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AI could end foreign-language subtitles

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Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#201

Post by webmaven »

Findecanor wrote: post #48
aeturnum wrote: post #3

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…

In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English. I believe that reading the Swedish subtitles and hearing the English words simultaneously have played a large role in helping Swedes to learn English. However, it does help a lot that the grammar of Swedish and English is relatively similar. I have been trying to use watching anime to get better at Japanese…

> In my country (Sweden) subtitles are the norm for imported content, with most of that content being in English.

That was the norm as I was growing up in Israel, with the exception being children's programming (usually animation) that was dubbed. The dubbing was usually quite good, and done by actors prominent in children's programming.

OTOH, being bilingual myself, the poor translation of subtitles was constantly driving me up the wall. I just couldn't ignore the mismatch between the dialog in English and the subtitles in Hebrew, but the rest of my family wouldn't agree to let me cover the bottom fifth of the screen.

Semantically, the translations were generally accurate except in infrequent cases where the translator obviously misheard something or translated a phrase overly literally (more often with non-RP British or Australian English than American), but stylistically, the translation was always bland and "correct" (eg. "sure" and "yeah" and "you bet" would all inevitably be translated as "yes").

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#202

Post by webmaven »

Delk wrote: post #87
jonpurdy wrote: post #56

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…

> Then there's of course the question of dealing with scripts that have multiple languages spoken in them. Something would surely be lost if multiple languages were dubbed into the same third language.

I've sometimes thought that languages could be indicated by phonetic rendering of an accent (an audio version of this was done on the excellent and clever show 'Allo 'Allo where dialog in 'French' is English with a French accent, dialog in English is RP, British characters badly speaking 'French' use RP with funny word substitutions, and so on), similar to how comics often indicate other languages in word balloons with conventions such as or italicization, but that's probably too high a bar.

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#203

Post by fouc »

derekp7 wrote: post #132
creakingstairs wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

The problem I have with subtitles is the same reason I could never enjoy comics / graphic novels. I can either read and process the text, or look at / process the action (pictures). For me it is the same thing as trying to pay attention to two conference calls at the same time with a phone in each ear (is it just me that can't do this?). And it isn't just the mental processing, the rest of the screen sort of disappea…

I wonder if you subvocalize what you read, that could add another layer of processing.

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#204

Post by dheera »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #105
dheera wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, I often much prefer subtitles to dubbing as I can hear the original voice artist's tone of expression as it was intended to be. Also, languages are bridges, not barriers, by exposing yourself more to another language you will learn it if you don't reject it.

That's a cute sentiment but there is no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language. I think you're confusing the movie 13th Warrior for reality. I have friends who religiously watch subtitled anime only and they are no closer to learning Japanese in any real sense of the word than a person who would watch the dubs, except for picking up a stray random word h…

> no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language

Um, that's how babies learn, I think there is plenty of evidence in every baby on the planet.

People stop learning this way when they start thinking of languages as barriers.

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#205

Post by derefr »

ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #173
derefr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is why people mostly talk about watching foreign-language animated works and soap operas/dramas: dramas will have either action or talking heads, but not usually both; and animation can be paced stylistically, so that each shot lasts long enough "by design" to read the subtitles, even when it would be over in a split second in reality. But I can't imagine watching, say, a foreign live-action sketch comed…

At least in Japan's case, I highly doubt the pace is «paced stylistically, so that each shot lasts long enough "by design" to read the subtitles». If anything, they are usually at the other end of the spectrum, in that most local releases don't even include japanese subtitles (To be frank, I'm quite surprised this is even legal, considering the impact on deaf people) So more than for artistic reasons, I think it's mo…

Even without the subtitles, it's a stylistic choice in the way comic panels with dialog are screen-written / storyboarded / directed / performed by voice actors.

"Screen-original" films and TV series are written in more a "top-down" style, with scenes being planned for their pacing, and the dialog in a scene liable to get cut down or rewritten to keep said pacing.

"Adapted from a non-visual source medium" films and TV series also almost always get their scenes cut down, just by necessity (a novel won't fit in 1.5hrs.) Though only "almost", because sometimes a director sets out to adapt a work into a really long treatment that can fit all the source material and then some — like the Lord of the Rings movies, or Game of Thrones. But even then, the director is still someone who is immersed in the top-down, "we get to knit it together how we want" zeitgeist of regular Hollywood film&TV production.

"Adapted from a visual source medium" films and TV series, though, are — if not heavily budgeted for adaptation polish — written mostly "bottom-up", starting with a treatment and storyboard that keep every line and shot from the source, and then letting pacing slip to keep in all the stuff that existing fans of the source material expect to see (and because the producer wants as many episodes as possible, so why not stretch one chapter out into five episodes if you can?)

This can lead to some extremely long shots, where there was dialog in a comic-book panel that was clearly not originally written with the intent of having it performed while holding/panning on the exact panel shown; but where a lazy "reading" of the source by the cinematographer leads to exactly that.

You can also call this the "make a radio play / audio drama out of the book; lock it down; and then add visuals to it" adaptation strategy.

(This is also common, as it happens, to specific genres that started out in the radio era. True crime, whether it be on TV or on YouTube, mostly consists of podcasts with the visuals almost being an afterthought. This is why so many people put it on in the background: the way it's done, you don't have to look at it to follow what's going on.)

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#206

Post by crtasm »

throw_away wrote: post #55
xiii1408 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! My perennial problem is that most Chinese TV content has excellent subtitles, but they're burned in to the videos. So if I want to watch a Chinese show with a friend who doesn't read Chinese, there's no option even for auto-translated subtitles. I've often thought of writing a script to generate subtitle files using text recognition, but haven't gotten around to it.

Ah, but one thing I miss about the burned-in subtitles was how, on VHS at least, one could fast forward like 2-3x and still be able to read the captions. I double-lazied my way out of more than one high school book review where a boring book was made into a boring movie.

But now we can do the same thing with softsubs, e.g. using VLC.

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#208

Post by acchow »

thfuran wrote: post #123
acchow wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be an issue with your audio mixing in your particular speaker setup. Often times trying to play audio meant for surround systems (5.1, 7.1, etc) on stereo channels results in a poor audio mix.

And Netflix in particular seems to love defaulting to 5.1 tracks when it shouldn't.

I don't even see an option to manually select a stereo track anymore. They seem to have removed it from my Smart TV's app.

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#209

Post by guythedudebro »

krageon wrote: post #180
shkkmo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started watching Squid Game with my brothers' girlfriend and gently suggested that we should use subtitles and the original audio. It took a couple of episodes, but some of those dubbing performances are pretty rough and when she did decide to switch she immediately agreed how much better it was. The only downside is you have to actually _watch_ the show rather that staring at your phone most of the time...

> brothers' girlfriend You have multiple brothers with one girlfriend? I understand this is not likely, but it's such an interesting concept I kind of want it to be true.

Maybe he meant "us brothers", since he was Netflix and chilling with her

Re: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

#210

Post by cyphar »

distances wrote: post #200
Mindwipe wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The licensing costs of all major languages can't be prohibitive. It's not the cost, it's that their removal is a disincentive for people to use VPNs to hop outside of their usual residential territory.

Netflix doesn't ship all the languages even with their own content, so it can't be the only reason. But good point, never thought of that, and truly sad if access restrictions again is the reason for legal services delivering less than piracy.

If you change Netflix's interface language you'll get access to more languages for both subtitle and audio tracks.

I suspect there's some estimation going on to figure out what languages someone is most likely to know given a certain interface language and location. This is a somewhat common annoyance language learners run into because it's not obvious that you need to go through these hoops to get access to the language you'd like to use.

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