Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.

Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.

Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.

View on HN

I haven't investigated it much, but I imagine that LLMs have made it easier for japanese culture products to release products in English language. Is industry in Japan taking advantage of nearly free translation for it's print products?

I've heard stories of rather poor translation work since Sony purchased Crunchyroll (a popular AI streaming site) and started using AI for a lot of English subs.

So while AI has potentially made it easier for some Japanese content to reach English-speaking Western audiences, I’m not so sure that it’s doing justice to the original creations.

Note: I’m not suggesting that AI doesn’t have a place in translation work, but it still needs close supervision from bilingual people.

https://www.cbr.com/crunchyroll-chatgpt-sub-anime

Poor subtitles don't really bother me.

For one thing I've watched enough anime that I have quite a bit of comprehension of spoken Japanese, there are a lot of things that you hear over and over again that stick in my mind. I will even instinctually translate English translations of anime back into idiomatic anime Japanese.

Another thing is that emotional comprehension of Japanese is really easy for English speakers. The people who make Chinese mobile games realize this and make Japanese the default for westerners as opposed to Chinese or English: Japanese speakers use tone to express emotion and I dare say are more expressive and more comprehensible emotionally to English speakers than English speakers.

My spoken Chinese comprehension is weak but I've been training myself to read it emotionally -- like emotionally Chinese was "inscrutable" [1] to me when I first started watching Chinese language media but I hear people speak Chinese every day at my Uni and I watch their faces out of the corner of my eye and maybe even drift into a synchronization trace and I can feel the rhythm of how their voice speeds up and slows down and the other cues and it seems really expressive to me.

Now I have a lot of respect for professional western voice actors who do "cartoons", I saw one who went to my acting school who did a 5 minute skit where he did about 20 different voices. There you really have madcap expressiveness but unfortunately the genre is limited and you just don't have the range of subjects and a stance which is just a bit more serious but still has a "cartoony" range of expression when things get heated.

[1] tone is semantic in Chinese so it is not used so much to express emotion

I lived in Taiwan for years where I worked in ESL and later translation work between traditional Chinese and English. Chinese (like many languages) can vary pretty widely in terms of intonation/accents. For example, if you listen to someone with a 青島 accent, IMHO it sounds a bit more subdued than a typical 北京 one. Interestingly I've actually had a number of mainlanders instantly identify me as having learned Chinese in Taiwan because of my softer pronunciations.

Wrt to voice actors, the world of today is far different from the VA world of yesteryear. There's a lot more competition and also less demand for somebody who can do a multitude of bombastic voices. It's rare that you need somebody like Dan Castellaneta or Mel Blanc. Partly I think because if you look at the trends, especially in Western cartoons and animation, the characters' voices are often very close to the voice actors' natural voices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com