may as well be gold to what normally be nothing.
I personally adore fan-subs, since the actual fans of the series tend to commit themselves more to absolute accuracy. I can't go into detail because of the nature of his character, but Bon Kurei from One Piece is an example of what I mean. "Okama" means something very particular, and I like it when the fan-subs explain the nuance and context for various in-jokes you would normally only understand if you spoke fluent Japanese. Like Gaimon, and the "Boxed son" joke. The joke being he's trapped inside a treasure chest, but "Boxed son" is a term people use when talking about overly sheltered young men. Comedic misunderstandings ensue, and it's brilliant.
It might train off of artists and talent's work without their knowledge or their consent and replace them due to capitalism and fascism but it won't replace that.
I will not be surprised if the next step will be a new video file format. On that can match anime character lip movement. So the video will be in sync with the audio independent of language
@@nobafan7515 Yeah right, by stealing off of the works of artists and talent without their knowledge and without their consent, all for the sole intention of replacing with them. And A.I is a threat to the livelihoods of millions if not billions of people, not just those of those artists and talent that it trained off of.
you know what this video and article reminds me of? Krillin to -Dende- Little green: "HEY, so uh, do you now about karma?" Dende: "No, i do not." Krillin: "well, it goes if you do something BA(AA)D: Localizers: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE--" Something bad happens to you. BUT, if you do something Goo(oo)d: Localizers: "WHY DON'T PEOPLE BEND THE KNEE-" Something Good Happens to you..!" Dende: "So, if i'm good, all of my family will come back." Krillin: "... are you still on about that???"
No tears will be shed. They did this to themselves.
Only of joy, bud, only of joy.
@@HenshinFanaticFair enough.
I think there will be no shortage of tears shed by localizers
@@MrNorker77 but do they count as people? Survey says, no.
@@HenshinFanatic Unfortunately they can vote, so they count legally. Well, most of em live in SoCal so I think they're busy with the consequences of their own voting actions.
I hope the KickVic VAs are the first to go.
Justice for Vic
Agreed, never forgive what they did to Vic. Those people were absolutely vile.
What about Rooster Teeth's remnants? You know they had a hand to play. And I'm hoping VIZ reboots RWBY and has a crew that cares about it.
@@broden4838RT is already dead, WB can't even sell anything of it, and RWBY may as well be a dead IP as they axed any future volumes (it was dead the moment Monty was TBH)
All the people that made RT pretty much got their money and left, and the community that once liked RT has evaporated due to the handling of many of their projects after going corpo.
@@gibmeaway100 TBH? But a reboot would revive it. But of course, me or several others would gladly put an end to the antics of CRWBY's fans
Nothing valuable was lost. They did this to themselves for not doing their damn jobs.
That part
I do think something important will be lost, good localizations are a genuine treat to read, and I do fear that we will lose out on some potential greats. Realistically, the best translations were unofficial, and will likely remain unoffical ones even into the future
as a Japanese speaker their translation isn't accurate
Part of making translations and localizations is taking an idiom and translating it into another idiom in the target language that not only translates the meaning but also the sentiment and general vibe. Is it serious? Is it sarcastic? How should the voice actor read and emphazise this thing? A proper translation should convey the feeling that needs to go into a dub.
Even worse are things like double entendres and puns.
Professional translators can’t do this because they have been politically captured.
AI can’t consistently do this because it generally sucks and won’t have enough context to understand when something is a callback that it should riff on and sarcastically use the same expressions and intonation as an earlier episode etc. It perhaps will one day. AI as implemented in LLMs is non-deterministic; it ranks the alternatives by weight of likelyhood and uses a random number to pick according to weight. It is a sheer miracle how much clever sounding nonsense you can get from an LLM; sometimes it is even correct and factual. There’s no reasoning or understanding in the model. But that only takes you so far and when you’ve devoured the entire internet’s text resources as well as scanned books there’s nothing left; just garbage output by other AIs.
For a long time fan translations (just the text) are likely to remain the gold standard. Dubs are universally kind of terrible; very hard to do and the people with the resources that they might get it right once in a blue moon don’t have the motivation.
Listen, if i would do the same i would lose my job in around 2 Days. Iam responsible for Airport Security, so it would be like that: I do not want to implement some laws and rules because i personally think they are stupid or would be better for the airport, like setting the room temperature to 13°C (~55 F°) while people need to undress and be controlled there because i personal like it cold.
It's the same thing, it would be just about me, the company needs to cool it down in summer, Passengers would be shivering, my staff would not be happy either, its just me. But yeah, i would totally throw a tantrum when i lost my job because of THAT.
I'm over 9,000% for anime no longer needing localisers.
Also, Japanese companies should always keep veto power over any translation process for their products.
I hope this same thing spreads over to video games also.
If you pay attention, you'll see that most Japanese companies don't actually pay attention to what's being done with the product after it's handed off. From what I understand, their main focus is that the localizers don't physically alter anything that would make the product bad -- think 4Kids dubs, where they actively changed the visuals to be more western and censored for the viewers.
They don't even think about the translation, which is why so many people in Japan lately have been surprised at hearing how much the localizers have been changing -- there's a reason they're only getting upset now, and that's because they never thought about it before, just like how you've probably never thought about how faithful our shows are translated over there.
