A resource blog for all the creampuff translators! TheLitteDrunkApple is my main blog; not affiliated with Carmilla, Couple-ish or "Til lease do us part", I just translate these shows and sometimes write subtitle tutorials.
Exactly one year ago I thought about translating Carmilla for the first time. I finally worked up the courage to ask about it in April, I actually started translating and editing at the end of May and now there are in total more than 100 subtitled videos not only for Carmilla, but also for Couple-ish and The Gay Women channel. And the most amazing thing about it is that I have met so many awesome people through this which has helped me to get through some rough times. I have also had the pleasure of introducing some people to this by writing tutorials and talking about my process - which even led to helping a fellow creampuff with answering a few questions for her thesis! So proud and happy for your success, @guardiansofwolves!!
Special thanks to Steph/Carrie/Paige, Kaitlyn and Adrianna for supporting our weird little bunch (and answering my awkward e-mails)!
And thank you, team creampuff language nerds <3 I don’t know where I would be without you.
Why didn't I know about this awesome blog of yours earlier?! Definitely have to do some more digging when I have time. The Finnish translator of Carmilla saying hi. You seem like a really cool person! Cheers from a fellow creampuff and language nerd, Anna
No idea but you’ve found it now, so welcome! so cool to meet you! and thank you <3 feel free to dig all you want!
We also have a group chat thing for the translators, I’m gonna dm you about that when I have more time later today, in the meantime there is a list with all the other translators on here if you want to get to know them! And my main blog is @thelittledrunkapple
There are many people working on subtitles and I don’t actually know all of them - if you are a translator for Carmilla (Who does French, Spanish and Portuguese??), come say hi! So here are all the people I know:
Italian: Paola @shufflegeek
Hungarian: Zsofi @carmillaisthedramainmylife
Latin American Spanish: Camila @i-believe-in-music
Russian: Ekaterina @seductioneyedtodeath and @kommandorlexa
Croatian: Lara @twilightbizarre
Turkish: Bianca (only on twitter EDIT: now @zepolzoom) and @ultimatepan
German: Me! Feli @thelittledrunkapple and a bunch of other people: @caitlinfenrir @feyrah @carmillaurahollstein @xxgongaxx @daslebenmitdz @kleiner-wildfang
So if want want to get to know us or even better, leave feedback about the subtitles, just message us!
EDIT: Found the Spanish translator! @enlaotraisla
EDIT: We have a new translator for Greek: @1onemoredream
(Part 1) With Carmilla Zero and Couple-ish only two weeks away (*throws tampons in excitement*) I thought it might be a good idea to put down a few supplementary tips and tricks related to translating, subtitle formatting and some common problems you might run into like:
“What do you do if Laura talks without breathing for half the episode and now you have to fit huge amounts of text into a short amount of time?”
(I wanted to include some example pictures in this but this post is already long and it messes up the bullet points, so I decided to put them all here.)
So in general, making subtitles has two parts: first the translation and then the subtitle editing and formatting.
Translation crutches:
Watch the entire part/episode you have to translate beforehand. The better you know the material, the easier it will be. Pay attention to see if there are recurrent terms, sentences or expressions in the episode, for example nicknames, or terms like “Lit TA”., “Board of governors” etc. If you translate with several people, it might be a good idea to create a little glossary to ensure consistency.
This is obviously easier the more material you already have. Pay attention to how the characters speak and what language they use.
Translate the episode’s title.There might be title cards at the beginning, the end or sometimes in the middle, so make sure you don’t forget them!
After you finish translating, read it again and ask yourself: “Would I say it in my own language?” It helps you to see if the translation is too literal.
Every character has their own “voice”; Does the character use slang? Or do they talk more formal or use antiquated words? Try to imitate these things in the translation too.
Puns are often impossible to translate, especially if they depend on a rhyme. Maybe there is a saying that comes close?
Spell check!
When you finished the suffering and crying of the translation and you finally have the text for your subtitles, there are some rules for the formatting to bear in mind!
