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Completely tangential question to this awesome discussion: who even writes subtitles? It feels like a thankless job to write subtitles for rips of movies and TV

Completely tangential question to this awesome discussion: who even writes subtitles? It feels like a thankless job to write subtitles for rips of movies and TV shows old and new. I get that maybe they source original from, say, Netflix, but .set files existed long before Netflix, and for lots of movies not on Netflix. Writing all those tags for hearing impaired seems like a lot of work, which anyone other than the first-person movie production team would be loathe to indulge in. Yet I see a lot of subtitles which don't seem 'official'. Then there are subtitles which seem like they were written as a loose translation of the audio. Both are in English, so I don't see why they can't just transcribe what's being said. Instead, for dialogues such as "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.", the subtitle is written as "The devil tricked the world into thinking he didn't exist."

ubercow13 8y ago
People actually _pay_ to watch TV shows, so imagine being paid to do it!
roddds 8y ago
I'm not super familiar with the specifics and I'm sure someone who's worked on this particular probably will be able to clarify, but the way I understand it there is a limit on how many characters can be displayed on the screen at any given time, as well as a minimum amount of time a subtitle should be visible on the screen. Because of this, transcribers might be forced to write down a shorter version of the line in order to make it fit.
kakarot 8y ago
Thankfully are jobs will be getting easier as speech recognition continues to improve. Some people start from scratch, some people find existing hard subs and translate them to soft subs, some people just translate subs, etc... some people are prolific but the reason it seems most media has a sub is that there are millions of interested and capable people out there, so if a movie is only meaningful enough to only one person out of say 40 million, that's still one person who will make subs for that movie. We have the countless masses to thank, even when sometimes the quality isn't perfect.
yesenadam 8y ago
I don't know who does it. There are some professionals. Professionals do it for when e.g. BBC or SBS shows non-english movies/series I guess. I wish there was a site where you could put money towards english subs for things!! I guess judging the quality wouldn't be so easy etc. Just in the last few days I've had these subtitle-related issues: - No English subtitles available for S04 of Rita (danish).. So I made English subtitles for E01, by machine translating existing German and Portuguese subs and using the 'original' German for reference. Turned out pretty great, but took an hour or 2. No way I'd do the whole season like that though. - Season 2 of Blue Moon (in french) has been out for years, no English subtitles anywhere, seems like there never will be. There's a season 3 too I think, not sure. - Trying to find subtitles for S02 of Overspel (dutch) there's everything available (but in 1 obscure subtitle site, not easy to find) except E07 and E08. I found someone in a forum asking about exactly those 2 subtitles in January 2014! No-one answered... I'd be happy to pay for subtitles for things like that that I really want! The cost would be small, I guess, divided by a few or a few dozen or hundred people around the world. Then they would be available online forever, hopefully. Just need to coordinate the effort. That could be a great website. Also, I helped a bit with some spanish and english subtitles for spanish-language tv shows on viki.com 6 or 7 years ago, which was a pretty great-seeming community-sourced translation effort, but it disappeared, along with all its subtitles. At least most of the content did, it was all asian stuff last time I looked, I think it must have changed hands.
breakingcups 8y ago
Besides people who manually write subtitles, there's also a whole slew being ripped from DVD's and such.
dewey 8y ago
For more obscure movies there are specialized forums where people do that for some bounty (mostly in upload credit) to make it possible for others to enjoy that movie they don’t speak the language of too. Not much different to the question why people spend days ripping music, movies just to share it with others.
olau 8y ago
> Both are in English, so I don't see why they can't just transcribe what's being said. Try writing subtitles yourself, and you'll probably see why. There's a limited space and time budget - people need to be able to read the thing without spending too much time focusing on it. Sometimes, if it's a quick back and forth, you even have to leave out some of the dialogue. Now what do you cut? And this is just for subtitles in the same language. Imagine also facing translation issues - where you not only are trying to roughly hit the same meaning and connotations, but also need to stay relatively close to the acting, e.g. you can't translate a strong exclamation word into something too soft. And there's also the issue of difference between spoken and written language, e.g. the viewers may accept someone saying "fuck that", but seeing it written down "- Fuck that" feels awkward. It is truly a work of art. And that's probably also why people are doing it in their spare time, perhaps after having seen a bad job from the official movie. I imagine doing it will also get you really close to understanding how the movie is built up.
oasisbob 8y ago
I'm equally amazed by the effort that goes into foreign dubbing. Staying in Chennai, India and channel surfing, Sky TV had dozens of US channels (TLC, Discovery channel, etc) which not only had English/Hindi/Tamil subtitles - but foreign language dubs too! Not just movies, but full overdubbing for 20-episode season disposable reality TV shows. Think, "Storage Wars" etc. Spent over an hour channel surfing and flipping languages. I would /love/ to know how they take the original subtitle tracks and translate/dub them efficiently.
- MagnumOpus 8y ago
  Dubbing is a major industry in many non-English-speaking countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy etc), employing more than half of voice actors -- so it's generally not some DIY cottage industry, but professional audio engineers and voice actors. They don't just use subtitles, they use the original video/audio to lip-sync as well as possible. Wikipedia has some more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#Methods
FranOntanaya 8y ago
TED Talks for example has a community of volunteer subtitlers that get credit for their work. A lot of them move on from there to professional captioning.
xpil 8y ago
A friend of mine does it as a hobby.
amyjess 8y ago
> who even writes subtitles? I do, as a hobby. Typesetting in particular is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. There are few things as satisfying me as being able to set a sign so that it looks like it's part of the video. If you're curious, there's a tool out there called Aegisub. Pretty much every fansubber uses it, and it can handle most parts of the process: timing, typesetting, TL/editing, and it shows you a preview of what it looks like muxed with the video (though you do need a separate tool to actually generate muxed MKV files). > Both are in English, so I don't see why they can't just transcribe what's being said. Instead, for dialogues such as "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.", the subtitle is written as "The devil tricked the world into thinking he didn't exist." You have entered the wonderful world of Hong Kong bootlegs, which are usually just called "HKs". The people who work on these just plain don't care. They translate the movie into Chinese, and then for whatever other language they release subtitles in, they just Google Translate their Chinese subs into that language, even if it's the movie's original language. Fansubbers hate them, and if the show or movie in question was never officially released in English, there are some groups who will clean up these subtitles to make them more presentable and fixing the godawful grammatical errors (this is called "scrubbing"). Of course, you're still left with a shitty base TL, but it's at least better than the HKs-as-is, so these scrubs are always just a stopgap until somebody can do a full TL. And there are some groups who will subtitle a series from scratch just to spite the HKs. The only thing good about these subs is that they tend to turn into memes. I'd recommend looking up the HKs of Revenge of the Sith, which ended up becoming an impressive stockpile of memes, most famously being the origin of "Do not want!". For memes that came out of shows I actually watch, I'd recommend googling phrases like "Don't molest the lawyer" and "Gao Main Bastard".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ubercow13 8y ago

