Turns out typesetting is kind of important but so is deciding what to translate

Over on Bluesky, Yukino has a complaint about a recent episode of Mono:

my favorite thing in the world is isolated translations of onscreen text that is downright impossible to tell what it’s referring to unless you already know the language

The example she attached was this (image & alt text by Yukino):

Anime publishing legend ‪Justin Sevakis‬ knew why this caption was displayed in this very unhelpful way:

This is done for compatibility with various streaming service’s subtitle/caption standards, which are based on closed captions and are absolutely not up to the challenge of anime and yet are insisted upon by said streamers

Which explains why this happened, but not why the anonymous translator decided this particular tag had to be translated and put on the screen in the first place. there’s no reason for it, the glasses are never seen again; it just seems to be translated because it could be, just like the other examples in Yukino’s tweet. And by floating them on the top of the screen instead of on or near the text they translate, they are as she says, completely useless unless you can already read the Japanese and so work out what they refer to. I’ve seen and been irritated a lot recently by exactly this combination of subtitling over eagerness and lackadaisical placements of captions, so it’s gratifying to see I’m not alone in this.

So often that we get completely superfluous captions translated (like school name plates or class number signs) while actually important text is left alone. When it’s then also displayed as incompetently as in Mono episode four as Yukino showed, it’s adding insult to injury. What it also does is show the importance of typesetting:

That video is four years old and sadly things seem to have deteriorated since then. As I keep saying, translation, including typesetting things properly, is the one added value anime streaming services add. But currently they fall at both deciding what is important enough to translate and then at displaying it properly. If a Crunchyroll has no respect for its own product, how can it expect its customers to have it?