International Audio (including Voice-Over Translations) — Page 4

It'd be really cool to have it synced to GOUT and included in next Harmy's DeEd. I hope someone capable visit this thread. D:

I am sorely tempted, but I'm pretty burned out on audio work right now and badly need a little break.  It's just one film too, not the entire trilogy, so that makes the workload smaller.

EDIT: I'm assuming it needs to be despecialized, which is really the hard part. But then, I also just hate the idea of anyone trying to tie the long-term survival of their language to the cinematic albatross of the Special Edition, so that also provides more motivation.  Ergh, so torn.

Do you know if the Navajo dubbing team have any plans to complete the trilogy?

Is anyone working on the Navajo dub? Definitely interested in hearing it.

I was tempted to despecialize it like the Ukraininan audio, but I'm not doing anything with it ATM (don't have it either).

FWIW, there was a Polish release of the GOUT with (as far as I can tell) English-only audio, but with European Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, and Greek subtitles.  I don't have anything but the subtitles (guess what's coming in Project Threepio v7.1?)

PM sent.

Just to round things out with Russian audio, I now finally have a Russian non-voiceover dub for Empire Strikes Back.  So that makes one voiceover-style and one non-voiceover dub in Russian for the entire trilogy.

The quality is pretty good--I still prefer the quality of the voiceover dubs in general, but this is another fine option for Russian-speaking fans.  The only Russian audio I'm really pretty displeased with is the Star Wars non-voiceover dub, which has quite a lot of issues.  But if you understand Russian and can't stand voiceovers, that one is available too.

Like the non-voiceover dub for Jedi, the one for Empire doesn't voice over the crawl, so forced subs will be needed for that, and will be included in the next version of Project Threepio.

FWIW, although I'm making all of these available to whoever asks, I'm only keeping the voiceover dubs for my personal collection, so I can't say if the non-voiceovers will be available indefinitely in the event of some unplanned failure.  So if you want them, PM me.

FWIW, there appears to be a Cantonese and Thai dub on the Hong Kong Blu-ray set.  That plus the official Korean subtitle translations make that set pretty interesting to me.  If anyone happens to be sitting on this set, send me a PM and you can be my best friend forever.

The dubs should be no harder to despecialize than our Ukrainian audio--perhaps easier since we don't have to deal with perfectly syncing the English audio accompanying the Ukrainian overdub.  ROTJ should be a piece of cake, SW somewhat hard, and ESB will be a complete bear.

AFAICT there weren't any dubs in these languages prior to the Special Editions (or else they'd have been on the Region 3 GOUT, I figure), but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.

I now have more concrete information on the Hong Kong Blu-rays.  There does not appear to be a Cantonese dub (too bad!), but there is a Thai dub, and some Korean subtitles (among some other subtitle options you can find elsewhere).

The Thai dub voices over the crawl, but does not voice over Greedo (haven't checked Jabba yet), so I'll need to make a subtitle track to accompany the dub, once it's synced.

Looks like Jabba is dubbed in Thai, so just Star Wars needs a special subtitle track to accompany the Thai dub, but none of the others do.  Jabba sounds... weird in Thai.

CatBus said:

Jabba sounds... weird in Thai.

 What did you expect lol

If anyone has any pre-2011 Thai audio, let me know.  At the moment, I'm syncing and despecializing the Blu-ray audio and there are a couple places where I'm having trouble removing audio changes made after 1997.

Specifically (all in Star Wars):

- The chess game, due to the weird slot machine noises

- Coming out of hyperspace into the asteroid field, due to the whooshing video game noises (could also apply to Empire asteroid noises as well, but I haven't gotten there yet)

The only other major audio content alteration I couldn't get rid of is the whirring, beeping hover droid on Tatooine.  Other than that, the despecialized soundtracks seem to be turning out very well.

Yeah, I know it's a long shot for anyone to have pre-2011 Thai audio (I don't even know if such a thing exists).  But with this crowd, you never know...

Thai's next? Oh shit, awesome.

Alright.  Short version: I've got GOUT-synced, despecialized Thai dubs, PM me for links if you're interested.  The Star Wars dub needs some Thai subtitles for the Greedo dialogue (it's not voiced over), and those will be included in the next version of Project Threepio.

Long version: These were strange dubs to work with. The lip sync was all over the map, sometimes perfect, sometimes way off, even for lines right next to each other.  Granted, Thai doesn't really lip sync well over English anyway, but I feel it could easily have been better.  That said, my fairly fast-and-loose sync to the GOUT probably didn't help matters very much.  It's not 80's Kung Fu movie bad, but it is just a little off, be forewarned.  Some of it's probably my fault, some of it isn't.

Despecialization went pretty well.  ROTJ probably sounds like the real deal to a non-expert.  Star Wars has a few rough places where the SE reveals itself, and Empire suffers worst, mostly during the Emperor scene, which sounds a bit like it went through the audio editing blender, which it pretty much did.

