Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles) — Page 50

mapet318 said:

Huh, I wouldn’t have guessed. I didn’t know lipsyncing in dubs was really a thing. Are you familiar with the Spanish dub of SW? Do you know of any inaccuracies?

No, this was a general statement. Google the term “dubtitles” and you will learn more about how unpopular they are and the reasons why.

As for the initial question asked – no, these subtitles don’t line up with the dubs timing-wise, and also they are different translations, so they don’t match even though they’re the same language.

Project Threepio subtitles try to use the best translations of the spoken English lines, without many other considerations. Dubs try to choose words that match lip movements, and other stylistic things that aren’t purely translation–what you really end up with is an entirely different performance, maybe good, maybe not. Star Wars is even more complicated than many movies, because so many lines are spoken by people wearing masks that dubbers often can choose to time their lines however they like. And some dubs, like the Thai dub for example, time the dubbed lines very haphazardly even when there are lip movements they could line them up with.

But, back to the flamewar-worthy part of this, here’s something I actually like that most people hate: Soviet bloc-style voiceover dubs. Never heard one? Try the Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian voiceovers. Basically the original performance is kept intact, and a translator who tries to stay very neutral just speaks over them. It sounds a lot like a speech at the UN or a radio interview in another language. Okay, it’s weird, I admit, but the original performance is left alone, and the voiceover style likely gives very little temptation for embellishment or alteration, which are both significant advantages over regular dubs in my book.

EDIT: Not to mention that the dubs that voice over the crawl use the 1981 text, while the subtitles use the 1977 text, and despecialized dubs have altered SE lines, while the subs use the original lines.

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Transcribing the dub into Project Threepio-style subtitles would have to be up to someone else familiar with the language (similar to the current situation with Slovak, Hindi, Tamil, and Navajo, where we have dubs without subs). However, if the complete audio happened to find its way over here, despecialized GOUT-synced audio would have quite a lot of value in its own right, and that task could be done by someone unfamiliar with the language…

EDIT: And depending on your definition of minority language, I think Cantonese probably qualifies as our first, not that I wouldn’t want more.

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CatBus said:

Well, I’ve gotten further in this particular stab at rewriting the subtitle rendering routine than I ever have before. The main sticking point seems to be that there’s a Windows-specific bug in ImageMagick+Pango, which means even if everything else is perfect (and we’re not quite there yet either), we’ll need to maintain two different rendering engines, which produce slightly different results, which is relevant in the sense that the SRT timings are optimized for the Windows method (the new method can occasionally be one frame off), etc, etc.

And, well, the script is slow as molasses. But it’s slow across all platforms, so there’s that.

Two steps forward, one step back. The newest ImageMagick fixes the ImageMagick+Pango text rendering bug, so we now have cross-platform parity. Unfortunately the newest ImageMagick also completely changes a few critical functions so all the scripts that worked previously are now broken to some degree. But equally broken across all platforms… I guess this will be good practice for the Perl 6 apocalypse.

I was wondering if you could provide German “native” or even “match” .sub-files in the next version to go along with Laserschwerts German Despecialized Editions.

I’ve thought about that. I’m inclined not to, but could probably be convinced–I’d certainly be happy to help the maintainers of the internationalized versions create such files, if they’re interested. I do make “full” versions of the English subs for that purpose, and none of the others need changing.

Reasons against: subtitle file proliferation (which leads to overwhelmed/confused people), and at least in the case of German matching subs, lack of a theatrical reference for Star Wars, which I also use for the matching style in Empire. I’d hate to make matching subtitles that don’t actually match once a reference is found. Also, the German version is typically watched with the German dub, and I make no promises that my subs match dubs.

CatBus said:

Reasons against: subtitle file proliferation (which leads to overwhelmed/confused people), and at least in the case of German matching subs, lack of a theatrical reference for Star Wars, which I also use for the matching style in Empire. I’d hate to make matching subtitles that don’t actually match once a reference is found.

I understand that and I would be perfectly happy if there were only native, no matching subtitles.

Also, the German version is typically watched with the German dub, and I make no promises that my subs match dubs.