A lot of them probably just have no idea about the absolute minefield American culture is right now. You could probably show higher ups examples of the translations, but, even if they speak English, they might not understand the cultural relevance of certain word choices. Words like "mansplain" might just sound like very specific Anerican slang to a Japanese person unless you take the time to tell them about fourth wave feminism and how the term is used almost exclusively by people from that movement. Changing calling a man "tsundere" to talking about his "fragile male ego" might make sense to a Japanese person in context enough to let it slide unless they know about the toxic gender wars in American media and how similar it is to "fragile masculinity", which is another fourth wave feminist buzzword.
Basically, they may need to have it explained to them that changes they would otherwise probably let slide are examples of western idiots using their properties for political propaganda.
8,000% is the original Japan Dub 😆
@@atlasgraham154 Yeah, it only took them 40 years.
*FINALLY! Serves them right! Don’t mess with my country’s culture and language!* 😠
Amen
@RinaRetro Thank you for your efforts at home. It helps knowing that the people of Japan are aware of what we've been so tired of seeing. I'm American and I've loved the japanese culture and language anime/manga/light novels can show/teach people around the world. It kept me going all this time. It helps me get through my day especially after everything here is being destroyed.
私は日本語を勉強してまだ3年しか経っていませんけど、アニメの字幕にいつもエラーが見えます。英語字幕なし方がいいw
Im sick and tired of disgusting western philistines perverting and destroying MY anime!
Some stuff can't be properly translated and some Indio sequences can't be understood by English speakers
Good riddance. I got REALLY tired of the mockery of the fans of the genre and it being used for political gain instead of supporting the creators and animators of the animes they've tainted to hell and back!
Humans man.
@@texasfuneral4787. No, not humans in general; this was substandard idiot humans.
Visa has been blocking funding, and anime is infiltrated. There isn't any more mature high quality content. People don't see it, and even watch Netflix trash. If you think any of the Netflix animations are good, you're the problem. They're literally sabotaging anime and replacing it with Netflix. Netflix visual quality is superior, BUT the story and dialogue is woke or cringe trash. All while anime has no budget and mass produces low effort baby shows. Anime is dead. It's following the WOW playbook by exploiting normies.
@JohnDoe-ip3oq reminds me too much of Crunchyroll and their heinous bs. Like the time they used the money to fancy up their office and made their own "anime", if that's what you want to call it, while the REAL animators got gipped hard.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq True, but this was way before Netflix. The last good Anime-series and movies were made around 2005. So, nothing of value has been lost.
If Vic can’t work in the English industry, then good riddance to the lot of ‘em.
Last I hear he owns his own anime dubbing company and has made dubs for some niche shows.
One I recall about a zipper mouth Yokai.
@ that warms my heart a little. Happy to hear he didn’t just quit the industry altogether. It’s a little sad that he has to work so hard to pave his own way though. Thank you for that little tidbit. If you get a moment, and the name of the company comes to mind, I’d love to look into it. Maybe buy a shirt or something.
@@jimmydean7219 No problem. I did a little search and this is what I found:
Anime Matsuri - Is the name of the New Dubbing Studio for "Nippon Animation" films.
The one I was talking about that either Vic is voicing in or promoting is called "Zip! Shimezo".
@@jimmydean7219 He also voices the gun merchant in 7 Days to Die.
vic needs to learn another language
As a translator at risk of losing my job to AI, I'm fine with localizers no longer corrupting any form of media, but I must also warn that it could be used by the usual suspects with an agenda.
It really depends on what they train the AI on.
@MaverickhunterXZero Not train, more like the parameters they add to prevent certain conclusions.
Google didn't train their sht on diverse notsees, they just told it to make the output "diverse" so the it did so for everything.
@@sianais More so "Non-white" and when people found out, that is what happens.
Difficult subject. Right now, Chat GPT kind of has a monopoly on quality AI translations in the gaming field, for example. Depending on an online model that they frequently update, with no way of archiving the model you're using, they can definitely make a mess of it. But if they do, I think people will just figure out another option, and it's a matter of time before offline models get the job done too, and everything can be done in-house with reliable models.
The problem is if the developer gets too lazy to even do that, and we see an industry of "Hire us to do AI translations", and then the third party starts playing the fool. Which, if I've learned anything about business, it's that they love to outsource.
so be an ai proofreader
“Good.”
-Zelda, Princess of Hyrule
Looks like those people who try to ruin anime are finally getting what they deserve!
Except they're infiltrating anime directly, and all anime in general has gone massively downhill in quality and story. It's all low frame rate moe trash. Mature content is dead. They have been blocking money like Visa for years. If you can't see it, maybe you like watching woke slop. Good anime hasn't existed for a while. I know some people like the Netflix shows. If you can't see the problem with this, you won't see better content ever again.
I seriously doubt that
@JohnDoe-ip3oq You think moe is TRASH😒!? smh...
@@jorgezaldivar3113 by itself no, but when there's nothing else? Trash. Also, quality dropped on everything left including that. They'll probably drop all animation, go to CG, then whoops live action with CG. Berserk went to CG. Half way there. Imagine CG moe. Would it even be moe? There's not going to be anything left in several years, just cocomelon slop, and people watching it will be cocomelon enjoyers. SMH? You don't deserve the privilege. That's for people who have taste and can recognize quality dropping.