People actually _pay_ to watch TV shows, so imagine being paid to do it!

roddds 8y ago

I'm not super familiar with the specifics and I'm sure someone who's worked on this particular probably will be able to clarify, but the way I understand it there is a limit on how many characters can be displayed on the screen at any given time, as well as a minimum amount of time a subtitle should be visible on the screen. Because of this, transcribers might be forced to write down a shorter version of the line in order to make it fit.

kakarot 8y ago

Thankfully are jobs will be getting easier as speech recognition continues to improve. Some people start from scratch, some people find existing hard subs and translate them to soft subs, some people just translate subs, etc... some people are prolific but the reason it seems most media has a sub is that there are millions of interested and capable people out there, so if a movie is only meaningful enough to only one person out of say 40 million, that's still one person who will make subs for that movie. We have the countless masses to thank, even when sometimes the quality isn't perfect.

yesenadam 8y ago

I don't know who does it. There are some professionals. Professionals do it for when e.g. BBC or SBS shows non-english movies/series I guess. I wish there was a site where you could put money towards english subs for things!! I guess judging the quality wouldn't be so easy etc. Just in the last few days I've had these subtitle-related issues: - No English subtitles available for S04 of Rita (danish).. So I made English subtitles for E01, by machine translating existing German and Portuguese subs and using the 'original' German for reference. Turned out pretty great, but took an hour or 2. No way I'd do the whole season like that though. - Season 2 of Blue Moon (in french) has been out for years, no English subtitles anywhere, seems like there never will be. There's a season 3 too I think, not sure. - Trying to find subtitles for S02 of Overspel (dutch) there's everything available (but in 1 obscure subtitle site, not easy to find) except E07 and E08. I found someone in a forum asking about exactly those 2 subtitles in January 2014! No-one answered... I'd be happy to pay for subtitles for things like that that I really want! The cost would be small, I guess, divided by a few or a few dozen or hundred people around the world. Then they would be available online forever, hopefully. Just need to coordinate the effort. That could be a great website. Also, I helped a bit with some spanish and english subtitles for spanish-language tv shows on viki.com 6 or 7 years ago, which was a pretty great-seeming community-sourced translation effort, but it disappeared, along with all its subtitles. At least most of the content did, it was all asian stuff last time I looked, I think it must have changed hands.

