International project?

[Soshen]

Hello.
All know that with matroska container (or similar) there are the possibility to add infinity sub scripts (soft) in a file...

What do you think about mading a project in muntilanguage edition... ?

For example a mix with hard and soft can be a good idea... like encode in hard all the romaji, kana karaoke, and other fx, but leave the possibility to swap the language using soft subs...

[GriS]

highly unlikely in case of fansub...

international project means bigger group required to do each language translation - translator, editing, and typesetting. It's not easy to find many people.

In addition to that, I don't think they (different language fansub groups) are willing to unite and release international version.

[TheFluff]

Ani-Kraze did this once for a Scrapped Princess release, together with the Chinese group Popgo.

More recently, an evil licensed-only subbing group sneaked in Slovenian subtitles in their releases of a certain TYPE-MOON anime.

I'd say it's possible, if there's interest. You don't need a big crew - if you're willing to translate jap -> eng -> something else, all you need is an extra TL, an editor and maybe an extra script QC:er. Even if you have more than one Japanese translator, you could keep all the TS in English and just let the non-English TL work on a timed script.

[Soshen]

my dont are only words... but a "proposal"...
i think that when the projects are starting, maybe with some base language, eng-ita-fr-ger-spa for example, and do something, the other languages will come naturally

but do a projects with 5 or 6 language it's a big thing ^^

[Sylf]

Two projects I remember the most are
* One by ILA, Lupin OGM releases (I don't remember if all eps, or just some eps) had multi language soft subs
* The other by Honobono. I forgot exactly which series they did. (Was it Those Who Hunt Elves?) They included quite a few language subs in each releases, using mkv.

There are other minor, dual language releases like Fluff mentioned, or Live-Evil's Queen Millenia (English/Russian), etc, that pops up once in a while.

[Soshen]

thare are all older projects, but what do you thing about trying to do?

[Sylf]

What they did was just experiments of the possibilities. And I think they served the purpose just right - they proved that they can be done. And if people wants to do that, they should. The MKV acceptance level has reached a comfortable level that groups shouldn't fear using mkv/softsubs. One thing I hope to see is wider, mainstream availability (instead of some patches available here and there) of full SSA/ASS support in non-Windows environments.

One can always fear that there may be groups that produce broken mkv files. When some people start using mkv softsubs just to be cool/trendy, they might not know the full technical specs of mkv or, worse yet, how to produce mkv files properly. (Gee, how can you do things wrong if you use mkvtoolnix? Well... it happens. Not every fansubbers practice good RTFM. Neither do I.)

Personally.... I'm still a fan of using hardsubs for making releases. So the possibilities of mutilingual subs are out for me.

[Soshen]

but some fansubber are fan of hard sub, principal, for the fear that other team stole their script for do other realase ( like with other language)... with multilanguage release that problem are a bit resolved... cose all language are aviable together

[Chromanin]

Most if not all of my encodes have been made with the idea of making them multilangual, which is imo the right thing to do.

[iluid]

Originally Posted by Soshen

but some fansubber are fan of hard sub, principal, for the fear that other team stole their script for do other realase ( like with other language)... with multilanguage release that problem are a bit resolved... cose all language are aviable together

I’ll never understand why people think hardsubs are done out of fear. It’s simply not true, at least not for me. It’s my belief that if we are subbing in English, the English subs should always be there and not be removable. The same goes for any other single language release. I just don’t see any realistic advantage (the difference in video quality is negligible with h.264 and/or \be1) to softsubs, but I do see that they require higher CPU usage and cause a lot of headaches for people trying to watch them on non-Windows systems.

Anyway, if you intend to do a multi-lingual sub from the start, softsubs are the only way to go. Like others have said though, this has been done quite a few times. A good unlicensed example would be Star of Cottonland (7 languages) done by Honobono. So essentially this is already being done, it’s just not very wide spread because it does take additional resources and there doesn’t seem to be a great demand.

[ScR3WiEuS]

a lot of groups have tried this, but i don't think it's a good idea for groups that plan on doing a show that's airing. the more languages you have, the more translators, editors, and QC that have to work on a project. working with that many people on 1 release is bound to go wrong, if not perfectly organized. in case it's not, you'll see yourself releasing 1 ep a month

and i also agree with iluid. when subbing in a certain language, there's no real advantage in doing softsubs. i mean wtf, if you want to have a clean video, download the friggin raw.

[ffdshow]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

More recently, an evil licensed-only subbing group sneaked in Slovenian subtitles in their releases of a certain TYPE-MOON anime.

