About fansubbing - sort of

[wahur]

Hi!

 

I am a translator by trade. Couple of times a year I work, mostly for fun, for local film festival, translating subtitles for festival films. Up to now my output has been very simple text files, someone else somewhere either makes subtitles or, in most cases, enters them manually, in real time.

 

When I heard about that crazy manual entering of subtitles I thought that probably it is not too difficult to prepare those subtitles myself. I receive films for translation on DVDs without any copy protection, mostly even without any fancy menus, so copying these files to my computer is not a big problem. Burning things back to dvd can be done with k3b. But what has to happen in between is rather hazy. I did look at fansubbing sites, but they have quite different issues and end-product quality is not a big deal for them - so they do things like converting from dvd to avi. Now for me - whatever I do will be shown on a big screen and loss of quality is simply unacceptable.

1. Timing. Is there a Linux software that I can use for timing the subtitles?

2. Formats. When I look around in web there is gazillion of subtitle formats. What do i need?

3. How do I format these text files I have, what software should I use, where do I put these files when ready, are there any other files i have to modify? idx?

 

W

[theYinYeti]

Hello,

 

1. Yes. spumux for example allows precise timing of your subtitles.

2. I don't know all those formats, although I'm aware of them. All I can tell is: there are 2 kinds of subtitles: text (most existing formats) and graphics (DVD, VCD...).

3. As a consequence, if you want to translate your DVD subtitles to text, you'll have to rip them and keep the timing information, and run some kind of OCR (although Linux isn't very good at that). You may have luck with subtitleripper...

 

Yves.