Overall Reflection

At the end of all of this, I really feel that subtitling has helped me grow in my understanding of the complexities of the Japanese language. I was able to learn new kanji, vocabulary and practice my translation capabilities. I also learnt new computer skills, from something as simple as uploading a file to youtube to creating a hardsubbed file.

However, due to time constraints, I wasn't able to complete a fourth video, which I had already mostly translated. If I ever did this again, I would definitely give myself set deadlines and times for working on each video, as opposed to just doing bits and pieces in between other lots of study.

I came into this paper very ambivalent, but I ended up doing something that I really enjoyed. It has inspired me to continue fansubbing, perhaps even into the areas of anime and drama.

Reflection on using Aegisubs

I chose to download Aegisub because I heard from friends in fansubbing circles that it was their program of choice, due to it being both freeware and containing a larger array of editing devices. It also has a regularly maintained wiki, which meant I would be able to easily look up any instructions that I might need.

I personally found Aegisub intuitive and user friendly, and subtitling with it was much easier than I expected subtitling to be. However, it still doesn't stop the time consuming nature of timing the placement of the subtitles themselves.

Video 3 - Can You Keep A Secret?

The third music video I subtitled was "Can You Keep A Secret?". This wasn't as hard as "Passion", in terms of its poetical nature, but was still more complex than "Automatic". I managed to translate the majority of this by myself, having to only ask for assistance on one or two lines. To be specific, this verse here:

"かすかな物音 追ってくる movin' shadow
振り切れなくなる影
少しの冒険と 傷付く勇気も あるでしょ"

Which I translated to become:

"A faint sound
The following movin' shadow
That shadow we can't get rid of
It's just a little adventure and some hurt pride"

This video suffered the same problem as "Passion", with the subtitles appearing too small on the screen. However, having learnt from last time, I remedied this before hardsubbing the file. The only other problem was that I experienced some issues with the audio being out of sync with the movie. (A problem with the file I'd gotten ahold of, not one that any of my programs had created.) But, I was able to solve this by using several video editing programs and removing and reattaching the sound.

Video 2 - Passion

The next translation I did was for the song "Passion". This song was a much bigger step up in difficulty than "Automatic", as it is filled with colorful metaphors. By the first line - "思い出せば遙か遙か" - I was already taking artistic lisence and altering the english lyrics to the way they "felt" in Japanese. (Rather than the literal meaning) Will and Clint offered me a lot of assistance in this translation, and for that I am very thankful. Will was also the one who showed me popjisho, which made the looking up of kanji fast and easy.


I got the quality right when I uploaded this video to youtube, but for some reason, the subtitles ended up incredibly tiny. In hindsight, I should have taken a screenshot in order to put here and show everyone what it looked like, but I just pulled it down straight away, and went through the subtitling program to make all the subs larger in size.

Video 1 - Automatic

The first video I fully completed was "Automatic". It took me about 1 hour to translate the entire song, which was far shorter than the several hours I spent on my first (non uploaded) music video. Why? Probably because this was Utada's first single, and she still mostly wrote her lyrics in English before translating them into Japanese. This contributed to the ease in which I found I could understand the song, and have it make sense in translation. That said, I still had difficulty in reading some of the kanji, and looking through a dictionary to find the reading was somewhat of a pain.

When I uploaded this video to youtube, several things went wrong. As it was the first time I've ever uploaded anything to youtube, I didn't realise what quality it would be or how the subtitles would change. The video ended up being terribly blurry and small, and thus you couldn't read the subtitles at all. I had to pull the video down, hardsub the video again at a higher quality, and upload it once more.

I think this video went well, and it made me look for an alternative to the paper kanji dictionary, which I found in popjisho, and I learnt something about uploading videos to youtube.

First try: Not a success.

Before the holidays, I subbed my first MV. It isn't one I'm going to upload to the internet, because it was more a practice run than anything else. It already taught me a few things:

1. I got to mess around with several subbing programs, and discover the best tools of the trade.

2. I learnt that most subbing programs don't come with an automatic way to create hardsubs - so I had to spend a lot of time finding a video editor that would give me what I want without a loss of quality.

3. I realised how hard it is to put Japanese metaphors into English.

I'm already into subbing my second MV, and I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with this one than the first. Hopefully it continues along this way!