Final word: looks like native subs are in for the next release, for German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, for international preservations that may or may not exist yet. If anyone knows about other international releases of the OOT with translated onscreen text, let me know–but I think most of the others either subtitled or dubbed over the crawls and alien dialogue. Or they’re SE releases, which isn’t really usable in this context.
Matching international subtitles look like they’re out, though. The only Star Wars international reference I have is for Italian, and the font is so large that matching other subtitles can cover the whole width of the screen, even if I cheat a little and compress the long subtitles a bit*. You’d really have to break the lines up into smaller chunks, and I’m afraid it still wouldn’t look very good even with that. Matching international Jedi subtitles are doable, at least using the references I have, but then you get matching subs for only one film of the trilogy, and that seems a little off to me. So at least for Project Threepio, matching subtitles will be an English-only phenomenon. Not that it won’t include all the tools and sources necessary for people to try this on their own, if they want.
* With the new script, I’m trying to be more careful about enforcing the so-called title-safe area, which isn’t as strictly necessary anymore, but still helps with aesthetics. When subtitles exceed 80% of the screen’s width, I get nervous and the script throws warnings, and when they exceed 90%, there’s a problem and the script errors out. I cheat by condensing any subtitle that exceeds the 80% threshold by up to 7.5%, which usually isn’t very noticeable. However, using the matching Italian Star Wars font, even with a full 7.5% compression, it still ran over the 80% threshold quite a bit, and the 90% threshold in one spot. It never actually ran off the screen, though, at least on the one language I tested (Italian). But it just wouldn’t have looked very good, in my opinion.