Subtitle formatting:
Sometimes these guidelines cannot be applied perfectly. Don’t panic and go with your gut, maybe try a few different versions and see what works best when you play the episode.
Subtitles can’t overlap. (Your subtitle editor should indicate this.)
Subtitles need to be on screen long enough so you can read them comfortably, especially if the text contains unfamiliar words.
For this do not put more than 35-40 characters in one line and no more than 2 lines. (This might depend on the language! German for example has longer words in general, so lines that are a bit longer can still be read comfortably.)
Try to match the beginning and the end of the subtitle with the audio, especially if someone talks immediately before or after; it can be good to allow a bit more time. In general, the subtitle should last a bit longer than the audio, because reading takes more time than listening. Add a tiny bit before and a small bit at the end.
Pay extra attention to the timing when there is a joke (for example, LaF bursts in and interrupts - if their speech appears to early, you ruin the surprise!).
Line breaks should happen at logical points in the sentence.
It is possible to break a long sentence into two or more separate sentences and then you can display them as consecutive subtitles. Again, make sure those breaks happen at a logical point.
You should also break the sentence when there’s a pause in the middle.
Sometimes several people speak more or less at once. The standard way to format this is to indicate each speaker with a dash and a new line.
Make sure to give enough time for one word subtitles too (”Hey.”). They should appear on screen for minimum 1 sec.
If someone talks off screen, indicate their name like this: [Laura]
Same goes for music or noises, for example [panther growling in the distance].
Subtitles should not overlap into a different shot. (In Carmilla you almost never have shot changes since there is only one camera angle and maybe a cut in between scenes, but in Couple-ish that might happen.
Common problems you might run into and possibilities to solve them:
Too much text in too little time. Sometimes you have people like Laura Hollis who talk without breathing for half the episode - and it can be a real challenge to fit it all in the given time.
The first thing you should try to do is check your translation, maybe there is a way to make it shorter by using a different phrase, word or structure.
Delete words that are not absolutely necessary, like “well”, but don’t do this all the time either!
If you have a pause, you can extend the subtitle for a bit longer when nobody else is speaking.
Divide the lines differently.
Get distracted and rewatch the episode. (And cry again cos that’s fun.)
Extra subtitles on the screen which are not spoken (like JP in s1) and people talking simultaneously.
We can use two lines with a dash and pretend as if it is a normal dialogue, but shortening both lines.
If the characters read or narrate the text, then it might be best to only write down the spoken text.
Brand names and references to characters from other shows:
Urban dictionary is your best friend!
Leave the name as it is.
Look up the show and check if the character already has a translated name and then use that.
If it refers to food, sometimes it is a good solution to use a more general term, for example “candy” instead of “twizzler”.
Quotes: For example, Carmilla quoted Camus once. You can look it up if there already is a translation in your language and then use that, otherwise you have to translate it as best as possible on your own (if possible, from the original).
Last step: Watch the whole thing at once and check for any last mistakes or problems!
Many thanks to @shufflegeek @carmillaisthedramainmylife and @rinucz for co-writing this tutorial with me! And if you need any more advice, just let us know!)
Thanks! I'm actually Brazilian so I was checking to see if you guys got pt-br covered. I'm glad you do, I think Brazil is like the third country with more views on the Carmilla videos and I'm happy there'll be Portuguese subtitles for couple-ish cause I'm sure it'll be just a success in here as Carmilla :)
Ah, glad to hear that! I talked to the Brazilian translator and she told me that if you wanted to contact her, you can find her on twitter @yserafim_
Is the portuguese translation going to be pt-pt or pt-br?
are you talking about couple-ish?
yes, it will be brazilian portuguese! But, since i don’t coordinate the translators, I am not sure if there is also someone else who does pt-pt; I couldn’t find someone in our groupchat thing, so maybe there is nobody. You would have to ask the official @coupleish tumblr about it!