FINALLY! We can have accurate translations without added BS! FINALLY!
Watch all the AIs get replaced immediately by silicon valley SJW approved AIs lol
@@MerlosTheMadikr These people think AI wil save us no they wont they ate just as woke as woke humans
All dubbed by Andy Kaufman.
I don't really know about the accurate part
@@rashira9610 Yeah. I couldn't care less about the fools that caused this, but AI doesn't understand context, word play, and so on. It'll likely be just another KIND of terrible, so... we lose either way.
Good! GET RID OF THEM! They’ve ruined enough games and anime with their ridiculous crap! I’m not happy they’re being replaced by AI, but gosh darn it they suck so bad at their jobs!!
Too bad they can't find based localizes instead of woke ones.
Better off learning Japanese it really a crutch holding you back your loosing to much baked in nuisance
@@southcoastinventors6583
People for the AI stuff don't even want to pick up a book or anything dude.
@@darkzeroprojects4245 That is true but honestly even though it has taken years for me anyways totally worth it
@@southcoastinventors6583 it is.
Sadly ai users and supporters , least most likely, never would find it worthwhile.
And nothing of value was lost.
Had they taken their job seriously, the fans would demand they stayed.
That's where you're wrong entirely you make it sound like everybody who does localization is bad that cannot be further from the truth you're trying to love everybody together with the bad ones is unnecessary Siri
@@animezilla4486 Oh hey Jamie Marchi has an alt account
The english localization industry was extremely determined to avoid quality control and refused to get rid of bad actors. They deserve to be replaced.
@@MordethKai To me, almost every English main character seems to have the same voice actor lol. Or like the same 10 english voice actors do all dubbing for all anime. Just mean I feel like we need more variety of voices in dubs.
I think it was the author of kengen ashura who said to go to the pirate sites over the localization.
Based
I actually wonder if what started all this wasn't the whole Vic Mignona thing.
If so, I am laughing at those idiots so hard. They wanted more power, they tried to sue someone for it, and they lost all their power in the process. 😂
Screw you Bulma.
Don't get me started on Monica Rial and that other female dog. They're two of THE main reasons why I'll never listen to a Funimation English dub again.
Monica is the fake Bulma.
Hey man. You can still like Bulma. Remember, she has a different VA in the original Japanese.
But not liking Monica? Understandable.
@@Tenshii_Artii Monica is garbage compared to the original VA. Lets be honest. Generic Karen voice doesn't even come close to Bulma's original voice
@@lancekemal8989 I might play a bit of a Devil’s advocate here. When I first started watching Anime back in 2010, she’s one of the VAs I would know by name. So really, I grew up listening to her in roles. And maybe
It’s just me, but for some roles, I liked her take. Like when I hear an English dub, there are characters she does which I would always think of her as the first thing.
I found out that she played a role in an Anime called Baccano! As a French woman. And maybe it’s just my simple brain at the time, but I thought it was cool she could pull off a French accent. Then I thought both she And Jamie Marchi knocked it out of the Park in the roles as Panty and Stocking.
But. Later down the line, I also started watching Dragonball some time in 2015. And I distinctively remember watching the version Where Monica did not voice Bulma. I forgot the name of the original English VA (Was it Tiffany?) but I am more use to her than I am to Monica. When it comes to an English Bulma, the OG VA is who I picture.
Because truthfully. Monica’s voice just slowly began too grating for me as Bulma. Like her voice would more suit the whiny old lady characters who nag on you all the time. And while Bulma has her moments, she is still a genius who rightfully takes some pride in her own work.
The fact that it's VLC of all things makes this somehow even more hilarious, considering that's the player pretty much everybody uses for their media they've got on the high seas...
I will never understand why companies like Crunchyroll and Sentai Filmworks never just fired these localisers. Surely they’d know that all their mistranslations would do is drive up piracy. But I guess now it doesn’t matter that much now that the actual player comes with AI subtitles. Should have just done their jobs right in the first place instead of incorporating their cringy fan fiction into official translations.
Because the companies (at least the western departments) agree with them. This is why all those twitter weirdos were seething at that jelloapocolyse guy even through he was one of their own cuz he snitched the quiet part out loud that all these western anime/mange publishing and streaming sites like Crunchyroll, Retrocrush and even the more niece ones like Discotek media all encourage this activist BS. You truly can't trust any of these snakes.
They haven't been paying attention. Japan doesn't (Didn't) care about translations until just recently, and the only reason their noticing now is because the outrage began to grow so loud the Japanese community started to get curious why everyone was so angry, and then THEY got angry, which lead to the companies getting curious and seeing why everyone was so angry, which -- like before -- lead to THEM getting angry.
From what I understand, Japanese companies rules for editing are typically aimed towards altering the art, not so much altering the script. They're trusting the localizers to translate their work into a medium that is easier to understand by non-Japanese speakers, so some alterations are to be expected. It's only because the Woke Mind Virus began to infect everything that things got bad enough for them to actually stop and look at what the translations were actually saying.
They don't care about customers and money since they get ESG funds to compensate... The whole point is societal engineering
@@daerovius7535 Japan doesn't get ESG funds. That's a Western thing.
