Chatgpt’s translation errors with Crunchyroll Anime Spark calls for human localizations
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- Crunchyroll sent anime with clearly generated subtitles with typos, clumsy phrasing and lines like “chatgpt said.”
- Fans noticed quickly and criticized the lack of human supervision
- The incident emphasizes the growing concerns about AI that replaces creative roles without the right assessment, in particular in the localization, where context and tone are crucial
There are whales, and then there are chatgpt -under titles that seem to be deliberately written to make people upset. That seemed to happen with some of the translated Japanese people who are shown on the screen during episodes of Anime who have recently been spotted and shared online.
The first example to get online attention made it clear that ChatGpt was the culprit of uncomfortable and outright translations during an episode of Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror ShowCrunchyroll’s new anime series about occult strange and internet brain rot. It literally included the “Chatgpt” rule in both the German and the English subtitles.
Fans started screenshots of bizarre sentence structures and dialogue they had seen, and now had a statement and a source of debt. Four -game character names, inconsistent phrasing and just outright invented words and sentences were spotted everywhere.
I only looked for about two minutes and was so frustrated about the subs with mistakes that even a normal machine translation would not have given.
– @halene.bsky.social (@halene.bsky.social.bsky.social)) 2025-07-03T02: 47: 11.136Z
In the event that it was not enough, the president of Crunchyroll, Rahul Purini, had told forbes in one interview Only a few months ago the company had no plans to use AI in the ‘creative process’. They would not mess with voice acting or storage generation, he said. AI would be limited to helping people to find shows to watch and recommend new shows based on what viewers had previously enjoyed.
Apparently chatgpt translations do not count under that section, but localization is not a mechanical process, as every human translator could explain.
Localisation art
Hey, now show some respect for the most legendary of all anime subbers: the name of the translator
– @viridianjcm.bsky.social (@viridianjcm.bsky.social.bsky.social)) 2025-07-03T02: 47: 11.132Z
Localizing is a major problem with anime fans. Debates about or certain subtitles are too literal, too loose or too limited in their references to be understood outside of Japan have been raging for decades. But nobody on which side of those debates is probably that these enormous errors by Chatgpt are fine.
Crunchyroll has not officially clarified how this happened, but reports suggest that the subtitles of the Japanese production partner came from the company. The generated subtitles can be given to Crunchyroll to air without crunchyroll being responsible for making it.
As different people have noticed, you expect, when you pay anime to stream anime from a large platform such as Crunchyroll, a certain basic line of quality. Even if you do not agree with the choices of a room, you can at least understand where they come from. The fact that apparently no one has read the chatgpt titles before they were uploaded to a global audience is more difficult to justify.
Translation is an art. Localization is not just about replacing Japanese with English. It is about tone, cadence, subtext and making a character sound like himself in a language barrier. AI can guess which words go where, but it doesn’t know the characters or the show. It is like a small translation dictionary, which is fine as far as it goes, but it cannot make a conversation logical without combining a person. A few fans are furious enough to ask themselves and to go back to sharing fansubs, the self -brewed subtitles unofficially written and reduced in the days of VHS. In other words, exactly the thing that Crunchyroll ever helped to be outdated by offering licensed versions of shows of higher quality.
At a time when more people look anime than ever before, Crunchyroll is apparently willing to gamble that most of us will not notice or give whether the words that characters say are logical. If Crunchyroll wants to maintain its credibility, the localization should not treat as a technical problem to optimize, but as a storytelling component that requires human nuance and judgment. Otherwise it might just be “gameorver” for the reputation of Crunchyroll.
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