Automate the dub

April 6, 2013 8:51 AM

China is on a major push to dub TV series into English, and I'm primarily a subtitle translator who's been dropped into the middle of this exploding industry. While I've found industry standards fairly easy to research, what I've found less than easy to locate are recommendations for specialized software used in the translation process. What I'd like to know, if anyone here can recommend anything, what are the software packages you use that help to automate or smooth the process, specifically tracking whether timing and lip sync are right, specifically free software, as it's going to be hell to convince my bosses to buy something they can't sample, and I've been assigned a squadron of three untrained non-native translators to do most of the heavy lifting for me.
posted by saysthis to Writing & Language (3 answers total)

I will ask my subtitler friends but your stipulation of "free" made me pause - as far as I know the leading packages do cost $$$ if not $$$$. There might be something out there though, or at least a free trial.
posted by altolinguistic at 11:08 AM on April 6, 2013

Response by poster: Then by all means name the leading packages, even the really spendy ones. I'll look at those, too.
posted by saysthis at 12:51 PM on April 6, 2013

This is probably not in the league you are looking for, but when I'm captioning videos for work, I use Subtitle Edit, it's open source, and I find it intuitive and surprisingly powerful. I have only used it with video files.
posted by smoke at 3:38 PM on April 6, 2013