To get to the point: Would anybody be interested in starting a group project with me (and others) to create Japanese subtitles, in text soft-sub format (in kanji/hiragana/katakana) which could be added to their favourite anime discs?

Note: This wouldn't be for distributing the actual video/audio, only the text files and transcripts.

Background: Okay, so, one of my recent projects in process is taking all of the anime I have on disc (Madman Australia versions) and converting it to AVI for use on my computer.

In the process of doing so, I have separated and compressed each episode into single AVI files and have reversed the Japanese/English audio (so that Japanese is default). I have also extracted the subtitles, which are kept in text-based external subtitle files (.srt). Those external subtitles can later be integrated into the AVI files as softsubs in a single file, but I have not done that as of yet.

What I thought would be cool, in addition to doing the above, is to add Japanese subtitles in the same fashion that English subtitles are used. I have looked around, and from what I can tell - there doesn't appear to be any consistent or readily available Japanese subtitles for most anime. I am aware of kitsuneko and few other sites, but they do not appear to be comprehensive nor do they appear to be consistent in what they offer.

Obviously, being an English release by Madman, my discs do not have Japanese subtitles - but have "English" and "Signs only" subtitled which I can extract. Those included subtitles, however, have the more-or-less appopriate timings for speech. (I assume this is common with anime distributions worldwide and that everybody would be able to do the same thing with their own sets of discs, albeit perhaps switching the timings slightly to cater for different publications).

All that needs to be done to add Japanese subtitles is to listen in on the anime and write what is being said (easier said than done, of course - this could be quite time consuming when it comes to getting the kanji right).

But - of course - thought this could be quite useful in terms of listening, learning the kanji and vocab as you go, immersion and then potentially using the transcripts/subtitles in conjunction with SRS and sub2srs?

---

Have just come across this (transport streams), which might also be of use in supplementing the project:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid114158
http://transportstreams.org/captions/

Do you have any particular series in mind?

Subs are a lot easier to find now. A group called elitist-fags release subs for a lot of anime and also the raw transport streams through bittorrent. If they don't have the subtitles available for download you can always get the transport stream and extract the subtitles from their with caption2ass_mod. (Some shows don't have closed captions though).

Though if you want subs for older shows, then I guess making them yourselves is the only option. It would be a lot of work though...

Sounds like a fantastic idea to me, especially for harder-to-get shows.

I don't have any particular series in mind.

I would start with the discs that I have in my own collection (which isn't amazing expansive, but includes things like Chrno Crusade, Shakugan no Shana, some Bleach, Naruto, FMA, Tsukihime, Speed Grapher, Kimi ga Nozumu Eien) and a few others.

Of course, however, this isn't about me and what I have and getting it subbed for my benefits. Letting the community decide what is best to start with as a group is probably better (perhaps each person could nominate a series).

There is an anime/manga cafe about 5 minutes from where I live which have a pretty extensive collection for hire, so I could help out others for whatever series they needed.

It could also be a good idea to work as a group so they could be checked and verified by either one of the more advanced members of the community. I know I'm going to have trouble, at times, identifying which kanji are appropriate and will probably mishear things (e.g. particles).

Of course, if subtitles are already available online - there would be little point in redoing them. I agree with focusing on rarer series. It could be helpful to acquire and convert the ones online to a common format, ensure they are correct, and store them in sets for each series, in one place, so that they're easier to access.

There wouldn't be much utility in going much further, I think :-]

As already mentioned the Transport Streams Caps uploaded by Elitist Fags (Frostii *cough*) are rather useful.. Just some ass files are not uploaded and need to be extracted which is.. painful, when you need to download ~4gb first (takes long, even through DDL and torrentseeds die after a few days automatically; fast bandwith users are needed here for this project, if it's to succeed). Would be nice to have some subfiles regularly for some series like Meitantei Konan.

I get the impression from their website and your post, perhaps mistakenly, that those released subtitles are difficult and bandwidth consuming to obtain if not pre-extracted, do not always cover full series, are sometimes inaccurate due to bad captures, and disappear along with the torrents if not pre-extracted and listed in their archive?

