Motivation
As a big fan of Ang Lee, I’m in love with many films produced by this world-renown director, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of my favorite. The film features an international cast of actors of Chinese ethnicity, including Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi. The story itself is based on the Chinese novel of the same name by Wang Dulu, the fourth part of his Crane Iron Pentalogy. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2000, and won over 40 awards including Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Original Score, and Best Cinematography, receiving the most nominations ever for a non-English language film at the time, until 2018’s Roma tied this record.
The original video
The original film trailer is in English and without subtitles, and this post will show you how to subtitle and localize it by using Iflyrec and Adobe After Effect.
Challenges
- Cover and localize the on-screen texts “Sony Pictures Classics” at the beginning and “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” at 1:43.
- I’m using a Mac. My subscription to the virtual machine (Parallel) just expired, and I don’t want to renew it.
Step-by-Step Instruction 1: Subtitles
I discovered an excellent tool Iflyrec for subtitling with the functionality of voice recognition and automated machine translation. Unfortunately, the official website hasn’t been localized, and it only shows Chinese.
- Import the file. After importing the original video, it will ask you to choose the source language and customize the rules of the subtitles as follow:
2. Subtitling. The tool will recognize the audio and create subtitles automatically. You can check and edit the subtitles on the left side and preview the video on the right side. It also shows the timeline where you can drag every subtitle to make it more accurate.
3. Translation. Translating the subtitles is extremely easy by using this tool. Click the blue-button with round angles, and it will show you the translated subtitles by MT. You can also post-edit the target content.
4. Subtitle setting. You can change the position, font, and font size, etc, of the subtitles by clicking the setting.
5. Export the file. When everything is perfect, you can export the video, XML, CRF, as well as the srt file by clicking the button on the upper right of the preview screen.
Step-by-Step Instruction 2: Localize the on-screen texts.
There a few on-screen texts that need to be localized, and I will show you how to do it by using Adobe After Effect. (I assume that you know how to create the new project and import the file :))
- Create a shape layer. Click Layer>New>Shape Layer.
2. Cover the source texts. I chose a rectangular, and select the Shape Fill Color that’s exactly the same as the original background.
3. Change the timeline of the shape layer. You can zoom in and figure how the period of the background and simply drag the time bar to make it the same as the original video.
4. Add the target texts. Since the title of the film shows up in order, we need to create two text layers. Please ensure the font you select is similar to the original texts.
5. In the original video, the text shows gradually, so we need to change the opacity of the text. Make sure you click the timer so that AE can mark the percentage on the timeline.
So, here is the localized on-screen text.
The Localized Video
Takeaway
I feel like I was a tailor when subtitling and localizing the trailer. It’s easy to add, translate, edit and customize the subtitles with the assistance of AI, but I still need to be careful about the accuracy and timing of target subtitles. Besides, Adobe After Effect is powerful. The principle of localizing the on-screen texts is just like localizing the images by using Photoshop: cover the original part and add the target content that’s similar to the original style.