Introduction
Since I was a teenager, there was something that called my attention in a particular way when watching movies; this was subtitling. If I knew a little of the language heard (English, for example), and I had to read the subtitles in my native language (Spanish). In my mind I tried to "correct" or "evaluate" if the subtitles were correct, according to what I already knew. I find this type or translation interesting, and I know that is a good business too. I do not know what type of translation I want to end up working with, but I am willing to discover it step by step.
"Subtitling is an exciting area of translation, and is part of a broader field of audiovisual translation which includes dubbing, voiceover and audiodescription. Subtitling is divided into two types: subtitling within the same language, for the deaf and hard of hearing (also called captioning), and subtitling across languages, for foreign-language film and television.
The subtitler’s task is already difficult because subtitles are so limited in space (about 37 characters per line, and a maximum of two lines) and time (subtitles should not stay on the screen longer than six seconds). The result is that the content of the dialogue has to be cut down to fit in the subtitles. Not only that, but the content has to be translated, and the subtitles also have to be ‘spotted’ or timed carefully to match the dialogue. There’s a real art to this, and it takes lots of training and practice.
Subtitling doesn’t just translate the dialogue, but also other meaningful language in films such as signs, letters, captions and other written words. When a film has lots of written language and dialogue happening together, this can result in some very difficult choices for the subtitler."
SOURCE:
1. AdapTV
"AdapTV is the world's first television network dedicated to the mobility impaired, hearing impaired, and visually impaired. AdapTV initially launched as a network of low power broadcasting stations (LPTV) that all carried the same programming, with the flagship station being KALTV in St. Louis, MO.
In late 2011 AdapTV sold or closed down most of its LPTV stations in order to raise funds for and concentrate on a national cable television launch. In mid 2012, AdapTV began broadcasting in cable markets nationwide. Some viewers who received AdapTV's low power signal are no longer able to receive the channel as their cable company does not carry it leading to a large volume of requests for a relaunch of LPTV stations in those markets or internet streaming of the channel. Officials for the network stated that the latter is in the works.
Prior to AdapTV, the Silent Network and Kaleidescope TV both served all or part of this audience. The Silent Network featured programming with open captioning and sign-language for the hearing impaired and deaf starting in 1980. The network was later purchased by a private group in San Antonio, TX who eventually transformed the channel into Kaleidescope TV which was envisioned as a channel for viewers of visual, hearing, mobility and other impairments but later became a general health network before ceasing to broadcast several years later.
Programming on AdapTV is as diverse as general entertainment networks and broadcast channels for the general viewing community.
Sports
The network covers live or tape delayed coverage of most sporting events, open and closing ceremonies for the Deaflympics, the Olympics sanctioned sporting event held every four years. The next Deaflympics starts June 23, 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
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The Paralympics is a major international sporting event for athletes with physical and mobility difficulties andcarried live and in repeats on AdapTV.
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AdapTV carries Wheelchair Racing every Sunday afternoon as part of its sports block.
It is healthy for all humans to do exercise, no matter what habilities or impairment we have. It is great that these organizations have olympic competitions for the hearing impaired or paraplegic.
This shows us how much they care about living and want to enjoy their lives by practicing a sport. They give us an example, that life is too short to waste it. It is worthy if you take advantage of every minute you have.
News
AdapTV has the US's only open-captioned news broadcasts and also includes sign-language intrepretation and audio description for the visually impaired. All major news stories are covered as well as stories of special interest to AdapTV viewers. Sign-language intrepretation has been available on news broadcasts internationally for years including a special programming block on the BBC which AdapTV also carries.
Films and Series
Kids TV
AdapTV provides a wide variety of children's programming including films, cartoons, educational series and more for children who are hard of hearing or deaf, visually impaired or blind or physically or mobility challenged. As well the network seeks to reach the friends of these children and help create an inclusive environment. Much of the programming is produced by AdapTV, colleges for the hearing and visually impaired and the BBC.
Events
Miss Deaf America is the precursor to the Miss Deaf International event. The pageant is broadcast live on AdapTV.
The next Miss Deaf International will be broadcast live from Sophia on AdapTV from July 23–27 as it is a multi-day event. Due to the time difference the pageant will be carried live and with tape delay during US primetime hours.
Formats
Open Captioning
Most programming on AdapTV features open-captioning. This means that viewers do not need to turn on captioning when watching the channel. AdapTV uses enchanced open captioning which uses larger letters and a white background making text much easier to read.