Because Elitist Fags already offer an archive for subs which are pre-extracted, the only ones that'd be worth getting are the ones which are the most difficult to get (because they aren't pre-extracted), right? I think it could well worthwhile to do, even if they were just extracted and posted up on the Elitist Fags archive itself afterwards. [As you said though - this would need a lot of bandwidth and fast connections].

I think the main aim of this project, would probably be creating subtitles in situations where they just simply don't exist. That, of course, is even more painstaking...but potentially quite valuable not only in that they can be reused by other members of the community (e.g. subs2srs), but also in that the process of subbing a full series would benefit some with listening/reading/kanji usage/vocabulary?

I can see four potential aims/forks of a subtitling project:
- Transform plain transcripts available online into subtitles (easy)
- Use manga volumes to create subtitles (also easy)
- Compile existing subs/captions in an easy to access place
- Create subtitles from scratch for rare series (hard)

All being equally valuable, I think. I'm willing to put in the time to try drag as much of what's available online together and potentially invest in getting a better connection to source transport streams.

Would like to hear others thoughts on how this might work.

I guess you misunderstood me slightly.. They upload the RAWs (so the normal cap of an anime or show whatsoever, including the ads, so video and audio (Jap)) which include sometimes ASS files, which are automatically created by the specific broadcaster for the series for people not being able to hear anything (but can read the subtitles logically).
So they upload them and some scripts are (trying) extracting these ass file from the .ts video and upload them separately into /captions/ directory. (which sometimes fails.. due, dunno).

The fatale point is, that.ts/.ass files get deleted after a certain time and you cannot find them anywhere downloadable/available (DDL/torrent dead), as they cannot store infinite amounts of videofiles naturally..

Hence the TS files include quite a lot of ads and are uncompressed MPEG-2 streams they are BIG (3-4gb) and the servers are not like 4mb/s DL speed (pity).

My idea would be starting collecting subs (jap) for certain series as well, like Detective Conan.. Somebody could easily code a script downloading the the same directory structure every time they update/upload some new series.. Just an idea, i'm not a coder though

Edit: So why not starting up with Detective Conan?

If I can put it some suggestions for the project, I'd like to see Japanese subs for recent shows that don't air with captions. Stuff like Kimi ni Todoke or Angel Beats!; movie DVDs that don't have a Japanese track on them; or shows that have incomplete caption scripts floating around on the net.

For example, I am missing captions for episode 3 of the Twin Spica drama and it seems impossible to get a .ts raw for it now since it's so old. So being able to fill these gaps with something be rather awesome. Also Elitist Fags does seem to have gaps on some shows, these would be great to fill also.

I suppose I could be up for some subtitle timing if needed. However I don't have the listening skills to transcribe with. I'd also be willing to teach a timing program like Aegisub to someone who can transcribe.

I know this defeats the listening aspect part of doing this, but wouldn't it just be easier to rip the Japanese subtitles from the DVDs?

Most Japanese releases include a subtitle track.

Daichi Wrote:If I can put it some suggestions for the project, I'd like to see Japanese subs for recent shows that don't air with captions. Stuff like Kimi ni Todoke or Angel Beats!; movie DVDs that don't have a Japanese track on them; or shows that have incomplete caption scripts floating around on the net.

Actually angel beats did air with captions, I have an subs2srs deck for the first episode. I only ever saw subs for the first episode, but if we could get the transport streams somehow, we could get the subs. I highly doubt anyone has them though...

kerosan41 Wrote:I know this defeats the listening aspect part of doing this, but wouldn't it just be easier to rip the Japanese subtitles from the DVDs?

Most Japanese releases include a subtitle track.

Could do, as long as the subs are exact (which they aren't often), but I guess we could fix them. You could then ocr the subtitles to a text based format.

This seems to be exactly what the Anime Transcripts Wiki does, save the timing work.

bombpersons Wrote:Actually angel beats did air with captions, I have an subs2srs deck for the first episode. I only ever saw subs for the first episode, but if we could get the transport streams somehow, we could get the subs. I highly doubt anyone has them though...

