Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles) — Page 14

That's great.  Since you're in Slovakia, if you have another source for Slovak subtitles for the OT (such as good-quality fansubs), that would be fine too!

Yeah, I don't want to add any more languages unless they're trilogy-complete... so it's up to you, really.  I think lack of Slovak subtitles isn't a huge deal, considering our solid support for Czech, etc.  But if we want a Slovak option, I've got an English template file for Star Wars for you... and I'd want you to go through and check for any terrible errors in the other films too.

At least according to Google Translate, in Thai, C-3PO yells at the Mynock: "Go away, you crazy insect!"

...which, from what I've heard about the size of the insects in Thailand, is actually pretty accurate.

FYI, I'm doing a little housekeeping and this will involve a few changes to naming conventions in the next version.

First off, I'm getting rid of the "-forced" suffix, because the titles are not actually forced, they're just the sort of thing that is typically forced.  So rather than confusing people as to why those subs are not actually appearing by default (as truly forced subs should), I'm changing the name to "-titles", at least for now, because these subs are for onscreen titles.

I probably won't ever make truly forced subtitles, if for no reason other than the fact that the language tagging conventions for subtitles are inadequate to get it working properly in many cases--if you have your system set to display Chinese forced subtitles if available, great--does that mean Mandarin or Cantonese, Traditional or Simplified, and so on.  I will, however, include a utility in the next version which will allow people to easily mark subtitles as truly forced if that's their preference.

Speaking of Chinese, I'll also be changing the Mandarin tags to something a little more correct by modern standards.  So zh-cn will become zh-cmn-hans and zh-tw will become zh-cmn-hant.

There is no need for these tags, simply naming the files "ESB_cantonese" or "ESB_mandarin_traditional" is a better idea IMO.

I'm hoping that people actually having to know/find their language code is a bit of a short-term anomaly.  As new projects come out, I hope they'll just mux in these tracks with the correct language code and then nobody will need to download Project Threepio as a separate package.  They'll just play the video and their player will display the full language names in the subtitles menu.

This is ultimately designed as a supply-side project, even though the SUP files have yet to actually be used in a preservation--and the language codes can be helpful for disc authors (keeping the filenames as short as possible can be a virtue with certain authoring software), as well as for many of the utilities I use for creating the subtitles in the first place, so they're staying as-is.

Okay, so this is weird.  I know DVDs are passé and everything, and that even moreso, MuxMan is ancient and unmaintained, but I nevertheless find it to be an awesome free tool for the job.

But remember a while back how I had to include a modified version of MuxMan because the regular version used the wrong language code for Indonesian (so some players couldn't ID the language correctly)?  Well, it turns out that in the late eighties, three ISO-639-1 language codes got changed--Indonesian, Hebrew, and Yiddish.  And in at least one official standards document out there somewhere, the code for Javanese was mistyped.  MuxMan gets all of these wrong, using the old/wrong values.  So I'll be making another modification to MuxMan to take care of this.

And, as a teaser, there's an actual reason beyond anal-retentiveness I needed to make this change ;)

If anyone here can read/write Hebrew or Arabic, I would be delighted with some assistance.  There appear to be good-quality (what I'd call "verified") graphical Special Edition subs out there (and I have some for SW, with more on the way), but converting them into text and retiming them to the GOUT may be the death of me.  They aren't useful as graphical-only subs because they're SE subs, so it's convert & retime them, or nothing.  Also, RTL scripts make my head hurt.

The help I need would involve taking an English template, and either transcribing the translations from a graphical image of the translated subtitle, or pasting in an OCR'd version of those subs, and making manual corrections as needed.  You wouldn't actually have to do much translation at all, because that's already done.

I'll try my best on my own of course, but I might not get very far.

Why not

Can I please ask for a download link to the subtitles? Thanks :)

PM sent.

Much, much appreciated! Thumbs up :)

PM sent.

While using Google Translate to help sync the official Simplified Mandarin translation to the GOUT, I got my favorite mangled translation so far.

As our heroes are escaping Mos Eisley, C-3PO says: "I forgot how much I hate Star Trek."

Project files have been updated to version 8.0 (original post has been updated as well). Please PM me for the temporary download links until the files are available in a more permanent location.

The goal of the 8.x series is to provide complete subtitle parity, in terms of both quantity and quality, with every known release of the 2011SE worldwide.

I was not able to complete everything I wanted to do before I felt obligated to release what I had in its current form, so there will be a smaller point-release or two down the road--but in its current state, we already offer a complete superset of the subtitle languages offered in every 2011SE release (that I'm aware of), and are very close to matching them in terms of quality as well. Congratulations to everyone who has contributed anything to this project so far!

