Improving English subtitles AFTER they have been created

Contributing
41

we may be trying too hard to include all the subtext and surrounding intention in your examples.

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42

My bad!
Must have been the excellent work of the translator!

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43

Ok. I am abnormal, it has been a life-long effort to never be on a bell curve.

Korean drama sounds okay to me despite the odd sentence structure - possibly because of studying German sometime ago. Having things “out of order” doesn’t faze me. The visual and voice cues make sense if you listen - over time you do pick up some things in Korean and get what’s going on there too, despite it not being one’s mother tongue.

I had no idea how blessed I really was working with Chinese dramas until I realized English and Chinese share the same sentence structure and so it’s easier for me, subbing, segmenting, editing, to preserve the visual cues as I go. :slight_smile: Whether it’s Zhou of the 100 mph 2 second segments
or the Shaolin of 6-8 second segments
(Ammmmmiiiiitttttaabbbhaaaaaa), I do what I can to get the sentence into one sub, one segment as much as possible. So I reconfigure wayward segments, and make sure once I have that sentence completely in the same spot, that the context and everything all fit together. :slight_smile:

So when editing, if I can group the sentence as it’s really spoken together as much as I can, that’s the majority of the battle. :slight_smile: With Chinese drama in the historical and wuxia world, I also have to get the T/N in there. :slight_smile:

Anyway - it’s a fun topic. :slight_smile: Hopefully the vikibug infestation will stop making it something I discuss and let me do some editing today.

Crouching Dieter, Hidden Donut
Yeah I’m awake waaayyy too early here.

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@sophie2you No! Snail was an awesome drama!! With a sucky ending

But I still cried buckets because it ended too soon :sob:
But that generalisation is for the older Chinese people? Cause I really don’t like tragedies and so I remember when I was young and asked some elder relative why all the dramas were so tragic, and the answer I got was something along those lines?

@deadliftdiva_548 I shall wave away your attempts to dangle luscious chocolate cake recipes in front of me and taunt my inability to eat them cause I’m semi-allergic to chocolate! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

@irmar I actually still don’t think the first sentence is awkward. Slightly clunky yes, but preferable to inverting the order. And also, I think that by inverting the order, you lose the impact and the emphasis. So I like that translation.
For the second, I’d say that wasn’t a good translation, and someone needs to correct it cause it doesn’t make sense. I hate random translations that seem to come out of nowhere, although they make perfect sense in their original language. Usually for Chinese, I find that those random translations come about because the person translated too literally.

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45

Ah, the literal meaning.

Yes, there is sometimes a world of difference between the literal meaning and the intention.

Case in point: Our fabulous sign at Condor, right? :slight_smile:

LITERAL - it’s “Capture the Central Plains”. But that’s an idiom, and you then have to take the literal meaning along with the idiom to know it should read as “Conquer and Rule the World”.

It’s another reason these dramas seriously rock. :). And another thing Chinese has in common with English. :slight_smile: What drives folks absolutely insane learning English
are all the things that do not make literal sense! :slight_smile:

Chocolate allergy? (grin) Not so fast. I once made a non-chocolate version. Yellow cake, for the sponge - again, not a fan of sponge cake. I prefer the yellow for it’s better flavor and the better “crumb” - texture. Topped with a small moat of cherries - echoing the interior - and omitting the chocolate curls. Optional garnish: marachino cherries, for those who need MORE. :slight_smile:

Muahahaha!

GeNie of the Lamp. POOF!

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I don’t like you anymore. Bye! I’m poofing too! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

47

sigh. it was bound to happen.

i just finished doing some more work regarding that whole Yanmen mountain/pass deal on demigods - the thing on the fan.

Thank you again for the information there - editing-wise, it now makes sense!

Crouching Dieter, Hidden Donut
Dozens of good reasons, just like great donuts, to read up on the actual history!
Turns out this was the place the Yang Family Generals did a lot of their work over the defense of the Song Dynasty
before they were driven south.

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48

we have that idiom too, but no it literally means conquer China (the Central Plain). Took me forever to realize the central plain was china in imperial doctress.

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49

I understand people’s concern over preserving the Korean sentence order in order to match facial and voice expressions. However this is not a problem if it’s a short sentence fitting in one segment. And the bottom line is it has to make sense in English.
In very long sentences, split over many subtitles, one can easily fix this problem without flipping.