Yeh, I know about the first episode. But I actually don't think it aired with captions. chihiro-subs actually dropped it because they couldn't get the captions.

Quote:"We picked the show up under the assumption that because it aired on TBS, it would have closed captions. We were wrong."

However, It seems like a Chinese subtitling group [萌月&诸神字幕组] released Jpn mkvs for Angel Beats, which as far as I know, they transcribed it themselves. So the subs exist, but where to find them I'm not too sure.

here's another option to consider... korean subs
if there aren't Japanese subs available. I wish I realized this sooner!!!

get korean subs from clubbox and then google translate them to Japanese. It's obviously not gonna be 100% same word for word since it's google translate but it's helpful since korean/japanese have similar grammar and have lots of kango　（漢語） in common. OBVIOUSLY not 100% but enough to help me out with my not so ideal level listening skills;

1. get the smi file from clubbox.
2. convert it to .srt
3. google translate it to japanese

details:

for this you have to use vobsub->subresync to convert the smi subs to srt format (be sure to convert with correct fps rate (most likely going to be the smallest one which is 23.something) so that it matches the video) then open the srt file in notepad... copy and paste it into google translate and then paste the japanes translation back to the note pad... then do save as nameoffile.srt (with save as type set to all files)
(wait: JUST realized. if you google translate the arrow gets messed up that it should be 01:50:32,646 --> 01:50:35,904. but then arrow turns to - > which makes sub file not work. so you have to do control +h on microsoft word to fix all the arrows back then paste back on notepad

anyone can get a clubbox account!
http://lifeanddeath.blogsome.com/clubbox-tutorial/
http://www.ampedasia.com/forums/register...11630.html

search engne for clubbox files:
http://search.clubbox.co.kr/
maybe use this site to search instead since clubbox is slow/laggy with loading:
http://boxfile.co.kr/

search the name of the show + smi
try searching for it with japanese/english title and that should be enough to find it or find out that it doesn't exist.

I find it helpful since not all dramas/animes have japanese subs available (on d-addicts/kitsunekko etc... I know they air with japanese subs (字幕放送 on the bottom of the screen) but not all shows get the subs ripped by someone and shared) but korean subs do exist most likely. I have trouble with kikitori so with japanese subs i pretty much understand everything while without them i'm screwed/I don't have to miss any juicy lines etc.

plus it enables me to use sub2srs if the drama/etc doesn't have english or japanese subs out in the first place.

so like the person above who wanted angel beats....... you could do this.

howtwosavealif3 Wrote:here's another option to consider... korean subs
if there aren't Japanese subs available

That's certainly an option for starting out, but for me, my listening is too poor for something that isn't 100% exact. But of course as the topic of the thread, a simple group effort could use this as a starting point and fix things up from there. This sounds like it could have some promise.

Oh. So by "subtitles' you mean "captions" as in "closed caption".


Good luck!

If this project gets started, I'd be really interested in helping type up Japanese subs from scratch since I'm used to doing this anyway for my sentence deck. I do come across particles which I'm not sure are は or　が but whenever this happens per episode, it could be figured out amongst people in the group, as well as with the help of native Japanese speaker contacts online.

I've actually been looking for something I can do to help out online communities (whether it's translating or doing things like this) while using Japanese to keep improving, so I'm really glad I saw this thread!

Also, I nominate a classic anime like Ginga Tetsudou 999　

balloonguy Wrote:This seems to be exactly what the Anime Transcripts Wiki does, save the timing work.

When I saw this thread, I immediately though for 'Anime Transcripts Wiki' as well.

If you click around the site, they don't have terrible amount of Japanese subtitles available. But I found this link on their site: http://kitsunekko.net/subtitles/japanese/ It lists links to many subtitle files. These are essentially the same as transcripts.

If you're interested in dramas, daddict's has an extensive selection of Japanese subtitles for Japanese dramas.

