this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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All the cool effects, honorifics, translator notes that explain references that you might miss as non-japanese viewer... Whoever put this much effort for free more than 10 years ago, thank you! It was so refreshing seeing this in the era of corporate sloppy subtitles!

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[–] MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not a fansub, but the pop-up references on the Excel Saga DVDs were great. It's like reading two rapid fire shows at once!

[–] hypertown@ani.social 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I didn't know the official sub had references! Well to be fair older releases had less money involved so there were less strict guidelines and more people with passion so I guess it's not impossible.

[–] Unboxious@ani.social 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

A lot of the people who get hired to do subs are the people who used to do fansubs back in the day. There's a lot of passion, but they aren't usually given the time to go above and beyond. It's kind of a shame; these days I'm noticing Crunchyroll doesn't even bother paying someone to proofread.

[–] Hazel@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Unboxious@ani.social 3 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

No idea. I'm definitely noticing more obvious errors when watching new shows than old shows though. Sometimes they're even errors that aren't issues with translation but could just be typos or bad English grammar for example. Things any native English speaker should be able to catch. Since Sony took over and put the geniuses who ran Funimation into the ground in charge of Crunchyroll I'm guessing they've been having their employees do the classic "do more work for no additional pay" thing corporations love to do.

[–] hypertown@ani.social 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Yup, they always were low quality but right now it's so bad it's hard to even watch.
From AI translations, through weird localized translations, rushed scripts to just putting dub audio description as subtitles... It's depressing.

[–] Unboxious@ani.social 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Yup, they always were low quality

I'm honestly not so sure about that. I really like the subs for Yakitate! Japan for example.

right now it’s so bad it’s hard to even watch.

That's definitely an exaggeration. I'll notice something is off maybe once an episode, and even then it's usually pretty clear what was meant. It's really not that big of a deal.

[–] Hazel@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 12 hours ago

Crunchyroll started as low quality speedsubs, their strategy was being the first to release the latest episodes of shows airing at the time. Alongside speedsubs you had quality subbers which would release a couple days later with higher quality translations and using better RAWs. Crunchyroll quickly became the dominant speedsubs, always being first, so eventually you had CR subs too. These would improve CRs shoddy subtitles a bit, maybe add character colors and formatting and such, and then release shortly after.

Yakitate Japan only started streaming on Crunchyroll after having been officially licensed by Nozomi Entertainment. They almost certainly used the official subs rather than doing their own.