Another source:
Sign Language Interpretation
Most programming on AdapTV features sign-language intrepretation if it is not featuring sign language as the main content of the programming.
This can also be a way of translating for a deaf person...
Another source: American Sign Language University
Audio description While as of 2013 a contested Federal mandate in the US requires audio description on certain programming AdapTV has chosen to provide audio description of most of its television programming. Unlike other networks the audio description does not require that viewers activate the service and rather it plays during the main audio feed."
Another source: Audio description
2. Aegisub
"Aegisub /ˈiːdʒɨsʌb/ is a free open-source cross-platform subtitle editing program. It is extensively used in fansubbing, the practice of creating or translating unofficial, noncommercial subtitles for visual media by fans. It is the successor of the original SubStation Alpha and Sabbu.
The software is considered the standard in a well-known fansubbing group, and has been recommended in the online "Guide to Fansubbing".
It has been designed for timing and styling of subtitles, as well as the creation of karaoke. Aegisub's native subtitle format is Advanced SubStation Alpha text, which supports subtitle positioning and styling. The program also supports other common formats such as SubRip. Features include support for timing to both audio and video, and can use many video processing bindings to process those, such as FFmpegand Avisynth. It can also be extended with the Lua, Perl and Rubyscripting languages.
In fansubbing terms, Aegisub is used for translating, timing, editing, typesetting, quality checking, karaoke timing and karaoke effecting. Although, many groups use different tools for some of those steps, such as Adobe After Effects for typesetting, or a simple text editor for translation."
How to use Aegisub:
3. Closed captioning
"Closed captioning (or abbreviated: CC) and subtitling are both processes of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information. Both are essentially the same and typically used as a transcription of the audio portion of a program as it occurs (eitherverbatim or in edited form), sometimes including descriptions of non-speech elements. Other uses have been to provide a textual alternative language translation of a presentation's primary audio language which is usually burned-in (oropen) to the video and not selectable (or closed)."
A Short Example of YouTube Closed Captioning & Subtitling
4. Comparison of subtitle editors
"A subtitle editor is a type of software used to create and edit subtitles to be superimposed over, and synchronized with, video. Such editors usually provide video preview, easy entering/editing of text, start, and end times, and control over text formatting and positioning. Subtitle editors are available as standalone applications, as components of many video editing software suites, and as web applications."
There is a various list of subtitle editors, each one of them differently created for translators and editors, depending in your need. Some of them can include adding sounds, some of them don't. But, here is a list of the most used: List of subtitle editors.
5. Anis Ebeid
"Anis Ebeid (1909–1988) is an Egyptian translator, known for Arabic subtitling of American movies. He was a pioneer in Arabic movie subtitling in the Middle East.
He graduated from Engineering college, and then travelled to Paris to study for the Masters degree in Engineering. He was the first in the world to insert subtitles on 16-mm film. He kept the record for 40 years as the sole vendor of this service till 1944. The movie Romeo and Juliet was his first Arabic subtitled movie."
6. Fansub
"A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program which has been translated by fans (as opposed to an officially licensed translation done by professionals) and subtitled into a language other than that of the original." The most popular fansubs are the anime fans. They started translating their favorite anime shows in the 1970s. It grew as the fans grew, and nowadays, there are fans from every age.
7. Same language subtitling
"Same language subtitling (abbr. SLS) refers to the practice of subtitling programs on TV in the same language as the audio. This method of subtitling is used by national television broadcasters in India, such as Doordarshan, and in China. This idea was struck upon by Brij Kothari, who believed that SLS makes reading practice an incidental, automatic, and subconscious part of popular TV entertainment, at a low per-person cost to shore up literacy rates in India."
SLS also refers to the classroom or educational use of synchronized captioning of musical lyrics (or any text with an Audio and/or Video source) as a Repeated Reading activity. The basic SLS reading activity involves students viewing a short subtitled presentation projected onscreen, while completing a response worksheet. Ideally, the subtitling should have high quality synchronization of audio and text, and text should change color in syllabic synchronization to audio model, and the source media should be dynamic and engaging."
I believe this might be the "easiest" way to translate, because it is your native language; you hear it, you understand it, you know it. Every type of translation is extraordinary, you just need to develop not only in the ones that you like the more, but the least. Practice makes perfect!
