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Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles) — Page 89

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I was wondering if I could possibly get a link to the most recent update.

Thanks in advance and thanks for all the hard work you have put into this project!

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Thanks for the amount of work !
Can I have a link to subtitles files ?

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Hi Catbus, and thanks for your work!
Can you please share the link to the subtitle pack?

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Hi CatBus
I have been thinking on how to improve the flow in a subtitle. This is what I have come up with and I wondering what you are thinking about it.

1 Defining the characters:

LS=Luke skywalker
DV=Darth Vader
R2=R2D2
C3=C3P0
UO=Uncle Owen
Ux=Unkown
and so on, to be used instead of speechlines(–) and infront of their lines too. Defining the characters could be done just before their first appearance:

AU=Aunt Beru

AU Luke! Luke!

AU Luke, tell Uncle if he gets a translator,
be sure it speaks Bocce.

LS=Luke Skywalker

LS Doesn’t look like we have much
of a choice, but I’ll remind him.

2 Rolling subtitle:

UO Can you speak Bocce?
C3 Of course I can, sir. It’s like…

C3 Of course I can, sir. It’s like…
C3 …a second language to me. I’m as fluent—

C3 …a second language to me. I’m as fluent—
UO Yeah, all right. Shut up. I’ll take this one. Luke!

UO Yeah, all right. Shut up. I’ll take this one. Luke!
UO Take these two over to the garage, will you?

UO Take these two over to the garage, will you?
UO I want them cleaned up before dinner.

This would get people more time to read the lines.
Should it be declared somehow when the line moves up to give space for a new line? Maybe an arrow poinitng upwards?

Reading it like this doesn’t give it much justice, create a subtitle and see how the ideas works/doesn’t work.

3 subtitles for dubs:

The dubs doesn’t always correspond to the subtitle, maybe create subtitles for these too?

4 The bad idea:
I was thinking of maybe makin the second line backwards to make the reading flow a little smoother:

UO Take these two over to the garage, will you?
UO .dinner before up cleaned them want I

How could this idea work in other languages?

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 (Edited)

I think what you’re describing for #1 and #2 is partway to an SDH subtitle. i.e. cues for things you may not be able to hear clearly. While I’d happily accept SDH subtitles for non-English languages, I’d have to rely entirely on others to do the translation work (the commercial subtitles generally don’t do this). You could use the English SDH subtitles as a template, just finding the SDH cues and translating them/inserting them into the existing subtitles. The character names would have to be localized to the current translation. No universal abbreviation system would work (think about languages that don’t use Latin characters).

There are a couple Uncle Owen exchanges that are just very dense, and rougher on mid-dialogue line breaks than anywhere else in the trilogy. I’m more likely to solve that problem through retiming than anything else, but only if it’s a noticeable improvement and maintains readability. I’ve even dropped one of C-3PO’s lines (“Shutting up, sir”) in that particular exchange in an attempt to give the other lines more space. It’s just… a lot of dialogue in a short period of time. I see what you’re doing, but I’m not sure this is the way to do it, in non-SDH subtitles, at least.

For #3, you’re definitely not the only one who’s interested in this, but this is too much for this project. These subtitles are designed for the English audio only – adding one more supported audio track, with different translations and even different timing (stormtrooper voices don’t always line up at all, because there are no lips to sync), could theoretically double the size of the project, and then double again for another dub. I definitely recognize that if you watch, for example, the Italian dub with Italian subtitles (or the Italian dub with Croatian subtitles, etc), the dialogue won’t match. That’s a line I drew a long time ago for this project, and I’m not willing to step over it. The project goal is to provide the best possible translations of the English dialogue, and that’s all. Dub translations often prioritize things like lip-matching, so it’s possible no “best English translation” subtitle would match in any dub translation. There are language-specific preservations (Krieg der Sterne, Geurre Stellari, etc), and it’d probably make more sense to pair this type of subtitle with those projects. It’s a good idea overall – I know I occasionally watch films both dubbed and subbed in English, and I don’t like when they don’t match, even though I know why.

For #4, I like the thinking outside the box, but no. Too weird 😉

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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Hello CatBus, could you send me a link to download all the subtitles (all languages) of the 3 movies please?