Apparently there is a bit of confusion on what I do (and don’t do) regarding the subtitle translation:
I am not officially responsible for coordinating/uploading subtitles for Carmilla or Couple-ish! If you want to offer to do translations for these shows - AWESOME! But you need to ask either Steph hotladypants or the official coupleish tumblr.
I am just one of the translators. I (will) translate both shows into German with a bunch of other German speaking Creampuffs (caitlinfenrir carmillaurahollstein daslebenmitdz feyrah kleiner-wildfang sun-skalli xxgongaxx ) and I edit all the German subtitles, send them in etc.
HOWEVER, I do talk to the other translators a lot and I also run the carmilla-subtitles blog (you should check out the subtitle making tutorial there if you haven’t yet), and I talk about translating/subtitle making a lot.
If you are interested in becoming a translator yourself and/or want to get in contact with the other translators, you can find many of them on tumblr, and we have a skype group for the Carmilla subtitles and most of us will also work on Coupleish. We are currently 7 people, me and 2 other German friends, Paola shufflegeek from Italy and another friend of hers, Ekaterina from Russia (not on tumblr), Camila i-believe-in-music from Chile and Zsofi carmillaisthedramainmylife from Hungary and I talk to another German, Bianca, on twitter @zepolzoom (she’s also not on tumblr), she does the Turkish translation for Carmilla. And twilightbizarre has just started to do Croatian subtitles for both shows!
This group has been very helpful just to exchange experiences, talk about different programs we use, how we work, to discuss references/difficult sentences and stuff like how to translate the gender neutral pronouns. Or we just cry together over the last episode :D
And there are a few other translators that I haven’t met yet! So, if you are one of them, come say hi!
We kind of jokingly nicknamed ourselves “Creampuff language nerds” and if you are a translator for one of these shows you are very welcome to join us :)
Hi, mind sharing how you get to be involved in Carmilla? How did you get the translator gig?
Hi, sure! (It is actually not as extraordinary as it may sound at first.)
I’ve alway had a “thing” for languages and I’ve always loved translating, but I had never done it “professionally” before, especially not for subtitles (which is a bit different than, for example, translating newspaper articles, because you have dialogue and not written text).
I started watching Carmilla in October last year and I immediately liked it a lot, and then in January Steph (the producer) put up this post on her tumblr, saying she was looking for translators and I immediately thought, oh, this could be interesting for me! I’ve always loved translating, I’m also quite good at it, and I figured that this would be a way for me to support the show. Another thing is that there is still not a lot of LGBTQ+ content available and translating the show has made it available for younger people who might not yet understand English that well. Or like a friend of mine who will now be able to watch it with their mom :) So that was my motivation behind it.
And then I just messaged Steph asking if she wanted German subs, and she replied and said yes :) I actually started doing it at the end of May, I continuously translated the new episodes from season 2 and then did as many episodes as possible from s1 on the side (as many as uni allowed me to do). A few weeks in I got a few of my creampuff friends involved and we got the idea to do it together, so we would set a time and meet up in a google doc to work simultaneously which is a lot of fun, a lot faster and also a lot easier since it allows to discuss difficult lines. I’ve also met a few of the other translators and we’ve set up a “support goup” via skype where we help each other out and I’ve gotten in touch with another girl who now does the Turkish subtitles. And the responses from Steph etc. have been wonderful! Doing this is a lot of work, I still need about 2-3 hours for every episode and the responses we’ve gotten via mail, tweets or comments on yt have been really appreciative and wonderful. So overall this has been (and still is) a wonderful thing for me.
I hope this answers your questions and if you want to know more, feel free to ask again :)
So, for some reason you have decided that you want to translate subtitles, probably for Carmilla or another show like Couple-ish, or maybe you want to check out how it works and if that might be something you want to do. Providing subtitles in another language is a lot of work, but also a really fun thing to do and you can help make the show available for more people!
So fear not, I have done this for a couple months now (for Carmilla and I will do it for Couple-ish as well) and will try to describe it as best as I can!