The provenance of this audio finally revealed itself while I was working on Empire.  They are most likely 1997 SE dubs that have been updated to include 2011 audio changes.  I don't know much about the SE audio variations, but I concluded this from the DSS (disembodied screaming strangers) in each of the three films.

I did ROTJ first, and the DSS was there as Vader threw the Emperor into the pit.  The DSS wasn't that guy from Shattered Glass, but an equally incongruous Thai voice.  They definitely did a good job matching the WTF factor from the English dub, I'll give them that.  Then I did SW, and there was no DSS as Ben Kenobi chased off the Sand People.  That was odd, I thought, but I just ignored it and moved on.  Last, I did Empire and was shocked to hear the DSS as Luke fell from the platform on Bespin.  This time it was the same voice as the English audio, so not only are Thai audiences left to wonder why the Emperor from the wrong film is screaming while Luke falls, they're also wondering why it's the Emperor from a different dub of a different film. All of that, to me, pegged it as 97SE audio that had been revised to include 2011SE audio.

Anyway, I understand dubs are very popular in Thailand, so I'm happy that Thai speakers now have an option for watching the Star Wars trilogy dubbed.

The Thai can't even ADR films in their own language without it looking weird.

If anyone is interested, I have the spanish castilian audios from the 1995 VHS tapes. (they are the same tracks used in the spanish LaserDiscs)

The main difference between them and the GOUT DVD's tracks are that the opening crawls are narrated.

Also in TESB and ROTJ, before the Lucasfilm logo, there is no 20th Centrury Fox Fanfare, because they used a CBS Home Video logo instead with it's own music.

I have TSEB and ROTJ syncronized at 23,976 fps with harmy's despezialiced movies. But with SW, I couldn't because I think the 1995 LD/VHS tapes has an extra frame in the video, and it's impossible to make it work applying delay with tsmuxer.

If any one want them, just let me know it ;-)

Interesting about the voiceover on the crawl.  Do you know if that was theatrical, or if it was added later for things like TV broadcasts that may have been using video with the English crawl?  I always assumed that both versions of the Spanish Star Wars had translated text onscreen for the crawl in the theatres.

And yes, I'm interested in the Star Wars audio.  If it blends well enough with the GOUT audio, it may be better than the Blu-rays as a way to patch over the wrong audio in the trash compactor scene, due to no SE elements.

CatBus said:

Interesting about the voiceover on the crawl.  Do you know if that was theatrical, or if it was added later for things like TV broadcasts that may have been using video with the English crawl?  I always assumed that both versions of the Spanish Star Wars had translated text onscreen for the crawl in the theatres.

And yes, I'm interested in the Star Wars audio.  If it blends well enough with the GOUT audio, it may be better than the Blu-rays as a way to patch over the wrong audio in the trash compactor scene, due to no SE elements.

I'm sure it was added later, the first video tapes from 1984 had the opening texts translated. (there are some videos on Youtube) So previously in the theaters they had to be translated too... ;-)

The 1995 tapes and the LD have the opening texts in english. It's weird because the forced subtitles of Greedo and Jabba are in spanish (yellow color by the way)

I think maybe the reason it's because the 1995 tapes were the THX restored versions and probably they were "restored" using a unique source (the english version)

I'll send a PM right now partner. TESB & ROTJ tracks are perfectly sycronized, I put a text in the rar file with the delay that it must be apply using tsmuxer or mkvmerge... But SW was impossible for me, If you succseed to integrate it in the movie, just let me know because i'd like to add it with the HD version of Harmy :-)

Whoah. So now I have a new theory for why they swapped out the Castilian audio for the compactor scene in the GOUT.

There is scored music in this scene, for the Castilian Spanish audio, that AFAICT isn't in any other version of Star Wars anywhere ever, and was removed on the Blu-ray release.  It sounds like part of the same piece that plays when R2 wakes up in the Sandcrawler and rolls through the menagerie of droids on the way to finding C-3PO.

I don't know exactly why this would make someone want to swap the audio out when they made the GOUT, but maybe they thought they had some sort of bastardized TV broadcast audio, and went back to their sources and found audio without this bit of the score.  Since the Latino dub has been out of circulation so long, maybe they didn't even know there was a second Spanish dub, and that's what they got by mistake.

Anyway, I sure hope I can incorporate this into the Castilian GOUT audio.  It's a little hissy, but the unique score definitely makes me want to try my best!

Then again, this VHS copy really is the sort of bastardized TV broadcast audio I mentioned.  It does have the made-for-TV voiceover on the crawl after all, so it's not theatrically accurate in that respect.  But would a TV version include such a slight alteration to the score?  Seems farfetched to me.

Any ideas?  Do you think this slightly different score was theatrical or not?