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A very sincere thank you for all the hard work, CatBus!

May I have a link to the subtitle pack please?

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Thanks for your job! CatBus, can you send me Ukrainian subtitles, please?

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Thanks for all your hard work CatBus, could I get a link to these please?

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Hi CatBus, I’d like to get these subtitles too. Thanks for your hard work.

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 (Edited)

It’s been a while since I’ve put a “Here’s an interesting thing I learned today” post out here. It started with this article (from 2013, so the situation may have greatly improved since then):

https://medium.com/@eteraz/the-death-of-the-urdu-script-9ce935435d90

First off – Urdu subtitles are still not really an option unless I find a new source. The Urdu subtitles floating around out there on the usual Subscene-type sites are clearly machine translations with major problems that are obvious even to me. But machine translations may be good enough for creating titles-only subtitles to accompany the Hindi dub (quick background: Hindi and Urdu, when spoken, are very closely related dialects of a language sometimes called “Hindustani” with only a few minor vocabulary differences. When written, however, they are written in entirely different scripts that are indecipherable to each other. So an Urdu-speaking viewer watching a Hindi dub is a quite likely scenario, and Urdu titles-only subtitles for the Greedo/Jabba scenes would help them.

Back to the different families of Perso-Arabic scripts: if it’s hard for people to imagine how a font can make such a difference, Latin-based languages had a similar schism a long time ago. There was a form of writing called Blackletter which was once very common, but it was eventually supplanted by Roman-style text. Today, Blackletter is only really used when people want to make something extra fancy or medieval-looking. If you had to read a whole book in this script, you could still do it, but it would be very slow-going (and you’d probably also think it’d be worthwhile to find the same book in a different font).

And that’s where people seem to sit on the Naskh/Nastaliq divide, except that both styles remain in active use. The Arabic world has gone with Naskh, parts of South and Central Asia have gone with Nastaliq, and Iran sits in the middle, where Naskh is used for everyday usage, and Nastaliq is used pretty much exclusively for poetry and decorative script. Using the wrong font in the wrong place ends up with people feeling that they’re reading some strange, foreign and unnecessarily difficult-to-read text (you may see old Ottoman-era signs with Nastaliq script in Naskh-using areas, but that’s much like Blackletter today – it does still exist, but it’s very limited in usage). But Naskh clearly rules the digital world, and Nastaliq areas just suffer with it. It’s so bad that, according to the article, in Nastaliq areas, people hate using Naskh on their smartphones so much that it has given rise to Urdu transliterated into Latin – a whole new informal, unstandardized writing system created for lack of a font!

So, long story short, when I create these Urdu titles-only subtitles, they will be Nastaliq. But I will likely also create Afghan Persian (Dari) subtitles. Afghan Persian is basically the same as Iranian Persian with a few vocabulary and pronunciation differences, but in written form they’re very, very close, except that Iranian Persian (for non-poetry) is typically Naskh and Afghan Persian is typically Nastaliq. This is not entirely new territory – Simplified and Traditional Mandarin have a similar split, where they’re mutually legible but just feel wrong when used for the wrong audience. Serbian is available in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, and so on.

And after working with this for a bit, I can also understand why Nastaliq is having such difficulty in a digital world. The script is a horizontally-written (RTL) script, but it doesn’t sit neatly on a straight baseline like most other scripts. Instead, it sort of hangs in the air and words tend to form these beautiful-looking cascading diagonals (which likely present all sorts of issues to the font renderer/shaper). But if you’re pressed for vertical space, that sort of layout can be a problem – and subtitles are definitely pressed for vertical space. Nevertheless, I think I’ll be able to make it work. Nastaliq subtitles will definitely cover more of the screen vertically than their Naskh counterparts, but it seems workable. In my opinion, if you have only a couple seconds to read text before it disappears again, it should be in the easiest-to-read format possible!

Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)

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Hello, cat bus. Can you send me the subtitle of return of the Jedi? Thank you very much.

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 (Edited)

Hello, cat bus. Can you send me the subtitle of return of the Jedi(Mandarin Chinese)? Thank you very much.

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Hello Catbus, and thanks for your work!
Can you share the link to the subtitle pack? thanks