Download and install a subtitle editor, check my resources page for various options. I personally use Subtitle Edit which I can highly recommend (only win/linux though) and which you will see in this tutorial. Other programs might work similarly. Also search youtube for tutorials!
Download the subtitle(s) (for Carmilla, again check my Resources page; otherwise, I use this website: paste the URL of the youtube video and then select “download SRT english”).
EDIT: the site I suggested originally doesn’t work anymore, so I suggest this site - which you can also use to download the video. how handy!
Download the youtube video(s) you plan on making subtitles for.
[.srt is short for SubRip text and is one of the most common formats for subtitle files and is the one we will be working with here. (more info on .srt here)]
(All pictures in better resolution here)
Making subtitles is a process that basically has two steps: Translation and editing.
The first step is doing the translation. Open the .srt file with your subtitle editor. The default view is the “list view” and it looks like this:
For translating I personally prefer the “source view” (circled red), which is easier/faster to navigate with a keyboard only but you can also use the little box at the bottom. Another thing I find very helpful is going to source view and then copying everything into a google doc (and then back when I’m finished) where I work on it with my friends - I highly recommend doing that, makes it a LOT easier and it is also very motivating! Also autosave is a huge advantage.) Translating is an art in itself but I wanted to concentrate on the technical aspects here. (For some translation tips, check out part 2 of this tutorial.)
Run spellcheck! You can download various dictionaries when you click on the [...] symbol.
The next step is to open the video file. Go to “video >> open video file” and select the correct video. Also select “show video” and “show waveform” in the top bar and then on “click to add waveform”. The program will then extract the audio (this takes a few seconds) and display it as a waveform. Overall it should now look like this:
So, now onto editing! There are a few things you need to check now:
The subtitles can’t overlap, they need to be displayed long enough so one can actually read them comfortably and they should overlap with the audio. You can easily change all these things by clicking in the waveform window and dragging the respective subtitle around and use to little arrows to make it longer or shorter. This might sometimes be difficult to manage, depending on your language. Sometimes people (*cough* Laura) talk really fast and you have to fit a lot of text in a short time. You could try to translate a bit differently so the sentence becomes shorter or divide the lines differently or make the display time a bit longer, even if the audio is already over. This is a bit of an experience thing, you will need to try it out and play around a bit to see what works best for your language. Ideally it should look like this:
Sometimes you have lines that are a bit longer, and then it can be a good idea to put a linebreak (either manually or use the “Auto Break” option)
Subtitle Edit will also indicate when lines are too long (standard is max. 80 characters per line; if they are longer, they will get cut off, especially if you watch on a phone/small screen!] or the time is too short or when lines overlap etc. (go to Options >> Settings if you want to change the default) I currently work with these settings:
Almost done! A few last things to consider:
Describe noise/music etc. for people who are Deaf or HoH like this: [Weird noise from outside. Might be a growling panther].
Sometimes “Laura” edits in these funny titlecards like this one or the SNN etc. Don’t forget to translate these too!
Put the title at the beginning and the “see that subscribe button....” at the end.
Give your file a reasonable name. I use this format: [episode nr.] [name of show] [language] for example: “232 carmilla german”
Send your file via e-mail (to Paige in the case of Carmilla), check it out on youtube a while later, find a typo and cry.
And then join our Creampuff translator skype group for moral support!
(contact me thelittledrunkapple or Paola shufflegeek or Zsofi carmillaisthedramainmylife or Camila i-believe-in-music and say hi!)
EDIT: check out part 2
Edit: 31.10.15: added a new site for downloading subs.
That's interesting, what you say about translating Laura. Is it because she does most of the talking? Or because she has her own style of talking (phrases etc.)?
Ah! Well, obviously she has the most amount of lines, but that is not why she is the hardest to translate. Prepare for nerdy language and translation talk! Some of these things are not specific only for Laura, but for the translation process in general.