That doesn't make any sense at all one thing people like you will never understand is you make it sound like every single localization is a bad person that could not be further from the truth some of them have been doing their good job recently so what makes sense for all these English companies to just fire everyone have your information send them have done their job correctly
Any one of us would be fired for doing deliberately bad jobs at work and then bragging about it in the open. This was a long time coming for these ego maniacs.
Please be true this time
I hate localizers so much it's unreal
Should just be learning Japanese because you are still missing out on cultural information that included in the language itself
@@southcoastinventors6583 That can be said about any piece of media not from your country.
I sure don't
They wouldn't be in this mess had they focus on translating this without putting their woke activist in it. Now they get to join the increasing number of Hollywood folks on the unemployable line.
Don't be so sure about that
Unfortunately, this is the part the part where they'll try to lobotomize the AIs to adhere to "The Message"
A.I tends to break if you put nonsense into it
Google was working on that, last I remember
But Americans are moving away from woke. This could not have happened at a better time.
The amount of prestige for the first person to strip tHe MeSsAgE out of any such AI system will make them a god. Bring it on.
The neat thing about AI is that anyone (provided they have loads of GPUs at their disposal) can build and train a model. The frameworks are ubiquitous now. Many of them are open source.
I don't want stuff localized, I want it translated.
Doesn’t always work out that way.
Translating is respecting cultures and countries.
That doesn't work with Japanese. Localization or bust.
Literal translations are awkward as hell.
Speak for yourself
@@LuigiTheMetal64it's not that simple as you think it is
Like do your job or you will be replaced. They didn't do their job so they got replaced.
“How accurate is this?” Well, unless the AI brings a shovel, it’s not going to be any lower than the bar that’s been set by the localizers in the west.
there is a difficult ballance to "localization." People generally don't mind the slight shifting of cultural context to make certain things make sense in translation, but when you start peddling politics that have nothing to do with the direct translation, that's when we have a problem. Unfortunately, bad localization has been a thorn in the side of every gamer and fan of any form of forign media since this practice began. Many people would happily take AI translations, or even AI dubs if they're more accurate and don't peddle the politics. I'm sure we all would prefer a person to do the job but as we are finding out, people can't be trusted.
Never lie about other country's culture. Saying otherwise is like saying it is fine to talk about Bill Clinton in an anime set in Japan, which makes no sense.
@@LuigiTheMetal64 or having having characters making pun when they never did
Adult Swim’s take on Shin Chan was a great example of a conversion WITH injecting local politics …despite some of the differences. But that was when we weren’t at each other’s throat and people still had senses of humor. And when the Left hadn’t completely left the reservation.
Localization is never needed and should be cast away. Simply add a translator note off tot he side, this has worked in the past and it'll work just fine in the future. We don't need some goon adding "bruh" to every sentence in the name of "localization" just because the character used "aibo" once. Many fan translators for manga actually devote a panel/page at the end of each chapter to further explain cultural significance of certain references made in that chapter. Shouldn't people rather be willing to learn about another culture than completely rewriting it to suit their ignorant lifestyle?
If you're indulging in another culture's media, have the decency to actually be willing to interact with it. If i'm watching another country's show, I want to hear that country's slang.
Me and my wife were watching a Korean soap yesterday and they used an American term in the subs and it totally ruined the setting and tone of the show. So, I will have to respectfully disagree with needing to fit the nation you are subbing for.
Congrats to Truck-Kun for graduating from Isekai and getting working K-Drama. Well done!
Good localization, like good dubbing, died in the early 2010s. This is long overdue. Hopefully anime dub voices will follow suit.
ADV suck. I never laughed at the implication that Ayumu Kasuga from Azumanga Daiou is a Southern US girl. Mentioning Bill Clinton makes no sense in an anime set in Japan.
@@LuigiTheMetal64 Osaka as a region is analagous to the American south, so the southern accent makes sense. The Clinton bit didn't work out, but that's one bad example. Have you ever tried reading machine-translated Japanese, or even direct-translations without touchups for grammar? At best, it's off-puttingly mechanical sounding. At worst, it's gibberish
It is odd that dubbing how worse after 4Kids went under. It was like they no longer needed to be better anymore.
@@PsychicWarsyeah at least there was a genuine attempt to keep the Osakan accent culturally relevant by trying to mimic what it would be like as an American. That kind of stuff i would give extreme leeway so long there was an attempt made to translate in good faith.
Another thing that would be hard to translate is that one scene in Black Lagoon Revy spoke English in the Japanese dub. The reason she spoke English is because she was Chinese American if I remember correctly. The equivalent would be that a Spanish person was speaking Spanish in an area where everyone else was speaking English. Just so that everyone else didn't know what was being said and she was playing dumb with the guy. I wouldn't even know how to adequately translate that scene. Think they had her speaking broken English in the English translation.
@@kosmosXcannon Yeah, Engrish scenes don't really work dubbed. Same thing with Echoes Act 3's famous LET'S KEEL DA HO
thanks alot, Wokies. You ruined a job section for all future voice actors.
Time to send those anime "localizers" to the Doom Dimension!
Is the Doom Dimension the home for infinite losers?
@PerryMcCall18 yes
@@PerryMcCall18 first I heard of that
@@kematch935 even better cast them off into the warp in Warhammer 40k.
@@merafirewing6591 Some of them are degenerate enough that they might thrive there.
Give em to the Necrons.
