[:en]To localize this music video I found onre YouTube, the very first thing I did was checking with the band to ask for their permission. I’m a big fan of this band and I’m so glad that they kindly replied to my message and said “go for it”. By inserting “vd” in front of the YouTube URL I downloaded the original English music video and then started to localize it into Chinese. For this project, what I have done are basically adding a Chinese subtitle and localize the on-screen texts originally in the music video.

Subtitles Creation

Since there are no Chinese translations for lyrics, I need to translate them by myself at first. Due to the huge syntactic differences between English and Chinese as well as the language contracts for Chinese subtitling, I didn’t use any CAT tool for this lyrics translation.

The tool I used for subtitles creation was VSS Enhanced, which is a very straightforward tool for beginners. All I have to do is selecting the dialog for which I want to create a subtitle and then add a new one. There aren’t any major problems in this project, the only thing I need to pay attention to is the font since the initial one doesn’t work well with simplified Chinese. The following two pictures show the before and after the change of subtitle font.

 

On-screen Text Localization

There are two types of on-screen texts required to be localized in this video. The first one appears in the middle of this video as a kind of subtitle which explains the storyline. To localize them, I created a new project in Adobe After Effects and simply added an adjustment layer with camera lens blur effect which could cover the original subtitles and created new Chinese translations with the same color. I also added a drop-shadow effect to make the Chinese ones look more like the original ones.

The second one appears as the title of this song at the very beginning of this video. I firstly tried the same method I localized the first one, but I failed as the Chinese translation of this song’s name is much shorter than the English one and the blur effect didn’t work very well.

I then tried to add a solid color mask to cover it but the result was not very satisfactory, either. The primary challenge here is that the background is rather complicated and has been changing through all these seconds. It was really hard to find a suitable color. The picture follows shows the best attempt I did. It seems okay but okay is not enough.

To make it better I saved every related frame into a Photoshop layer and did the manual work. Thanks to the content aware fill function in Photoshop, my life becomes much easier. I know this may not be the most efficient way since it cost me several hours to do it, but the final effect makes all the efforts worth.

Typewriter Effect Localization

To make it more interesting, I also localized the texts typing from the typewriter in this video. I don’t really have to do it (basically because a typewriter for Chinese sounds crazy…), but I did it anyway. The way I localized it is quite similar to the one I did for the on-screen subtitles. I firstly added a blur mask and created the corresponding Chinese. I separated the last half line word by word to make it looks like a typing effect. I also chose a different font KaiTi for these lines to so that these words look more like prints.

Here is a 10 seconds trim of this part.

After making all these changes and burning the Chinese lyric subtitles with HandBrake, I tested the video again in VLC to see if there are any problems. And yay, I successfully make it works!

 

（Special thanks to the coolest britpop band in this century – FUR）[:]