91–100 of 221 posts
> More Netflix subscribers watched dubbed versions of "Squid Game" than subtitled versions. The default of you load it is dubbed, right? That’s what it started for me. So this stat probably has more to do with the default than anything else. They’re making a weak case that this problem even needs solving.
> The default of you load it is dubbed, right? I don't think so, at least not for me.
What’s really surprising to me is that synching subtitles isn’t a solved problem. Why can’t someone just loosely transcribe without time stamps and sync it to the video?
Most people read more slowly than they can listen. Many other people can read faster than they can listen. But you need subtitles that stick around long enough for the first group, and really, you want a comfortable margin so that people aren't frantically trying to finish reading every subtitle before it disappears.
I watched the show 大江大河 ("Like a Flowing River") on Viki, which has excellent community-generated subtitling. The second season isn't available on Viki - only YouTube. (Actually, Viki seems to have lost the license to the first season by now, too.) And the subtitles are abominably bad, bad enough to make me stop watching the show. But they're perfectly synched - every subtitle on Youtube is exactly matched, millisecond-to-millisecond, with a Chinese subtitle which it attempts to translate.[1]
[1] Ignoring the timing, which is much too fast for the English subtitles, the fact that each subtitle is translated independently is another huge problem. It leads to nonsense when one sentence is split across multiple subtitles, because the English and Chinese do not naturally present the same information in the same order.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think there's a lot of gatekeeping about this. People - perhaps rightfully so - believe subtitled versions to be more ... "pure" than dubbed versions. Well, they are more pure than dubbed versions. There is so much nuance and tone in the original language that is either left out or changed in the dub. Not to mention word order (subject-verb-object in English/Chinese, subject-object-verb in Japanese/Korean) that f…
When I was a kid, my dad was stationed in Japan. We watched all kinds of stuff, including Totoro on Japanese TV. No subtitles or dubs. Not a clue what they were actually saying but we all enjoyed it anyways. So you could always try it out and see how it goes.
This would be a lovely option to have and I find it hilarious that anyone imagines that subtitles are some kind of problem we are trying to get out of. Adding text to movies has a huge array of advantages: it preserves the original performances, it makes the dialog accessible to people with hearing or auditory processing disabilities, they can be multiplexed in a way that audio cannot, etc. Obviously it would be wond…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think there's a lot of gatekeeping about this. People - perhaps rightfully so - believe subtitled versions to be more ... "pure" than dubbed versions. Well, they are more pure than dubbed versions. There is so much nuance and tone in the original language that is either left out or changed in the dub. Not to mention word order (subject-verb-object in English/Chinese, subject-object-verb in Japanese/Korean) that f…
There's often a lot of nuance lost in translated subtitles as well, in my experience, often because dialogue written for one language can't be coerced into natural dialogue in a different language without significant changes. Keeping the original audio track does preserve the direct relationship between the actor's tone and expressions, of course, and it could also be something closer to what the original makers inte…
Though this is much less of an issue when watching fansubbed media (for Japanese content, anyway) because the fans have translator notes and do a much better job than Netflix or media studio translators.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very surprised more people watched the dubbed version of Squid Game over the subtitles. I saw a friend watching the dubbed version and to me it didn't "preserve the original performances" as you say. Surprised subtitles are a barrier, I enjoy them personally, but I guess they have the data to know. I have tested out services that translate your "own voice" to another language and it was pretty cool, although I c…
When I've moved to New Zealand, I was taken aback at how many people just could not stand subtitles. This and your mention about 'barrier' reminded me of Bong Joon Ho (director of Parasite) calling this out: "Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films."
My wife is a translator and based on our conversations and her experience, subtitles are needed because people want to have the original audio + text, foreign subtitles are needed for obvious reasons, and human translators are needed for the "tricky" parts like new words and expressions, cultural context expressions, stuff that can't be directly translated, among other things. That's why in many countries a translate…
I'm a non-native English speaker, and I like watching English-language content with closed captioning in the original language.
There's often a lot lost in translation, especially on the screen (written content might have different issues), because it's often hard to get the rhythm and timing right without changing the contents in non-trivial ways when the source and target languages are completely different. Since I can understand English fairly fluently and nearly always get the nuance that would be lost in a translated version, I prefer the original language, even for the subtitles.
Since I'm not 100 percent, though, having the subtitles or closed captioning usually lowers my cognitive load. It also means I don't have to worry about missing something because of an unfamiliar accent, a very quickly spoken line, or some other random thing.
I speak a minority language that is primarily in spoken form by native speakers, very limited in number. I wonder, how AI technologies can be utilized to enhance the content or auto generating speech. I find it hard. Plus, the economic incentives for doing this work is highly limiting because of a small / limited user base.
I'm about to start experimenting with custom TTS generation, and I'd like to keep you in the loop if my efforts are successful.