Sure, they are not for the hearing impaired but for people who like to watch original version with subtitles instead of dubs (yes, they also exist in Germany 😃 )

Regarding native subs, don’t the Krieg der Sterne projects typically include German subtitles (equivalent to this project’s “native” subtitles)? I honestly don’t know. It seems that certainly the subs should be available from either Project Threepio or Krieg der Sterne preservations, it’s just a matter of where the best match is.

On this whole ImageMagick+Pango tangent I keep going on about, it’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to be (again) ripping large parts of this project out by the roots and redoing them before the next version (likely version 10.0 if it actually works), so never say never about anything.

CatBus said:

Regarding native subs, don’t the Krieg der Sterne projects typically include German subtitles (equivalent to this project’s “native” subtitles)?

Yes, but only in srt format.

Ah, I see. Yeah, I wouldn’t like that either. Okay, I’m now inclined to do native subs for German (and other languages in the same situation), unless I find complications. On the subject of SDH (Hard of Hearing) subtitles, if anyone wants to make SDH subtitles for other languages, I’d be happy to include them. You could use the regular subtitles as a starting point, and use the English SDH subtitles for an example for the SDH cues. It could match the German dub verbatim. Of course, this wouldn’t make as much sense for languages with multiple dubs (e.g. Japanese), but even then there’s often a favorite.

CatBus said:

Ah, I see. Yeah, I wouldn’t like that either. Okay, I’m now inclined to do native subs for German (and other languages in the same situation), unless I find complications.

Great 😃

On the subject of SDH (Hard of Hearing) subtitles, if anyone wants to make SDH subtitles for other languages, I’d be happy to include them. You could use the regular subtitles as a starting point, and use the English SDH subtitles for an example for the SDH cues. It could match the German dub verbatim. Of course, this wouldn’t make as much sense for languages with multiple dubs (e.g. Japanese), but even then there’s often a favorite.

Usually that’s the kind of task I love to do but now I have a baby at home and therefore not enough time for something that extensive.

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.

Oh, on the topic of title-safe areas, I suppose I should mention this now. Vertically, this project’s subtitles extend to about the 85% mark by the standard I’m using horizontally, which would usually indicate I’m getting a little close to the top and bottom edges of the frame. However, since most displays would have black bars above and below the frame, there’s zero risk of overscan eating up the top and bottom frame edges, even on the worst CRT’s, which is a risk on the left and right. Heck, even 21:9 displays would have small black bars along the top and bottom. So I think I simply have more leeway in the vertical direction, plus I just really like the subtitles at that position, so I’m inclined to leave vertical placement alone, and only really attempt any enforcement of the title-safe area horizontally.

EDIT: Actually just checked SMPTE ST 2046-1, and 90% is the new title-safe for HD, even though most video editors still define it as 80%, which was the old SD standard. So I still try to compress things down to 80%, because frankly that does still look better, but I’m not at all concerned with the vertical placement now.

There’s been some discussion of that already (not sure which page, but it’s in the thread) – it’s clear there’s some sort of vocalization before “just”, but it’s not clear (to me, at least) that it’s a word. I take it as a sort of semivocalized sigh, like a less distinct version of what Leia does in ROTJ before she says “It’s not like that. He’s my brother.” But it could also be an indistinct word. There’s a lot of stuff like that in these films, actually. But basically if I’m not 100% sure it’s even a word, I’m not subtitling it.

On another topic, the new Pango-based subtitle rendering script is a go, and I’m rendering now. Since the goal is to look very similar to what we had before, it’s not worth releasing the new version until we accumulate a few more changes. Nevertheless it constitutes a major architectural change, so the next release will be 10.0, tentatively codenamed “Pango’s not a man, it’s a system”

EDIT: Found the link:

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Project-Threepio-Star-Wars-OOT-subtitles/id/13794/page/3

Basically, we had an “It’s just Luke”, a “No, just Luke”, and a “Heh, just Luke”. I’m inclined to the last one, but since the sentence works without anything there, it’s not terribly clear, and there’s some uncertainty about it, I just don’t subtitle the “Heh” at all.