I think at the end of the day the studios will have to take responsibility for doing their own translations. A simple case of "if you want it done right do it yourself".
I've always loved anime, and always hated localization. If I wanted something from my region I wouldn't be watching foreign shows I'd be watching shows from my region.
Localization is not inherently "take thing from culture X and replace it with thing from culture Y," when done properly it's just "convey the intent of the line in a way that sounds natural to an English speaker." People just don't talk about examples of good localization because most people don't even know the first thing about Japanese so they don't ever notice it.
There was a video that came up on my feed recently of someone talking about a Sonic Adventure line. It was translated as, "Ah, yeah! This is happenin'!" while the original line was, "グレート！ごきげんだね！" The direct translation of the line is, "Great! I feel good!" but the exact connotation of Sonic's line is to convey "coolness" (his usage of the English loanword 'Great'), a sort of cheeky, confident and deliberately meant to sound kinda jokey.
"グレート" to "Ah, yeah" is the same general idea, an exclamation of excitement that sounds generally more cool and casual. And "ごきげんだね" to "This is happenin'" has the same general vibe - Sonic is excited and cheekily saying something to nobody in particular but just out of his own sense of passion, and using that 90s/2000s slang is entirely within the image of the character. It's a line that in terms of a direct translation has changed every single part of it, but in terms of an actual translation of the line's intent it captures the subtext of the line way more than a direct translation ever could. The purpose of the localization isn't to replace the Japanese, it's to show nuance of the line that a literal translation simply can't. To quote the video, "it's not about what the character says, it's what the line says about the character."
I'm something of a hobbyist myself and let me tell you that if you do any level of translation even casually you run into these lines where you're like, "Damn. How do I convey THAT?" and have to really pick apart the line piece by piece.
Dude, there is no good translation without some degree of localisation. Like the person above said, the issue is bad localisation and straight-up purposeful mistranslations by bad actors.
Even these AI software are localising the translation. Do you honestly think they're just using basic machine translations? Did you forget what those are like? You have no idea how odd sht sounds and how much awkwardness exists without it. I mean completely without it.
你吃了吗？literally: Have you eaten? But the English local equivalent is a greeting, so you will have whatever greeting is appropriate based on the context of the interaction used as the translation. That's all localisation is. Not everyone is good at it or understands it, apparently.
@@Zetact_ That is when done with passion and knowledge. Some of the recent anime done by the so called translation? You might as well have MTL at that point.
@@Zetact_ Yeah, I guess the important thing is to keep the spirit of the original dialogue.
I remember Dragonball Z having some weird translations in my country, they would even mention tv shows and other stuff from my own country, but that just made it more hilarious. It was about fun, not activism.
I bet Chris Sabat could get his old job at Domino's back if he asked really nicely.
He's a pro. He won't have much trouble finding jobs in the industry.
Time to use Frying Pans as Crying Pans!
You hate that line?
@TheAllSeeingEye2468
I changed it for the Localizers😉
nothing beats a jelly filled donut!
@@LeeroyPorkins no I mean do you hate the original line?
@PeterDanielBerg
They're delicious!
I've seen live a translation app used instead of a human translator for multiple languages in a conference I went to last year. Worked very decently. I could tell a few idioms from French and Spanish were not quite right, but it was surprisingly decent. The app could even contextualize the field (medicine) and choose the appropriate words quite well. It has hugely improved in the last few years as models have become much better. I have a cousin who is a professional translator (Spanish-French-English) and she is changing careers because all she does nowadays are fixes to AI-translated texts. This is a dying field, no matter what anyone says.
I have never liked "localization" in dubbing/subtitles anyway. If I am watching something from another country, I do not want their culture erased from it to fill it with western concepts and ideas, I want the "otherness" - that is part of what is interesting about it.
Time to celebrate!!!! 🙌🏻
OMG I remember Boys over Flowers, the anime and the live action!!! The live action for Mars manga was great for being made back in the day, I’d love to see the manga animated.
Truck-kun does show up in several shows 😂, No Longer Allowed in Another World actually gives a reason for the truck everyone gets hit by 😂
I really liked "No longer allowed in another world". The premise reminded me of a manga that was cancelled by the first chapter due to the villains looking too similar to other ip heroes. The depressing protagonist was a breath of fresh air and his coffin travel reminded me of Dragon Quest's party member coffin mechanic.
Ever since Netflix retranslated Evangelion I stopped watching anime on mainstream platforms altogether. Thank God I brought the old DVD's when I got the chance
Didn't know that, thank you. *removes Eva from my Netflix list*
Thank God I never sold my old Evangelion DVD's.
@@TuxedoEarth darn. It was in mine too.
They brought this action upon themselves.
Just keep an eye on who's working on the AI.
As an old-school Otaku, I have always preferred fan translation to official because I would learn new terms or honorifics. I love dubs as those were more available and cheaper then sub.but the translations have gotten way to western politics when I know for a fact there is little chance that was in the original content. If you are going to do something filled with western references and politics make it more like Ghost Stories where the translation team got the ok to make up thier own story and fit it too the series.
I'll take "all according to *keikaku" over mentions of "the patriarchy" any day.
They did it to themselves. They had one job, and they couldn't even handle it.
Hope they hire people who respect the source material
I remember watching Combatants Will Be Dispatched on Crunchyroll early last year, and I was thinking "WTF?!" Because the dub for a buffed tiger was talking about getting transitioning and saying he had certain feelings about little boys.
