It’s a great question actually, and the answer has mostly to do with Romanization. Japanese and English are sufficiently structurally different, that even the sentence length won’t necessarily be one to one (eg subject and object inverted).
Another thing that happens is time code shifts that come from differences in frame rate between source material and what the subtitlers end up with (eg 24 vs 23.98 if I’m remembering correctly), which can cause subs to have what we called “ramping” issues over time (timing gets less and less accurate). So you have to go through and reset all the lines anyway.
That being said, we DID do this sometimes, but maybe that takes your time down to 25 minutes, the hard minimum possible time to accurately subtitle a 25 minute show.
And translators hated having to add the times codes (or copy paste their translations over the CCs) — they preferred to just give a script to the subtitler and let them handle it. And actually, if it’s a really good subtitler, they can! In about 35 mins.
So I think the translators were probably right to push back, as it’s only 10 minute savings for probably >10 mins on their part.
- Japanese has very different word order and word lengths, and furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel. (Vice versa as well, of course, but that’s not really a problem here.) To give a sense of the alienness at play here, Japanese is essentially postfix throughout, that is the most literal counterpart of “the car [that you saw yesterday]” is “[[you SUBJECT] yesterday saw] car”; and it also has no way to join sentences that would not make one of them potentially subordinate to the other (like the “and” before the semicolon does in this sentence). Virtually anything longer than a single line has to be retimed (and occasionally edited for length).
- “Forced” subtitles for captions, on-screen text, etc. are simply absent in the original, for lack of need. True believers (like GP apparently used to be) will try to match the positioning and even typesetting of the on-screen original, either replacing or supplementing it. (Those aren’t your run of the mill SRT subs, ASS is a completely different level of functionality.)
> furthermore some constructions that are short and natural in Japanese have no universally good English parallel
One of my favourite things that clearly makes sense and sounds natural in Japanese but obviously doesn't translate well to English is "that person".
Every now and then you'll see some line of dialogue in an anime where someone says "Oh no, if this mark is showing up then we could see the return of _that person_." - which appears to be a way to refer to someone in the third person who the speaker knows but the listener doesn't - a linguistic "he who shall not be named", or "at least he who I'm not naming at this specific moment".
Some of the issues you often run into with Japanese subtitles are:
* Almost all Japanese subtitles include subtitles for every noise made as well as including SDH-like information about sounds. This means that a naive attempt to just match up subtitle timings won't work -- the English translation will have fewer subtitles and you will have to skip Japanese lines that do not have an equivalent in the English transcript.
* Most translated subtitles simplify things and have to re-organise sentence structures to match the target language, which means that you often have to pick different timings for how a sentence is broken up in English than in the original Japanese. Sometimes a very short Japanese phrase requires two sentences to accurately translate, sometimes a long Japanese sentence can be translated into a fairly short English phrase.
* Higher-quality subtitles will also provide translations for signs and other on-screen text (ASS supports custom placement, fonts, styles, and colours -- it is powerful enough to the point where some of the really good fansub jobs I've seen make it look like the video was actually localised to English because all of the signs look like they have been translated in the original video). The original timings don't help with this.
I should mention that I have used tools like alass[1] to re-time subtitles between languages before (including retiming Japanese subtitles to match English ones) so this is not an unreasonable idea on its face, but those tools mostly work with already existing subtitle tracks that have correct timings. My experience is that if you have tracks with very different timings (as opposed to chunks of subtitles with fairly fixed offsets) you start getting rubbish results.
