I watch absolutely everything with subs and I'm not especially picky about the quality (I've never minded dubtitles even though they send a lot of people into a seething rage). Having said that, the problem here is that the AI subs are exceptionally poor quality to the point of actively detracting from the show, so it's disrespectful of Crunchyroll to spoil fans' viewing experiences when they're effectively a monopoly on the content. I suspect that a lot of them think that the dub is the 'real' way to enjoy a show and subs are a stop-gap while the dub is in production, but for a lot of us a dub is unwatchable and they're devaluing their service to their own audience.
Having said that, a lot of human-translated stuff is bad too. Square Enix's recent (and not-so-recent) game 'adaptations' are just as horrifically interpretive as the infamous Working Designs scripts of yore and while some people love their (manmade) 'translations' and put the localisation teams on a pedestal, I can't stand their reimaginings of the original context. Subtitles are derivative works in my mind, with delivery of the translation being far more important than the subtitled script being an independent work of art in itself; they're a tool - albeit a tool I heavily rely upon.
In that respect I view it as different to a book or manga translation - but maybe that's my privilege talking because I am also able to crank up the volume and listen out for the original vocal performances for context cues, which is not so easy in manga (and outright impossible in text alone). In principle I wouldn't mind everything being subtitled by AI in a perfect world, especially if it meant getting subtitles (in a multitude of languages) on everything instead of only the most popular languages being served, or entire shows being subtitle-less on streaming services because the UK doesn't care about people who can't hear well. Or subtitle tracks on English language content being stripped out for the UK release of discs as a cost-saving exercise even when the subs exist in the US. Heck, actual Japanese subtitles would be really helpful and we seldom ever get those. We genuinely need AI to improve for this stuff for the sake of accessibility, because anyone who has watched something fast-paced or accented with YouTube's auto subtitles knows that machine subtitling is still horrendously bad.
But that's not what's happening here, and it's clearly just another example of Crunchyroll cutting corners in bad faith and using paying customers as test subjects. I wish that all of the content would go on all of the services so that each could compete on the quality of their platform instead of this nonsensical mess of exclusivity and stupidity.
(On the bright side if they get really bad it's probably possible to get them in trouble for not providing adequate support for hard of hearing folks. The US is way better about that than we are, which is why everything there has closed captions in the first place. )
R
www.animenewsnetwork.com
