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I've finally taken my first few steps into the brave new world of subtitling.  My girlfriend wants to watch Avatar (does that count as an anime?), but the English is a bit too fast for her. So, after realizing that I either cannot find the Japanese subtitles or no one ever made any, I set out to make them myself. Since I figured a lot of goons here in ADTRW have subtitle experience (if only just looking at subtitles experience), what are your suggestions for me? (Including suggestions for a better title, haha) I'm currently using Aegisub, and it is quite the slow running. Most of my time is being absorbed with timing. I had a few questions: Do you like to start your subtitles right before they speak, or after? Or is precision not that important? What's your opinion on subtitling things like "Ah"? Any tips to doing animations (like of the opening etc)?  Also concerning moving from English to Japanese: How do you handle pronouns? What helps you decide to use 俺 or あたし? Or even おら or something? (More people need to refer to themselves as 拙者 in my opinion) What about honorifics or polite language?  I also want this tread to be a more general discussion of subtitling in general as well: How many of you are in the subtitle game? Who makes your favorite (least favorite) subs? What's it like speed subbing? How many of you use English subtitles for other things as well because you've blown out your ears listening to too much J, K, or some other letter of Pop? etc. (Also, do you consider Avatar an anime?)  Also also post your favorite subtitles:  Bonus points if you find the keitai one
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Jan 17, 2015 01:39
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i cant help you but here are some funny subs  
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Jan 17, 2015 02:00
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Shadow0 posted:My girlfriend wants to watch Avatar (does that count as an anime?), but the English is a bit too fast for her. Shadow0 posted:Since I figured a lot of goons here in ADTRW have subtitle experience (if only just looking at subtitles experience), what are your suggestions for me? (Including suggestions for a better title, haha) The usual workflow is to first translate the entire thing into a plain txt file, then load that into Aegisub and time everything. Shadow0 posted:I had a few questions: My own experience is that precision isn't that important, as long as you don't start much too early. Half a second is okay, a full second is stretching it. Just make sure things stay on screen long enough to read them. Interjections depend. If they flow into a following sentence, consider doing them. If the character is just mumbling while trying to accomplish something I'd say don't bother. If by animations you mean karaoke effects, don't. They went out of vogue 5 years ago. (Karaoke effects are the cracktros of fansubbers, pure  .)If you mean series logo or so, don't bother unless you are really bored. Learning the tools well takes a long time. Shadow0 posted:I also want this tread to be a more general discussion of subtitling in general as well: And no.
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Jan 17, 2015 02:29
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It's not a sub thread without: http://onoretvn.tumblr.com/
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Jan 17, 2015 05:47
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nielsm posted:It's more likely that Japan dubbed it into Japanese, if it was ever released there. Japan tends to dub foreign things, especially cartoons and other stuff made for kids. I'm pretty sure there is indeed a Japanese dub of ATLA; I saw a YouTube clip of it once.
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Jan 17, 2015 06:05
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Silver2195 posted:I'm pretty sure there is indeed a Japanese dub of ATLA; I saw a YouTube clip of it once.
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Jan 17, 2015 06:11
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You're going to learn Aegisub, for all its issues there's nothing better or even close. Speedsubbing is like normal subbing, except with the 90% of excuses suctioned out. Niels's advice is good. Avoid doing basically anything you posted a screenshot of. Avoid "built-in" subtitle animations too; look into Mocha tracking if necessary, but there's no value except competition in crazy karaoke and there's no competition left in it anymore. The best advice for you, though, is: Don't.
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Jan 17, 2015 06:33
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Translation theory is something of a hobby for me. Perhaps I can help a little bit?Shadow0 posted:Do you like to start your subtitles right before they speak, or after? Shadow0 posted:What's your opinion on subtitling things like "Ah"? Even if you're going English to Japanese, there's a great deal you can learn from translators going in the opposite direction. Especially go for the more liberal translations: instead of comparing words and specific grammar, you want to be looking at sentences and larger constructions. So "kisama" can be translated as "you bastard". Woo... what a revelation.  Rather than that, I'm sure you can think of phrases and idioms that don't offer immediate alternatives. e.g. "yoroshiku onegai shimasu". Seeing how translators handle things like that can help you go the opposite way; even if you don't use anything you observe, it helps keep you aware that the more common language can map on to many different things.With regards to sounds like "ah" and so on. It seems to be up to the translator's discretion, but keep in mind that people read slowly, and subtitle space is at a premium. I think a good rule of thumb is to forget it if it's just filler sounds like "um" and "err", and to include it if it's "part" of the sentence or if the meaning is different. e.g. "Oh, I see" becomes "Aa, sou desu ka". You get the idea. Shadow0 posted:Who makes your favorite (least favorite) subs? Professional translations done by the licensing companies are usually fine. You get the occasional  snoozefest but by and large they're quite serviceable.Hope that's useful.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:29
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I appreciate it when for more WJT shows the subtitles do try to explain some of the weirdness or weirder jokes that we're (Westerners) just not likely to understand even if we're trying to learn the language and have some exposure to the culture. I will generally prefer something that sounds natural in English even if it loses some literal accuracy, unless its something you know to be plot specific/important later on. I also watch everything (even English stuff) in subtitles because sometimes I miss parts of conversation and its easier to pay attention to words on the screen.