8. Subtitle (captioning)
"Subtitles are derived from either a transcript or screenplay of the dialog or commentary in films, television programs, video games, and the like, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added information to help viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing to follow the dialog, or people who cannot understand the spoken dialogue or who have accent recognition problems. The encoded method can either be pre-rendered with the video or separate as either a graphic or text to be rendered and overlaid by the receiver. The separate subtitles are used for DVD, Blu-ray and television teletext/DVB subtitling or EIA-608 captioning, which are hidden unless requested by the viewer from a menu or remote controller key or by selecting the relevant page or service (e.g., p. 888 or CC1), always carry additional sound representations for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Teletext subtitle language follows the original audio, except in multi-lingual countries where the broadcaster may provide subtitles in additional languages on other teletext pages. EIA-608 captions are similar, except North American Spanish stations may provide captioning in Spanish on CC3. DVD and Blu-ray only differ in using run-length encoded graphics instead of text, as well as some HD DVB broadcasts.
Sometimes, mainly at film festivals, subtitles may be shown on a separate display below the screen, thus saving the film-maker from creating a subtitled copy for perhaps just one showing. Television subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing is also referred to as closed captioning in some countries. More exceptional uses also include operas, such as Verdi's Aida, where sung lyrics in Italian are subtitled in English or in another local language outside the stage area on luminous screens for the audience to follow the storyline, or on a screen attached to the back of the chairs in front of the audience.
The word "subtitle" is the prefix "sub-" (below) followed by "title". In some cases, such as live opera, the dialog is displayed above the stage in what are referred to as "surtitles" ("sur-" for "above")."
In other words, captioning is the same as subtitling. It is helpful for those who are hearing empaired, for those who do not have access to the audio (for being in a meeting, a library, or just for not having access to it), and for people that do not speak or understand the movie in its original language.
Another source: Captions, transcripts, and Audio description
9. Subtitle edit
"Subtitle Edit (also known as SE) is a free and open-source subtitle editor to create, edit, adjust or synchronize subtitles for videos. The application has a very easy to use interface containing a list of existing subtitles, a wave form to visualize audio waves and a player which looks like Windows Media Player 11. It uses the VLC media player orDirectShow to play videos.
SE supports 200 subtitle formats. Some of the most popular formats areSubRip, Timed Text, SubStation Alpha, MicroDVD, SAMI, D-Cinema, BdSub.
SE is available in 27 languages and contains most of the features of a subtitle editor.
SE is developed and maintained by a software developer, Nikolaj Lynge Olsson from Denmark. It is hosted at GitHub."
10. Subtitle editor
"A subtitle editor is a type of software used to create and edit subtitles to be superimposed over, and synchronized with, video. Such editors usually provide video preview, easy entering/editing of text, start, and end times, and control over text formatting and positioning. Subtitle editors are available as standalone applications, as components of many video editing software suites, and as web applications."
Another editor
11. Timed text
Timed text refers to subtitling taking time on account, doing it in a specific amount of seconds; it should not appear more than 6 seconds on screen.
"Typical applications of timed text are the real time subtitling of foreign-language movies on the Web, captioning for people lacking audio devices or having hearing impairments, karaoke, scrolling news items or teleprompter applications.
Timed text for MPEG-4 movies and cellphone media is specified in MPEG-4 Part 17 Timed Text, and its MIME type is specified by RFC 3839. "
12. Transcription (Linguistics)
"Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances (speech) or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists consider only the former to be transcription.
Transcription should not be confused with translation, which means representing the meaning of a source language text in a target language (e.g. translating the meaning of an English text into Spanish), or with transliteration which means representing a text from one script in another (e.g. transliterating a Cyrillic text into the Latin script).
In the academic discipline of linguistics, transcription is an essential part of the methodologies of (among others) phonetics, conversation analysis, dialectology andsociolinguistics. It also plays an important role for several subfields of speech technology. Common examples for transcriptions outside academia are the proceedings of a court hearing such as a criminal trial (by a court reporter) or aphysician's recorded voice notes (medical transcription). This article focuses on transcription in linguistics."
Conclusion
EU Transl skills descr.
Translating is not an easy career and involves many branches with it. One of them is subtitling, the one I chose for this project. I learned that there are two types of subtitling, and one of them can help deaf people understand what the movie, TV program, or video is about. One of the most interesting things about translation is that you can provide a great movie or text or interpretation for someone who doesn't speak the original language. Honeslty, I consider there is so much extended information I still need to learn about translation, and I still need to develop interpersonal dimension, language competence, information mining, and others. I consider myself a beginner in this area, willing to grow professionally, and someday be able to work in a great organization, or have my own Translation Academy... who knows?