Here are two more examples (from Tomorrow With You):

[QUOTE][the previous sentence was: Yes, we live in a world where money is considered to be the best thing.]
But with a family that you love, everyday, sharing precious times, making precious memories
A nest of love. Isn’t that the happiest thing in the world? [/QUOTE]
This, split over 4 subtitles. One wants to scream: where the hell is the VERB?
You don’t necessarily have to flip the sentence if it’s such a long one, split over many subtitles. It is enough to put another verb at the beginning, where - in English - it belongs.

"But
 Living with a family that you love [etc
] Isn’t that the happiest thing in the world? "
Thus you preserve the matching of face and voice expressions and all.

Another example from the same series:

This is not a question of Korean structure, I think. It’s just another subject and another verb, without having first completed the first sentence with an object.

And, a little later:

[QUOTE]
Look at this. TQ Cosmetics’ losses, profits from other companies are making up for that.[/QUOTE]
This is again the classic Korean sentence structure example. Object (losses), subject (profits), verb (are making up), and object repeated at the end (that)

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50

Making sense in the target language is important. I often change the order, but I try to keep the names and gestures in the correct segment. However, if we completely change the word order, we get a “dubbed” effect. Like in those dubbed shows, where the intonation and the facial expressions don’t match the voice at all and the outcome is distracting.

I don’t like awkward and clunky sentences that could have been saved with a few connectors, gerunds etc. I often pester native speakers with vocabulary questions and then message the drama’s editor with suggestions.

On the other hand, I can’t get immersed in dramas that haven’t kept the original speaking style. I keep rephrasing in my head.

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51

So what do you think of my solution to add just a tiny little verb at the beginning and keep everything else as it is?

Anyway all this is an issue just for long sentences that get split over many segments. If a sentence is just a line long, changing the word order will not affect it much.

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52

Adding a few key words is fine. I already suggested connectors etc.
Whatever can help with grammar but preserve the original style.

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53

So we’re on the same wavelength (as almost always)


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54

My edit would be “Aren’t the happiest things in the world being everyday with a family you love, a nest of love, while sharing precious times and making precious memories?”
When I’m editing Korean to English translations, I am listening for the structure of the sentence in Korean first, knowing that modifier precedes the thing modified, that there is no “number” for a verb in Korea (Plural or singular); that adding a number particle for a noun is optional, and the verb/ predicate must be at the end of the sentence.
In the particular sentence, is the nest of love the subject or in apposition to the family you love – that might make a difference but I would only know from knowing where in the sentence “nest of love” appeared and listening to any particle which might be attached to family and nest.
I also know “that” in " Isn’t that the happiest thing in the world" – with an extremely high probability would not have had a Korean counterpart in the sentence – but was included in the sentence by the translator who translated without putting the verb in more common English order in a question. The Korean sentence most probably would have had something to the effect of “in world best/most happy thing is not” at the end in Korean. So suppose the last segment only had "in world best/most happy thing is not " -the subber inserted the that and wrote Isn’t THAT the happiest thing in the world? The insertion of the “that” would have been avoided by putting the result in more natural English order. Of course the resultant whole sentence spread over multiple segments would not have a one-to-one correspondence between English and Korean but the priority objective of translating the intention of the sentence would be fulfilled and the sentence would sound more natural to an English speaker.
To say happiest, i know that most probably there were the words for best/most and the verbal form of happy.
In the example you gave, it is not clear what “It” is – with a family you love, a next of love, sharing precious times, making precious memories – collectively are they “it” or is there one specific “it” – If I heard the sentence there might be a particle that said this is the subject of the sentence of the sentence might have had multiple subjects.

55

Wow, that was a deep analysis, thank you!

The context was that the speaker (director of an NGO building houses for poor families) was lamenting today’s materialistic view, where when you are asked “Where do you live” it really means “how fancy is your neighborhood?”. And then continues saying that although for some people money is all, the most important thing is to have a loving home where you can build precious memories with your family.
He is speaking of house versus home, so the nest of love is the important part of the sentence, but a home becomes a nest of love only when your loved ones are there, so the two are sort of inextricable.

But this sentence was just an example of long ones split over four subtitles.
My point was that sometimes you can leave alone the sentence, so that those who understand Korean won’t be baffled, by at least putting a verb and a subject in the very beginning, so that all the rest feels more natural. And then, if needed, the Korean verb near the end, on the last subtitle.

"One day a mythical man named Go Nan Gil lived" is an example of a short sentence where putting the verb at the end is completely gratuitous, since the actor surely didn’t change lots of expressions from its beginning to its end.