Rough summary of changes:
- Added four new languages: European Portuguese, Hebrew, Slovenian, and Icelandic
- Changed quite a few languages that were partially or completely based on fansubs to official translations, including: Mandarin/Simplified, Russian, Turkish, Romanian, Croatian, Greek, and Bulgarian. Candidates for similar changes in the future include Arabic and Korean.
- Operation Eyestrain (a joint effort between Sadako, Feallan, and myself) is converting our graphical-only subtitles to text-based subtitles, and this work is ongoing. The status as of this release is: Mandarin/Traditional (complete), Cantonese (complete), Japanese (SW & ESB only), and Thai (ESB & ROTJ only). The result of this work will be editable/correctable subtitles in these languages that also happen to look nicer than our current graphical ones.
- Minor "correctness" fixes and cleanup to documentation and file naming conventions. The subtitles formerly known as "forced" are now known as "titles".
- Instructions are included for how to mark certain subtitles as forced, if that's what you really want to do.
- The version of Muxman included with this project has been modified (again), so that it no longer uses incorrect language codes for the following languages: Indonesian, Javanese, Hebrew, and Yiddish. No plans for Javanese or Yiddish subtitles, but never say never...
- Minor changes to Polish and English subtitles.
- The project now includes a HELP_WANTED.html file, as a reminder to people who use our subtitles that we can use feedback on our existing subtitles, and could always use subtitles in new languages.

Thanks to Feallan, pittrek, Sadako, Teesel, and lexsanor for their enormous amount of help, hard work, and raw materials used in many parts of this release.

As always, I'm sure I've forgotten a thing or two, but those are the big changes.

Nearly all subtitles are now of high enough quality that I feel the categories of "verified" and "unverified" subtitles have outlived their usefulness, so I will no longer make this distinction. The only fansub that I feel I can safely say needs some serious attention at this point is Arabic, and I'll keep working to address that. As always, any of our subtitles may contain errors, including errors duplicated from the original translation, but they can be perfected over time as people report the problems.

The shift toward using official translations in this release doesn't mean I think official translations are necessarily better than fansubs--simply that without the ability to determine the quality of any particular translation, the official ones are the safest choice, and also more likely to be consistent between films.

Lastly, if anyone out there knows how to read and type Arabic text, and would like to help this project provide top-quality Arabic subtitles, let me know. I already have complete Arabic translations in graphical form, but the OCR results from multiple programs just don't seem to be very usable without heavy correction, which I doubt I can do by myself. You don't even really have to know the Arabic language, just be able to read and type the characters accurately. Qualified parties please apply within--otherwise, Arabic subtitles will require a minor miracle to reach parity with the others.

doubleKO said:

Ha! Did Google Translate mangle it, or is that in the official subs? If so, do you think it was deliberate? Was it capitalised (or the Mandarin equivalent)?

There probably is an official Mandarin translation for Star Trek, which, if they were literal about it, would be something like "Space Journey".  So when C-3PO complains about hating "space travel", a translator could very well use the same characters.  Mandarin doesn't use the same signifiers for proper names as we use in English, so it could really be identical.  So it's probably a good translation, and Google Translate made a wrong guess that could have been right in another context.

In related news, Grand Theft Auto probably has localized names abroad that are less literal, because the reference to US criminal code would make little sense to those audiences.  I suspect Grand Theft Audio is called something akin to "Rogue" or "Antisocial Bastard" in Chinese.  Why?  Because "Rogue 2" translated back as "Grand Theft Auto 2".  You get odd bits like this all the time from Google Translate.

Keep up the good work guys, even though many of us only speak English we appreciate your efforts to bring the OT to a wider audience.

Thanks!

It's hard to tell. There may be smaller releases somewhere in Asia we don't now about, but I'm willing to bet we caught them all.

Danfun128 said:

I have some questions. Do your subs cover every language the 2011se covers? Are there any languages in here that aren't in the 2011se? What about the other se's and official releases? Lastly, can you PM me the most recent sub update?

PM sent.

I think I got every language used by the 2011SE Blu-rays worldwide, but as Feallan mentioned, there may be smaller-market releases I may have missed.  As for previous Special Editions, that's also a good question.  They've been around longer, so I'd imagine they've had more time to spread to various language markets.  If there are any official subtitled SE releases out there for languages we don't cover, I sure don't know about them.

As for languages we cover that are not covered by the 2011SE OT release, we've got American Spanish (as opposed to Castilian), Indonesian, and Ukrainian.  I've got a lead on Slovak as well, and a small pile of fansubs if I ever get around to it.

That said, I think at this point, it would be far more helpful to sync up foreign dubs than to add more subtitle languages (say what you will about dubs, they are kid-friendly).  So next time you see a pile of old used Greek VHS tapes or somesuch, take a peek... We definitely do not have every dub covered by the 2011SE. That is also being worked on ;)

EDIT: I should also add that numbers are good for bragging, but quality is where it counts.  And the 2011SE still beats us handily in one very large language market: Arabic.  Everywhere else, we're likely competitive on quality, or better!