@@mysterion3182 ok who directed the dub fr
i thought jelly voicing number 6 was 8/10
@stefanmadethen5359 I think it was Funimation
Don't know about the first part but as I recall the second part was just the way the character was written.
@@mysterion3182 looked it up, it was (dub) kuromu from bofuri who directed it (1-9)
@Zetact_ He briefly mentioned it after Snow gave him, Agent 6 and Alice their first pay.
Even if they use AI, they’re still probably going to need humans to proofread the translated scripts to make sure there aren’t any typos or grammatical errors.
One of them is having different dialects, honorifics, ending phrases, and onomatopoeias. Imagine AI trying to translate Pretty Cure where the mascots are known for the made-up ending phrases that even the Star Twinkle human characters notice "lun" and "yan" being said.
Yeah but that can be done in house by a smaller group of bilingual people who know enough about English to proofread and correct the errors instead of having to depend on whole groups of people that may try and shove current Western politics into something where those politics aren't.....like that whole "Patriarchy" thing from Dragon Maid.
Not if you just want to watch stuff that will never come internationally this is a good alternative.
Or better yet learn Japanese if you like Japanese content
@@ShinKyuubi ^THIS!
Good honestly the Voice Acting industry is one of the most vain, enititled, arrogant and overall toxic when it comes to entertainment. They get what they deserve.
I'm not saying voice acting isn't a hard job and that there aren't people who are great at it, but some of them have Hollywood Actor egos.
Anime dubbing used to be niche and the actors were grateful for fan recognition. Nowadays, you get dub VAs acting like they co-created the characters.
This just reminded me of a fan translation of an isekai story (an elseworld story, think Narnia, for people who don't know the terminology). It was about a Japanese guy who was turned into a game character who was a turn-based wizard in a real time world. And out of nowhere in one chapter, it started talking about US politics from the 90s. It was jarring and out of nowhere. For a Japanese born main character to monologue about.
"Piracy isnt a prizing problem, its a service problem" -Lord Gabe
If pirates can give better translations and soon better dubs, then why would we fans go to legitimate western distributers?
Id say its your duty to pirate, then go donate to things like Animators Dormitory or import merch from your favorite Anime/Manga.
As soon as you said “white truck” I was thinking, truck kun crossing over from the isekais animes to K darmas
There are import stores that sell the original versions and usually at a better price. There's usually one in Mitsuwa markets.
It's also super easy to just order from stores in Japan.
@@LatitudeSky There are several stores in the US that specialize in it not to mention ton of import stores that and have been making business of this for over 20 years. For example Mitsuwa Marketplace and Kinukuniya USA are physical stores in the US you can go to specialized in it. Kinokuniya also has online ordering whereas Mitsuwa Marketplaces are effectively mini-malls/grocery stores that include videostores where you can find the original releases of asian media including anime. There are also several stores for this online if you just look. So yes it is fairly easy. There are also other slightly more complicated ways as well such as sites that specialize in providing local storage in Japan to foreign (US) customers for things sellers normally don't sell out of the country. They then combine things stored in order to ship overseas allowing users to also save some on international shipping. These are all examples I have and still personally use.
I wonder if this is why hit pieces are starting to appear now describing the genre as 'problematic'? I covered one recently and am now starting to put two and two together.
All they had to do was respect the source instead they decided to be extremely disrespectful and hateful towards the creators.
When I first started using subtitles on RUclips they were bizarre. One actual example is when I was watching Uk’s Time Team, about the Ancient Roman Empire, and the subtitles were about naked mosquitoes going to a birthday party. I was just happy if I got the basic jist of whatever video I was watching. Now it’s almost never wrong. The last time I had wrong subtitles it was on a live TV news program. They have come such a long way.
RUclips has released the auto translate feature. I haven’t checked it out yet so I’m unsure how accurate it is but it’s a pretty cool feature.
Finally, a feature I've always wanted in watching videos.
Still the most baffling about localizers to me is that most aren't translators. I thought they were and also had some kind of culture study degree.
9:14 No one is safe from truck-kun. He is death incarnate, lord of isekai
Truck-kun's duty to isekai people is his bread and butter.
Good job, you showed the entire world that your job could be done by software.
since last month a lot of youtube creators are enabling the AI dub in several languages and it's very useful
ALWAYS LOOK BOTH WAYS; TRUCK KUN IS UNDEFEATED!!
I will stock with the older English dubs than what I am currently getting from Crunchyroll anymore.
Awesome!
So this could eventually become something like a "universal translator" akin to stuff we've seen on Star Trek, or a tech version of the babel fish from Hitchhiker's Guide, or the TARDIS' translation circuit?
😄
This should have happened years ago! Should have been translated by the people who made the anime. Not a 3rd party to screw it all up. It was a simple job. Incompetence.
Hellyeah! I'll probably rewatch a bunch of my older favorites to make sure what I saw is accurately told.
NOTHING of value will be lost .
Best case scenario: This forces localizers to be accurate in order to compete with automation.
Most Likely scenario: Industry screams about how this is evil and demands audiences keep paying for deceptive edits. An activism campaign starts to demand the AI be politically correct and censor content.