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Jan 17, 2015 15:07
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For quick and dirty timing for non-anime .srts I like to use SubtitleEdit to play the audio back and use the program's hotkeys to do things like, "set end time of subtitle, advance to next subtitle, set beginning time", which should probably be possible in Aegisub but I remember it not doing exactly what I wanted. Aegisub is definitely the more robust program for anything more complicated than a srt though. Some people don't like the post processor but I thought it took a lot of the hassle out of tuning lead in and lag times for caption groups. Also, the last anime I did timing for was when Aegisub was SSA, which was the most infuriating poo poo ever. I have fond memories of losing like a half hour of work when the application crashed gracelessly to desktop because I pushed the wrong button at the wrong time.
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Jan 17, 2015 16:03
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staplegun posted:Also, the last anime I did timing for was when Aegisub was SSA, which was the most infuriating poo poo ever. I have fond memories of losing like a half hour of work when the application crashed gracelessly to desktop because I pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. Aegisub's initial working title was Visual rear end, but that was changed before the first public release. SubStation Alpha is an entirely different program, but as far as I know it was pretty stable. Its main disadvantages were that it was designed for hardsubbing VHS tapes with a genlock. Maybe you're thinking of Medusa which was popular around 2003-2006? Because that was a terrible piece of poo poo. Or maybe XombieSub.
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Jan 17, 2015 16:11
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nielsm posted:Aegisub's initial working title was Visual rear end, but that was changed before the first public release. SubStation Alpha is an entirely different program, but as far as I know it was pretty stable. Its main disadvantages were that it was designed for hardsubbing VHS tapes with a genlock. Ah, I feel pretty dumb for making that connection based off of a small coincidence (both are subbing programs, one uses the .ssa suffix, the other .rear end). I'm 100% sure the program that was giving me issues was SSA, but I'm also pretty sure the me almost a decade ago didn't try too hard to fix the issue and just struggled with not clicking the CRASH DIRECTLY TO DESKTOP button. staplegun fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 16:31
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I remember having the issue of how I should split caption groups from a raw script and I was wondering if anyone had some advice since my solution isn't too elegant. Usually, when someone gives me a transcription it will be formatted in a way that doesn't care about maximum caption group lengths (Aegisub defaults to 40 characters maximum per line, so 80 per caption group), so I'll typically need to have it formatted before I begin timing. Letting Aegisub break long caption groups more often that not breaks the caption group or splits it in dumb ways. Do any of you have advice for automating their creation? I wrote a perl script that inputs a raw script, identifies changes of speakers, [audio cues], then breaks the lines into caption groups that make sense, but it's not perfect (and I literally do not understand why it works as well as it does, even though I wrote it). Oh yeah, and this: The Evil Thing posted:I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here. Surely the subtitles should appear simultaneously with the line, otherwise things can get confusing, especially in rapid-fire conversations. I didn't realize how important lead in times were until I actually started subtitling. You do want the subtitles to start a little before a character starts speaking (nothing too crazy, aegisub's default is like 200ms but I think I used less) since it gives a heads up to the viewer that, "hey, dialogue is starting now, look down here". It becomes less important when a character is going to speak for longer than a single caption group or if they're in conversation with someone since you're kind of expecting more text by that point, at which point you should just use the post processor to make the lines continuous and mostly biased to the end of the first line (did I mention that I love the post processor?) staplegun fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 17:16
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Wait, so is your input in one-two sentence-sized chunks that occasionally drift over your target CPS/go 3-line, or entire paragraphs at a time when characters have monologues? If it's the second case, I'd be more inclined to make a manual first pass to add linebreaks in the raw text wherever there are significant pauses (or just ask your typist to press enter then). This will leave you with output resembling the first case, which can be tweaked for reading difficulty and target audience on a line-by-line basis by duplicating -> removing text from each -> retiming that pair to split in the middle. Fully automating it sounds like an unsolvable problem, because you're losing a lot of data about the significance of each pause in the change to text. "Kind of" automating it by just having evenly-split 80-char chunks is a starting point for a serious edit pass.
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Jan 18, 2015 00:31
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IA(Trl) = f(Sk)
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Jan 18, 2015 02:39
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I miss the karaoke on OPs how am I supposed to sing along now?