I love your use of words. heh

I think, in case of kanjisub, a good way to do this is release in video and external subtitles. It looks very stupid but it is probably the only way to do the job. Unless some no-life slaves are there, something will go wrong and things won't move.

I still have doubt on softsub, mainly for non-ascii subtitles and typesetting elements. It will fail on some platform/players for sure. I strongly disencourage the use of softsub without a compatible version.

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by ffdshow

I love your use of words. heh

Why thank you!

Originally Posted by ffdshow

non-ascii subtitles

... Only breaks in really ancient vsfilter versions (e.g. 2.23, which noone should be using), and other really broken players. VLC and MPlayer both do unicode properly, AFAIK, but you need to supply them with a proper font that has all the required glyphs.

Originally Posted by ffdshow

and typesetting elements.

You can still hardsub those, but now that MPlayer has pretty good support for this too, there's really no reason to do simple typesetting (credits etc.) hardsubbed anymore. VLC users can go commit seppuku for all I care. >:| That player is just plain broken.

Originally Posted by ffdshow

It will fail on some platform/players for sure.

What platforms exactly? MacOS 9? Standalone DVD players?
MPlayer works just about everywhere, you just need to compile it... ^^;


(Yes, I'm a softsub whore. So sue me.)

[Soshen]

My idea is not made a real and stright group, but for start for me the better idea are form a team with some people of other country team. for example i've a jap2ita translator... jap2english there are a lot here and offcourse there are jap2rus and jap2french... with a group like this can work speedly... i know that are a "yume"...
if the way are jap2english and english2allother the standar time of realeasing are slow (2 or 3 week)... but do it for first are a real necessity? there are a lot of group that do it... and there are a lot of series unsubbed and unknow in neet word but really good ... For me try to do it is a idea that do on the fansub... it's a real occasion to mix different culture in a big projects...

[Ensign Shiro Amada]

It's a decent idea. If English fansub groups can collaborate with whichever English->X groups, staff shouldn't be a problem. The English fansub group can even encode/release while the English->X group does its thing, then releasing the multilanguage version after (since things are released over BT, it's not really a big deal to release more than one version, everyone can get what he/she wants). That way people won't have to wait for something they don't necessarily need.

I just realized that this the same as the two groups working seperately and releasing seperately, except there's a multilanguage version instead of a strictly foreign language version. I guess this whole multilanguage thing isn't really necessary unless you need both an English subs along with another subs in another language.

[Sylf]

Originally Posted by Ensign Shiro Amada

It's a decent idea. If English fansub groups can collaborate with whichever English->X groups, staff shouldn't be a problem.

That sounds like a very bad idea to me.

Normally, it takes a good channel of communication to have a successful fansubbing team. Some groups struggle communicating within their own group, let alone in a joint project settings. The situation you drew is a joint project with other lingual fansub group. Doing a joint just for the sake of multi-lingual release can create even bigger communication barrier.

But... that has nothing to do with the concept itself of multi-lingual subbing, nor the technical side of the it, mostly using mkv technology. I just think that if such an effort is to be made, it should be done as a tightly integrated team, not just loosely coupled teams.

[checkers]

This idea sounds dead easy to me. Translation & checking of errors can be completely compartmentalised form the other areas of fansubbing now - you either give the tler the raw or the english script and wait till they (and the timer) return what they want. The second advantage is that with softsubs you can add in new languages or update bad spelling whenever you want. With new episodes you could bundle in new languages / updates for previous episodes and put up instructions on how to use mkvmerge on your website. Better idea, include batch scripts so that people can remux without having to worry about track names and so on.

It sounds incredibly easy to me, and it would allow people from different languages subbing the same show to collaborate and produce a better product all around.

[Soshen]

but if in a multilanguage team there are varius translator that know japanese, i think will be easy and faster...

for a real example... if there are jap2eng, jap2kor, jap2ita, jap2french (i've the possibilty to find that person) the translating work will go in parallel way for all language... then it's needing a base timer for all and one for language that check the base script for edit the sentences.

[Soluzar]

Originally Posted by Soshen

i think that when the projects are starting, maybe with some base language, eng-ita-fr-ger-spa for example, and do something, the other languages will come naturally

Are you suggesting that other language translations should be based upon the initial translation from Japanese into English, and then yet other translations should be based on those? That sounds like a recipe for immeasurable horror, to me.

[xat]

Reminds me of the old game "telephone". In such a case I have to wonder how the last language in such a "translation chain" will end up. Granted, I don't think it'll be quite as bad since TLers would be dealing with text, but it seems to me that for something like that to work, you would need rather skilled translators.