I’ve always preferred subtitles on anime or foreign movies, since you hear the emotion or personality in the voice it makes it more natural and genuine.
Hmm...it might not be over for fan-subs at the very least. Japan has these honorific attachments to names depending on your relation to the person you're speaking to or their gender, or the other person's title/ranking in a hierarchy. Usually fan-subs keep those titles as is because Japanese anime is based on Japanese culture.
I've seen Google translate and other translation sites butcher those honorifics and try to get an English equivalent, but it isn't normal much for a person in their family to call their own siblings as 'brother' or 'sister' as often as an anime does; people in the West just addresses their siblings by their first name.
I think all this will do is just make an anime fan-translator's job easier. As for localizers, I've never appreciate their job because of their tampering with scripts. I think this is a win-win for fan translations and fans. If VLC only needs minor adjustments to their translations, then fan-subbing will be much easier in terms of checking and translating and fan groups would probably increase their output on translated shows too.
Other than this, this might be good for non-anime shows as well. There are small fan groups that translate variety shows, other TV shows or movies, so this would be great in general if it works.
with these shifts, the voice technology mentioned doing AI dubs can provide the voicework for the community cleaned subtitles making accurate dubs a reality for those blind/low vision anime fans who are completely cut off from the more accurate world of subtitled anime.
@@GlitchedVision Yeah, I think it's good as well. If it gets to this point, dubbers and localizers will be out of a job.
But hey, if they want to complain, just make great animations in America a thing again. The only way to compete with foreign animation is creating a great animation work with a good narrative and characters. I really do not want far left or far right talking points on politics in fictional works that I enjoy. Just keep the story down to Earth and driven by common sense and I'll enjoy it.
Let this be true. Let it work on all thing like Visual Novels. So many I can read with this.
Funny enough I could probably see some fansub groups getting in on this action. VLC is highly modular as far as user input goes, so I would imagine it would also support user-based AI training as well. Meaning fansub groups that were always dedicated to providing accurate quality subtitles could probably train an AI to do the work for them.
Don't expect this AI to be very good for a goodly while. Translating slang and metaphor in particular is fiendishly difficult.
I think it will be easier since it’s not live. It’s essentially giving ai a book and saying translate this and take as much time as you need. Live translation is what’s still wonky
#JusticeForVic
there have been bad official localizer for decades, they like to change meaning of scenes or lines ( eg Disney but great voice acting). So fan sub has been they best way for years
But then who will lord their false moral superiority ober me and tell me what a horrible person I am for buying the products that give them their jobs in the first place?
And no value was lost
@@Veteran_Nerd much value was, in fact, gained.
I recognize the thumbnail. Summer Time Rendering was _so_ good. The Disney exclusivity ruined its chances though.
Ai may have inaccurate translation but it doesn’t change literal paragraphs to fit the narrative like the localizers have been doing for a decade
This is great news, I expect some minor issues early on, but it will get better with time. Now we need AI software to do the same for games, books, and manga so we can cut out the anti fan localizers.
Rejoice!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉
I'm excited for when we get to the point where the AI can actively translate the VA themself into whatever language you're looking for. That's going to be peak.
How things are translated changes the story, and this affects the artist content. The localizers decided to insert the Woke cult agenda at the same time AI was maturing, and this is their fault.
cant be much worse then "let that child alone" there are so many old animes i wanted dubs for macross is a big one i just wish i could tell the ai to make Vic the voice actor for max sterling
I wouldn’t be too quick to jump on that. This is going to put localizer is out of work. RUclips is trying a similar AI thing with RUclips videos. They had to stop because the AI could batch video titles and translations.
@@Tommylop1982 and? Why should we care if those that hate us reap what they have sown?
Yes. that's what we want. We want them out of work. They mostly suck
This concept is VERY fascinating to me. With some of the international audience I’ve been fielding in my own line of work, this feature has been implemented into Zoom already with surprising success and accuracy for live subbing. As a medical clinic we always default to real living simultaneous translators whenever available for maximum accuracy, but that’s only consistent for Spanish Italian and Japanese audiences. Our Chinese and Arabic families have actually seen surprising success with the feature over several months so I trust that accuracy is fairly passable.
If this is being standardized in applications like VLC or even QuickTime, and it’s more accurate than the BS you see in IG Reels or RUclips shorts which is often more wrong than right, it will be an immediate gamechanger.
VLC FTW!!!
"Boys Over Flowers"
I watched some of the subbed version of the Hana Yori Dango anime on DVD years ago (switched to the English dub for a few minutes and chuckled at how one of the main guys, IIRC Tsukasa, said the name "Tsukushi" in English) and never once did I think there would be a live-action version of that. XD
2:25 lol engRISH?? 😅😅
If only this happened before 4Kids and Viz Media existed.
Good thing generative A.I is becoming less and less popular with the people by the day.
What!? You mean not doing your job right gets you fired!? Wow 😲
I've seen a few fansubbers are rather unhappy about how this is going down, mainly on how AI is soulless and lacks true emotion...
That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make, as long as the lowlcalizers are done for.
If they are adding soul, then they aren't making an accurate translation.
To a degree I can see what some people say. Maybe they make the language more colorful in some areas, but considering today's climate I think most people want an honest 1-1 whenever possible. What does t carry over just needs to be close enough.
Why should that concern people who want accurate and on-point translations for their foreign made entertainment?