breakingcups 8y ago

Besides people who manually write subtitles, there's also a whole slew being ripped from DVD's and such.

dewey 8y ago

For more obscure movies there are specialized forums where people do that for some bounty (mostly in upload credit) to make it possible for others to enjoy that movie they don’t speak the language of too. Not much different to the question why people spend days ripping music, movies just to share it with others.

olau 8y ago

> Both are in English, so I don't see why they can't just transcribe what's being said. Try writing subtitles yourself, and you'll probably see why. There's a limited space and time budget - people need to be able to read the thing without spending too much time focusing on it. Sometimes, if it's a quick back and forth, you even have to leave out some of the dialogue. Now what do you cut? And this is just for subtitles in the same language. Imagine also facing translation issues - where you not only are trying to roughly hit the same meaning and connotations, but also need to stay relatively close to the acting, e.g. you can't translate a strong exclamation word into something too soft. And there's also the issue of difference between spoken and written language, e.g. the viewers may accept someone saying "fuck that", but seeing it written down "- Fuck that" feels awkward. It is truly a work of art. And that's probably also why people are doing it in their spare time, perhaps after having seen a bad job from the official movie. I imagine doing it will also get you really close to understanding how the movie is built up.

oasisbob 8y ago

I'm equally amazed by the effort that goes into foreign dubbing. Staying in Chennai, India and channel surfing, Sky TV had dozens of US channels (TLC, Discovery channel, etc) which not only had English/Hindi/Tamil subtitles - but foreign language dubs too! Not just movies, but full overdubbing for 20-episode season disposable reality TV shows. Think, "Storage Wars" etc. Spent over an hour channel surfing and flipping languages. I would /love/ to know how they take the original subtitle tracks and translate/dub them efficiently.

MagnumOpus 8y ago
Dubbing is a major industry in many non-English-speaking countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy etc), employing more than half of voice actors -- so it's generally not some DIY cottage industry, but professional audio engineers and voice actors. They don't just use subtitles, they use the original video/audio to lip-sync as well as possible. Wikipedia has some more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#Methods

FranOntanaya 8y ago

TED Talks for example has a community of volunteer subtitlers that get credit for their work. A lot of them move on from there to professional captioning.

xpil 8y ago

A friend of mine does it as a hobby.

amyjess 8y ago

> who even writes subtitles? I do, as a hobby. Typesetting in particular is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. There are few things as satisfying me as being able to set a sign so that it looks like it's part of the video. If you're curious, there's a tool out there called Aegisub. Pretty much every fansubber uses it, and it can handle most parts of the process: timing, typesetting, TL/editing, and it shows you a preview of what it looks like muxed with the video (though you do need a separate tool to actually generate muxed MKV files). > Both are in English, so I don't see why they can't just transcribe what's being said. Instead, for dialogues such as "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.", the subtitle is written as "The devil tricked the world into thinking he didn't exist." You have entered the wonderful world of Hong Kong bootlegs, which are usually just called "HKs". The people who work on these just plain don't care. They translate the movie into Chinese, and then for whatever other language they release subtitles in, they just Google Translate their Chinese subs into that language, even if it's the movie's original language. Fansubbers hate them, and if the show or movie in question was never officially released in English, there are some groups who will clean up these subtitles to make them more presentable and fixing the godawful grammatical errors (this is called "scrubbing"). Of course, you're still left with a shitty base TL, but it's at least better than the HKs-as-is, so these scrubs are always just a stopgap until somebody can do a full TL. And there are some groups who will subtitle a series from scratch just to spite the HKs. The only thing good about these subs is that they tend to turn into memes. I'd recommend looking up the HKs of Revenge of the Sith, which ended up becoming an impressive stockpile of memes, most famously being the origin of "Do not want!". For memes that came out of shows I actually watch, I'd recommend googling phrases like "Don't molest the lawyer" and "Gao Main Bastard".

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]