There are instances, like the one I wrote in my previous post
"This person, I will definitely do my best to protect" (It’s not a quote, but there was something like that in a drama, I don’t remember which one), where there might be emphasis on some particular word. Yet even here there is a solution. Start a sentence, put an ellipsis, and then start it differently.

"This woman
 I will definitely do my best to protect her. As if he changed her mind about the syntax and abandoned the first try, to phrase his feelings differently in a second sentence.
It’s a compromise, but if the actor was pointing at the woman, it’s important that we have “this person” while he’s pointing.

Languages like Greek, Latin, German, Russian which have declension, give the speaker or writer much more freedom on where to put everything.
[declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number (at least singular and plural), case (nominative or subjective, genitive or possessive, etc.), and gender.]
So in English, in the sentences
“the house dog” and “the dog house”, the words stay the same and it is their placement which determines the meaning.
In Greek and all those other languages I mentioned, you could put the words in any order you want, and the meaning wouldn’t change. Because “The house dog” means “the dog of the house”, and we have genitive for “of the house” (Like saying “house’s”). Same for other cases: nominative is for the subject (the one who does the action), so whether you put the subject at the beginning or the end the meaning does not change.
Korean does not have cases as such, but it does have subject and object suffixes, and little things like that which determine the word’s role in the sentence.
English is the poorest one in comparison. And, having no way to signify a word’s role, the only way is its placement in the sentence. That’s why word order is all-important in English. If you take word order away, then the sentence becomes incomprehensible, or can lead to misunderstandings.

And punctuation too.
“Let’s eat, grandpa!” versus “Let’s eat grandpa!”
“Today we’ll learn to cut and paste kids”
and I end with the best one:
“A woman without her man is nothing”. " A woman: without her, man is nothing"

Makes it worthwhile being a grammar and punctuation nazi, wouldn’t you think?

UPDATE:

Today I just saw two more examples:

[QUOTE]
Like I at the Namyeong Station accident,
I’m not going to do things that I’ll regret later on.[/QUOTE] While translating it into Greek I put:
I don’t want what happened at the Namyeong Station accident to happen again.
So this time I’m not going to do things that I’ll regret later on.
It’s a bit verbose, but it fit well into the two segments. I’m sorry I had to ignore the initial “I
” (Na
 in Korean), but it couldn’t be helped. After all the English subber ignored it as well, so


Another one, split over three segments

[QUOTE]Teacher, to be completely honest, why you picked me,
and why you’re trying to make me independent, and helping me and supporting me

Is it okay if I ask you about this?[/QUOTE]

Possible solution with the least tampering of word order:
Teacher, to be honest, I’d like to ask something. Why did you pick me,
why are you trying to make me independent, helping me and supporting me?
Is it okay if I ask you about this?

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57

So
any thoughts of teaching for the NSSA? They are always hiring and trying to churn out good English editors. It’s done one on one basis and if you ever wanted to teach at Italian NSSA or create a Greek one, Amyboss and MazzaBoss would be very very happy.

58

I frequently visit NSSA to see the list of people who want to be taught. Three days ago there was only one Italian and no Greeks.
As for English, I thought they would want native speakers that’s why it never even crossed my mind to apply - as I’ve never applied to be English editor on a show either.

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59

It is my honest opinion that the non-native speakers of English have the best grasp of grammar over the common native English speaker. Maybe it is different in England or Australia, but the public school system in the US doesn’t really teach grammar.

I think you’d be a very welcome edition as a teacher (sensei) in NSSA.

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61

Thanks to Noam Chomsky
 I did not have as rigorous a grammar education as my predecessors from the same school did. They diagrammed sentences of the most complex order. We focused more on writing papers, and having solid arguments. It really isn’t part of the curriculum at all! My high school did teach it as one unit once a year for 6 years (jr. high to high school), but it’s not nearly as advanced as the little things that the English editors pick up on. Unfortunately
I wasn’t too interested so I got by
 but don’t remember much.

I know basic things, but not to the extent that other people may have learned. Unfortunately that is only done in a good catholic/private school. The nuns were apparently really scary and your thickest textbook was the grammar workbook!

62

I think the reason is also psychological. Sometimes native speakers (in every country) despise grammar and don’t give importance to lessons even if they are offered, because they think they don’t need it, since they already know the language. (“Why should I study my own language?”)