0
I haven't made a new entry in a while... What's been keeping me busy? School and the activity pictured above: fansubbing. Yup, even though I don't know much Japanese, I decided to take another plunge into fansubbing. Some may remember the Yui Aragaki clip I subtitled last year. After that clip, I started working on another project, but it was quite difficult, and I never finished it. Since then, I haven't worked on anything else... until now!
At the start of this year, I planned to do more Idoling!!!-related activities. I really want to see the "overseas" Idoling!!! community take off and expand this year, so I've been trying to think of things to help generate interest in the group and create new fans. One idea that popped into my mind was subtitled videos.
In order to subtitle a video, there are generally a few steps that need to be taken: translation, timing, typesetting, and encoding.
Translation is a bit of a problem for me. I've had two semesters of "Elementary Japanese" classes at my college, but I'm still far from fluent in the language. The classes really helped my understanding of the grammar, but vocabulary is my biggest weak point. I just simply do not know many Japanese words. So, translation is difficult because I need to look up almost every word that's being said.
Timing and typesetting generally go together, and neither is a big problem. I don't remember what I used for the Aragaki clip, but I've been using Aegisub for the past few weeks, and it's a really nice program. I needed some time to learn how to use the program, but once I figured out how to do the things I wanted to do, timing and typesetting became easy. Timing still takes some time, and typesetting still requires some thinking, but Aegisub's spectrum analyzer and live preview make things much easier than they were with the program I used for the Aragaki clip.
Encoding is a piece of cake for me. The hardest part was deciding which format to use.
So, despite the difficulty of translating, I have entered the world of fansubs. I'm definitely not the fastest fansubber, my work doesn't have fancy fonts and effects, and the translations may not be entirely accurate, but I'm trying my best to provide subtitled videos for Idoling!!! fans.
