Sometime last year, someone published a guide on auto-generating subtitles using an emacs plugin and WhisperAI. A lot of anime release groups use it so they can get an English subtitled version of a show released a couple hours after it airs in Japan.
It's nice to have access sooner, especially for less popular shows that might never get any kind of release outside of Japan, but it's a lot worse then most fan subs and sometimes misses entire sections of dialog.
That scene has long had the "janky but really fast translation" niche and the "good but takes a couple of days" niche. From what little I experienced of the former, people who cared about translation quality probably weren't using it anyway.
I've been away from all that for rather a long time, so I don't know. Still, I'd guess these robo-subtitles are probably replacing the "fast and bad" niche. The "slow and good" niche seems like it could survive.
Looks like anime fansubbing scene has not changed much in the 30 years.
Back then there were multiple fansubber camps - notably Artic Animation which fell into "janky but really fast translation" releasing many shows
and purist fansubbers who released maybe a few titles a year but with extremely high quality subs.
Then you had extremists who demanded no subs whatsoever and then those who preferred commercial dubs...
Lots of Chinese dramas with barely-parseable subtitles as well. Missing sections, and completely wrong contextual glosses, which are particularly easy to get horribly wrong in Chinese.
I've been getting the advice (but I'm learning German, not Japanese) that the best thing is to watch shows with subtitles in the foreign language to gradually acquire it.
Mostly videos I stream online. YouTube is a good example, but I've noticed an uptick in bad subtitles on other streaming platforms that stream content with higher production values.
I remember a while ago American shows and movies joked about Indian customer support, as they "lower the standard of customer service". Now here the same to AI "lower the standard of subtitle". The quality is not appreciated which is why the offering are lower the bar for quality constantly. Or they'll be out competed.
Maybe. But at least today my experience is that AI podcast transcription with good audio is off enough that I only use it to check quotes or pick out short excerpts. If I'm going to publish a full transcription, I'll just have a human do it. Not clear to me if it's faster for someone who does that sort of thing to be making a lot of corrections as opposed to just transcribing--though it will get there.
English dubbed English subs are completely different, the subs (presumably) being translations of the original language instead of the dubs. It's very jarring and I can only imagine this getting better with AI.
I've been rewatching some Star Trek Voyager on paramount+ and there is no way a person did all the subtitles. It's like 98% accurate, I'll give it that. But there are enough glaring mistakes that there's just no way a person would have made those kind of mistakes and also they are easily catchable if a single person were to proofread.
Subtitle mistakes are very common. I have tons of DVD's from before AI. The subtitles have tons of obvious errors. I doubt they re-subtitled it, thought they may have run it thru a generic AI? They probably took whatever was there and just dumped it onto the service. Some are even more fun in that they will have 3 generations of subtitles all on one disc. The TV CC fit into the vertical blank, the dvd subtitle, and the for the hearing impaired subtitle. I usually go for the hearing impaired ones. As they seem to be the most accurate, and usually have a nice bonus of putting the text over/near the person who is actually speaking. Which is nice for when chars on the show overtalk each other. A fun touch was on the toy story ones they used the font from the title cards as the font for the subtitles.
Paramount+ sucks. If you try to play DS9 season 5 episode 1, it simply throws an error. So all legal option for watching that episode is gone.
(I’m almost ashamed I watch Star Trek so often that I know this offhand…)
The subtitles are literally the worst, short of being incomprehensible. Like so bad that until someone experiences them, you can’t really grok how terrible they are. They’re a solid D minus.
Maybe it‘s an iOS thing. But every so often, the positioning codes sneak in to the subtitles themselves, so you start seeing x,y coordinates. And any time anything is italicized, the italicized part jumps to the opposite side of the screen, meaning the caption gets split in half. It’d be comical if it wasn’t frustrating.
(Thanks for the opportunity to vent about how sad it is that Star Trek is trapped behind such a bad streaming service. And I even pay for no ads, yet they still show ads every 8th episode or so.)
I agree Paramount+ is my least favorite streaming service. It never seems to remember what I was watching or where I am in an episode.
Subtitles are not something I normally have on since I know almost every word verbatim for stng and voyager... so maybe they are even worse than I realize!
I only pay for this service because I want to support my beloved star trek.. glad it's been getting some new life in recent years at least!
But yes.. it's sad that they have such a crappy service.
The subtitles I've seen come out of Whisper have been astounding. Dealing with heavy accents, and stammering without trouble. Current youtube auto CC is pretty bad, but the current gen AI is really impressive.