Laura tends to talk in really long sentences, especially when she is narrating something and then she often uses sentence constructions that really abbreviate the sentence. I am not sure if this is the right way to express this - basically, in order to get a grammatically correct german sentence, I have to use a different sentence structure, that is sometimes up to 50% longer than the sentence in English - which I then have to cram into the same time in the video. An example for this would be this sentence from episode 201:
“Anyway, turns out escaping Austria across the Alps, not as easy as the Sound Of Music made it out to be.” (104 characters)
Es hat sich jedenfalls herausgestellt, dass es doch schwieriger ist, über die österreichischen Alpen zu fliehen, als es in “The Sound of Music” erschien. (150 characters)
As you can see, the German sentence is a lot longer. German also does not have gerund forms for verbs, most often the only way to replace that is by using a relative clause which is a) longer and b) can then cause trouble if there are other gerund or relative clauses in the english sentence.
German also has gendered nouns (feminine, masculine and neutre) in 4 different cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) which then influence the ending of each noun, the article and also adjectives and pronouns, so sometimes an adjective will refer to 2 nouns in the same sentence, but in German these nouns have different genders! An example for this is at the end of episode 219. “… 19 year old girl with a broken… door?” In German, “heart” is neutre (das Herz) but “door” is feminine (die Tür) and in this case, both words (including their article and adjective) are in the dative case. “…with a broken heart” would translate to “…mit eineM zerbrocheneM HerzEN” and “…with a broken door” would be “mit eineR zerbrocheneN Tür”. So, no real solution to that. This is why it is so hard to learn German!
Laura also uses a lot of very informal speech/ slang, like the “pig latin” in episode 203 (I had no idea that existes, I had to ask around on tumblr what that even was before I could look it up, then figure out a way to do something similar in German.) Similar to this are puns/ proverbs/ phrases/ insults and references to movies/ TV shows, especially if they are not (well) known in German. Also proper names for certain things, like “twizzlers” or “poptarts”. And general Silas weirdness…
Another thing are cultural differences, in this case in the university system: We don’t have floor dons, TAs are usually Ph.D. candidates, we rarely live in dorms (and never with someone in the same room!), fraternities are also very rare/different (and if they exist, they are mostly related to religious traditions and happen outside of university, so the whole terminology/clichés like “frat boys”, “popped collar” etc. doesn’t exist), the studies in general are organised differently (no minor/major thing, no midterms, reading week, etc.) so it can be really hard to find a terminology that “works”. I have a really strange search history now!
And then I also have to consider that each character has its own “voice” and that often influences what word I ultimately use, for example Mattie and Carmilla sound totally different than Laura or LaFontaine. Before I started doing this, I spent quite some time thinking about each character, their manner of speaking, what is specific for their character.
And then there are things that make translating complicated in general, like how words have different meanings depending on the context or can have different connotations and many more…
All in all, this has been a really interesting and fascinating thing for me to do. I am a perfectionist when it comes to analysing and translating texts (I mean, I do study theology, so I am kind of trained to do that), but of course very often you have to compromise to make it actually understandable. What has been really helpful though is to talk things through with the other translators and then sometimes we suffer together when we can’t translate certain things like puns or nicknames. Basically we are all giant language nerds :D
...and welcome to the multilingual version of this vlog. Wait, what?
A few months ago I ( thelittledrunkapple ) started translating Carmilla for the (German) subtitles and recently I’ve been getting a few people in my inbox asking me things like:
So, how did you become a translator? How does this work? Oh wait, I do that too, we should talk! Do you know any other translators? I am looking for a translation partner! What is a good way to co-work on subtitles? I’ve been thinking about doing that too for my language, but I am not sure how? And what the hell does this line/weird reference/pun mean? cue desperate googling
...which are pretty much the same questions I had before/when I started working on the subtitles and therefore I decided to create this little sideblog!
Here you will find information to all these questions, resources, a chance to meet other translators, to get a BTS look at how “it” works or to just witness me being a giant language nerd :)