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Jan 19, 2015 20:50
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Make sure you include as many hilarious references and in-jokes as you can. edit: ie: 
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Jan 19, 2015 21:03
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Endorph posted:i cant help you but here are some funny subs Except for the sloppy second half, that was just about what the original text was, wasn't it? The dub was something like "You keep yapping [about POW conventions] and I'll introduce an illegal hard-mod to your face"
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Jan 20, 2015 00:12
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Well, that certainly makes my life easier. To be honest though, this is more of a way of forcing myself to study. I also want to introduce my girlfriend to more American TV (and can be mild studying for her as well [especially since she's helping out with the translations because I keep having questions]). nielsm posted:Learning to time well takes some time. Learn the keyboard controls, Aegisub is designed to be controlled in a similar way to an FPS game when timing: Left hand on QWER ADSFG, right hand on mouse.  No love for lefties.nielsm posted:Subtitles always start at or slightly before the character being speaking. Exception might be if the original video has a hard subtitle of someone speaking a third language, then time your subtitle to match the existing one to make it more visually pleasing. Okay, that'll help a lot. nielsm posted:If by animations you mean karaoke effects, don't. They went out of vogue 5 years ago. (Karaoke effects are the cracktros of fansubbers, pure Yeah, that was what I meant. I definitely did give up. Maybe one day. The Evil Thing posted:If you're translating into Japanese to begin with, presumably you're at least fluent. Just use the rules you were taught for pronouns, honorifics, keigo etc. as normal. Cartoon dialogue might be more hammy and exaggerated than in real life, but the the grammar is basically the same. I'd do my best to avoid getting bogged down in "what does X word mean in Japanese?"-type questions: you aren't trying to operate a 1:1 encryption cypher. Your first priority is making the characters sound natural, because a translation absolutely can make or break a show for some people. Yeah, the answer to my questions seem pretty obvious now, haha. This is more of practice for me that turns into a present for my girlfriend and then dispersed to the internet if it cares. I'm only conversational, but she's fluent obviously. I've never used polite language in my life though. I should probably go back and listen more closely to how anime characters similar to the characters in Avatar talk and model it off of that (or just use the dub, haha). Right, the meaning of the sentence - or more like - the meaning of the information that needs to be conveyed is what's important. Now that I think about it, I can probably just copy the dub into subtitles... I guess that'd defeat half the purpose though. The Evil Thing posted:Hope that's useful. Yes, it was, thank you! staplegun posted:Ah, I feel pretty dumb for making that connection based off of a small coincidence (both are subbing programs, one uses the .ssa suffix, the other .rear end). I'm 100% sure the program that was giving me issues was SSA, but I'm also pretty sure the me almost a decade ago didn't try too hard to fix the issue and just struggled with not clicking the CRASH DIRECTLY TO DESKTOP button. More things need a CRASH DIRECTLY TO DESKTOP button. staplegun posted:
I'm finding that Aegisub has no idea when people are talking and guesses wildly, is there some feature I'm overlooking? Thanks for pointing out the post processor though, that'll make adding those lead-in times a lot easier. Thanks a lot, everyone, these are some good tips. Sinking Ship posted:Make sure you include as many hilarious references and in-jokes as you can.  Does anyone know if subs are big at all in Japan? It seemed that no one really knows how to use a computer (or recognize the existence of foreign media [it's probably scary]), let alone search for fansubs. Are the dubs even popular?
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Jan 21, 2015 17:10
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No stop. re: dubs in Japan once I tuned into a Tokyo channel that was airing Hannah Montana dubbed that is my experience. There's actually a ton of dubbed cartoons on Disney Channel Japan and Cartoon Network Japan but most people don't get those channels so raws are hard to come by for the average person.
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Jan 21, 2015 17:20
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Shadow0 posted:
Shadow0 posted:More things need a CRASH DIRECTLY TO DESKTOP button. Shadow0 posted:I'm finding that Aegisub has no idea when people are talking and guesses wildly, is there some feature I'm overlooking?
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Jan 21, 2015 17:23
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aers posted:re: dubs in Japan once I tuned into a Tokyo channel that was airing Hannah Montana dubbed that is my experience. Yeah, a lot of Western stuff gets dubbed pretty often. I haven't seen much personally, but I can't not love the 24 commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga4nNSqsYp0
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Jan 21, 2015 18:08
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Oh yeah Fox has some Japanese channels that run dubs of all the popular American police procedural shows etc.
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Jan 21, 2015 18:14
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 Oh lord
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Jan 21, 2015 18:52
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if you look up most japanese voice actores they've usually done dub work, too. personally favorite is norio wakamoto as shredder in teenage mutant ninja turtles
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Jan 21, 2015 21:26
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Shadow0 posted:Does anyone know if subs are big at all in Japan? It seemed that no one really knows how to use a computer (or recognize the existence of foreign media [it's probably scary]), let alone search for fansubs. South Park gets decently fast Japanese fansubs, for what it's worth. Unfortunately they're pretty literal.
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Jan 24, 2015 12:40
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Mandoric posted:South Park gets decently fast Japanese fansubs, for what it's worth. Unfortunately they're pretty literal.
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Jan 24, 2015 12:48
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Mandoric posted:South Park gets decently fast Japanese fansubs, for what it's worth. Unfortunately they're pretty literal.
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Jan 24, 2015 14:02
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Endorph posted:do they have translator's notes explaining the american pop culture references? because that would be like an ouroboros I wanna watch the Chinpokomon episode in the original Japanese dub, subbed with a proper extreme literal translation.
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Jan 24, 2015 17:36
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I was under the impression that episode wasn't dubbed in Japanese though that might be an impression born of telephone game talk.
ConanThe3rd fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 21:08
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Jan 25, 2015 00:00
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