Lot of those probably are just virtue signaling to the anti-AI crowd. If it is accurate, it's all that matters.
I'd rather have emotionless ai over spiteful activist who hate the consumer translating something while on a power trip.
*Guess they never heard the saying 🤔 NEVER BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU 🤯🎉*
I hope they trained the AI to not Anglicize names, and to keep the -chan, -san, oppa, unni and whatever appellations we have learned to recognize over the years.
Hopefully it can output the raw text. There's a subtitle program that can transcribe using ai and it gives you both the transcription and the translation at the same time.
AI will also fail to understand what onomatopoeias are.
@LuigiTheMetal64 this can be trained. They're just words.
They had one job, an easy job and they pissed it all away for imaginary brownie points.
Hold on... doing this for subs is one thing. But I usually watch dubs, at least for the first watch. I can't pay attention to the show and read subtitles at the same time. But I don't want to hear an AI generated robot voice. I want actual voice actors, actually reading from an actual script.
If they use AI to translate the Japanese into English (or whatever) subs, and also into a script which is then acted by real voice actors, I guess I can live with that (even though I generally think AI is evil and will eventually be the end of us all).
BTW, the Korean show I like is Gyeongseong Creature. It's a little like a Korean Stranger Things, or Dean Koontz novel.
As someone who usually watches dub over sub due to (professionally diagnosed) ADHD, I get where you're coming from. That's why I want AI to replace translators, not voice actors. Sure, fire the obnoxious Twitter/BlueSky VAs and replace them with professional ones. But don't replace VAs altogether.
AI can clone people's voices now dude. Don't you remmeber how AI cloned jordan peterson's voice? Now imagine the original jpaanese voice actor's voice being cloned by AI, and you just feed that into a translator into enlgish and then the cloned voice of the original voice actor can say the lines in english using their cloned voice? Pretty neat. This is what I think is the future. AI can only improve from here on. So you will get original japanese voice actors that don't kno english, and hear their voice in english through AI which cloned their voice. No need to read subtitles. They will definitely need an editor to handle grammer and other things like specific terms, names and labales unique to the lore of the series that doesn't exist in our real world. (fantasy and science fiction often has made up science and magick systems that don't exist so the editor's job is to correct the AI when it makes a mistake here)
@@UToobUsername01 Exactly, so y'all better start getting used to this.
Used to look up to the ADV voice actors, now because of Vic, I can only watch anime subtitled. They railroaded the guy. Now with your phone, you can translate whole anime books in only a few hours, compared to the laborious process that took ages before then.
Not a fan of the localizers that shove in their personal opinions and politics, subverting the work done by the creators... But won't AI subtitles, especially ones in real-time, come out poorly? Like really bad Google Translate? Even if it can be improved, I feel like more accurate subs/dubs would be far from now.
Trust me, Google translate has made leaps and bounds in the past decades. Granted, some problems won't be completely solved, but then again, ai and humans cannot fix bad incoherrent writing period.
Free services also tend to be cheaper made then paid ones. I wouldn't be surprised if people have already spent time making more expensive ai translator services.
Probably not for this specific situation, but yeah. Well have to wait and see.
Edit: real time will probably just have more issues though. Since different sentence structures might mean it either has to delay a bit or worry about the order of words.
@@lightningpenguin8937 true, but if the human translators refuse to do their job, even the cheapest translation may as well be gold to what normally be nothing.
I personally adore fan-subs, since the actual fans of the series tend to commit themselves more to absolute accuracy. I can't go into detail because of the nature of his character, but Bon Kurei from One Piece is an example of what I mean. "Okama" means something very particular, and I like it when the fan-subs explain the nuance and context for various in-jokes you would normally only understand if you spoke fluent Japanese.
Like Gaimon, and the "Boxed son" joke. The joke being he's trapped inside a treasure chest, but "Boxed son" is a term people use when talking about overly sheltered young men. Comedic misunderstandings ensue, and it's brilliant.
If AI really is the future, then people will leave. AI will never be able to capture the human spirts
It might train off of artists and talent's work without their knowledge or their consent and replace them due to capitalism and fascism but it won't replace that.
AI will put people out of their jobs, turning them to bums.
I will not be surprised if the next step will be a new video file format. On that can match anime character lip movement. So the video will be in sync with the audio independent of language
Glad censorship is finally dying.
A.I is not censorship?
@@Sam-f3t5dnot at all. Ai gives power back to the people.
@@nobafan7515 Yeah right, by stealing off of the works of artists and talent without their knowledge and without their consent, all for the sole intention of replacing with them. And A.I is a threat to the livelihoods of millions if not billions of people, not just those of those artists and talent that it trained off of.
@@Sam-f3t5d I'm glad the localizers are losing their job. They didn't pander to anome fans and now they get to live like the rest of us.
you know what this video and article reminds me of?
Krillin to -Dende- Little green: "HEY, so uh, do you now about karma?"
Dende: "No, i do not."
Krillin: "well, it goes if you do something BA(AA)D:
Localizers: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE--"
Something bad happens to you. BUT, if you do something Goo(oo)d:
Localizers: "WHY DON'T PEOPLE BEND THE KNEE-"
Something Good Happens to you..!"
Dende: "So, if i'm good, all of my family will come back."
Krillin: "... are you still on about that???"