How to use the subtitle files: about a month ago, I watched some of nukemarine's YouTube tutorials. One video showed you how to load subtitle files into Excel in order to delete time stamps and other non-essential text from the subtitle files so that you're left with the bare bones text. You can then cut and paste the text into Word and do with it as you like (print it out, make anki cards, etc.).

Also, I don't suggest translating Korean into Japanese in order to study Japanese. Although they have a lot in common, there are many, many differences as well that an online translator cannot deal with correctly.

I'll contribute to this but once I gained the ability to transcribe flawlessly.

1- Transform plain transcripts available online into subtitles (easy)
2- Use manga volumes to create subtitles (also easy) - how do you do this? Often the production version differs from the video version
3- Compile existing subs/captions in an easy to access place
Doesn't kitsunekko already do this? I did this myself for Nyan Koi! - you can get my subs on kitsunekko. I did this by downloading TS files using Perfect Dark, if you can believe it. I did an extra step of retiming to match the fansub version I had - these retimed versions are the ones available on kitsunekko.
4- Create subtitles from scratch for rare series (hard)
Very difficult; I don't have the ability. This seems the most interesting, but I can't do episodes perfectly. I would need a checker or something.

Maybe someone can contact Funimation and inquire about Jap subs for future releases?

jcdietz03 Wrote:3- Compile existing subs/captions in an easy to access place
Doesn't kitsunekko already do this? I did this myself for Nyan Koi! - you can get my subs on kitsunekko. I did this by downloading TS files using Perfect Dark, if you can believe it. I did an extra step of retiming to match the fansub version I had - these retimed versions are the ones available on kitsunekko.
4- Create subtitles from scratch for rare series (hard)
Very difficult; I don't have the ability. This seems the most interesting, but I can't do episodes perfectly. I would need a checker or something.

Maybe someone can contact Funimation and inquire about Jap subs for future releases?

Several places have subs listed but they are never very well organized.

This is kinda a pipe dream, but I kinda have been envisioning a website recently where people could upload timed or untimed scripts. Edit them for corrections. Have the ability for additional timing information so the subs could be shifted based on what type of source they have (raw capture with commercials, standard raw group like leopard-raws, fansubs or so on). The ability to batch download the subtitles, based on what format they want (.srt, .ass, or .lrc) and source they have. And the ability for people to request transcriptions or subs of some type of media. Haha, I can dream I guess.

As for contacting a company like Funimation, the number of people that can use Japanese subtitles for educational means is probably very small. I'm sure they wouldn't jump on the idea as it would probably only encourage more reverse importing back to Japan. But if they did, I'd be lining up to buy these for sure.

http://kitsunekko.net is down! ...again...

I can't remember if Galaxy Angel is on that site or not. My brother recently got me into that anime (he's a huge fan), and I was wondering if I couldn't find transcripts for it.

Hero of Time Wrote:http://kitsunekko.net is down! ...again...

I can't remember if Galaxy Angel is on that site or not. My brother recently got me into that anime (he's a huge fan), and I was wondering if I couldn't find transcripts for it.

See http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid120110

そういえば、
Kitsunekko site description (simplified):
1) User selects a file or list of files
2) Site checks the filesize to ensure it's <100kB for each file
3) Site downloads the file from the user
4) Site lists the file

How hard is this to actually implement? Is it easier with FTP?

I did this video a while back.(Subtitling a bleach anime scene)

(One mistake, I posted it on the description)

If your wanting to create a group that uploads subtitles for animes, I'd be willing to join. Although I'm not flawless at transcribing just yet. It's something I will accomplish

ta12121 Wrote:I did this video a while back.(Subtitling a bleach anime scene)

(One mistake, I posted it on the description)

If your wanting to create a group that uploads subtitles for animes, I'd be willing to join. Although I'm not flawless at transcribing just yet. It's something I will accomplish

I wouldn't mind transcribing either. I'll add the same disclaimer, though - I'm not 百発百中.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in starting something like this, but if you feel like doing a group project, feel free to send me a PM.