This report is based on localizing a famous Chinese ancient costume drama called “Langya Bang”.
There is a view of our experience with Lang Ya list within the three months.
Please go to the details listed below.
Introduction
Over the last two months, I have been working with my friend Maggie on a new project about localizing a famous Chinese drama into English. Nirvana in Fire(琅琊榜) is a 2015 Chinese historical drama based on Hai Yan’s book Lang Ya Bang (瑯琊榜). The drama was a commercial and critical success, surpassing 100 million streaming views by its second day, and receiving a total number of views on IQiYi (a Chinese online video platform) of over 3.3 billion by the end of the series.
Name of the drama
The English name for this drama is Nirvana in Fire, but we prefer to translate it into Lang Ya List because Nirvana in Fire only summarizes part of the story, but the original Chinese name gives the complete picture.
Why we chose it?
We are doing this because both Maggie and I are super fans of this drama. Moreover, it was an ancient Chinese drama that was super famous. Even though the dynasties and the main event are fictional, they did show the real etiquette and culture of ancient China. As a result, it’s a chance to introduce Chinese culture to other countries. Additionally, there is a translated version of this drama, however, it is not fully translated. In the first 4 episodes I checked, each episode lasted 45 minutes, but the English version only translated about half of them. For example, the first sentence of the subtitles is in English, and the next sentence is in Chinese. Many English speakers still ask for English subtitles on YouTube because they cannot understand the drama in the current English version. Therefore, we decided to work on it and try to localize it.
Localization steps
The localization will be developed into parts: first, we need to download the video and audio separately, create an automated Chinese caption in Adobe Premiere, check it one by one, export the caption (srt file) to VSSe, and fix all the QA problems in VSSe (Visual Sub Sync Enhanced), translation with Memo Q, watch the video again after fixed all errors, save it and open it in Adobe Premiere, delete the original one and add my localized subtitle, watch the video again and export.
However, the working process is not as simple as we thought. In the following part, I would illustrate the challenges that we met during this process.
Challenge 1
We are currently working on episodes two and three (We are already done with episode 1, and the localized video is at the end of this report). It’s super hard because we found out that Adobe Premiere is not great for Chinese subtitles. In contrast to English, the “Transcribe sequence” isn’t working perfectly for simplified Chinese, and it has problems in almost every sentence, so I have to change them one by one. Every episode is 42 minutes long, and I spent about 3 hours fixing one.
Challenge 2
After finishing the initial checking, it is time for us to do the translation work. Since we use MemoQ for subtitle translation before, we also decided to keep using it for this project. Before we start translation, we need to use Pr to export the whole video with audio since we downloaded the audio and video separately.
The most challenging part of this localization work is the story background for Langya List is fictional but shares similarities with the ancient Chinese dynasties, so the way they speak is different from normal speech. Our biggest problem is translating those sentences. For instance, 后宫 Harem, 贵嫔 Noble Imperial Concubines, and 食邑 Feudatory land, those words make the translation super hard since we need to check them one by one when we meet. In Zhihu, a professional simplified Chinese and English translator posted his list of ancient Chinese words he has translated for free. So we decided to build a TM based on his plan and the words we have in Lang Ya Bang. This way, we don’t need to be concerned about how to translate them when we encounter them in Lang Ya Bang.
Challenge 3
Even so, translation remains a challenge since some words are very difficult to explain to Chinese people. For instance, 封禅 was translated into Fengshan, but people will not understand it if we only translate it into Fengshan since it means a type of ceremony held on Mount Tai where the emperor would offer sacrifices to the heavenly king. However, we cannot put the whole description into our subtitle because it did not meet Netflix’s requirements for English subtitles. It is imperative that we find a solution for these words. One thing I am thinking about is we can make a list with descriptions and pictures for those words. This way, people can check it if they want to know the deep meaning of those words.
Challenge 4
The other question we faced is that we spend most of our time on VSSe to check and fix the captions for the whole video (variable, since I am not aware of how many mistakes there are in the subtitles), and to check errors one by one (variable, the number of errors depends on the video). In my previous experience, I need about one hour to work on VSSe for a 5-minute video. As I mentioned before, each episode in Lang Ya List is about 42 minutes long. This means I will need at least 9 to 10 hours to finish one episode’s correction.
In the end
It may seem impossible to finish this project for Maggie and me, but I believe we can do it. Chinese people always say that “a hobby is the most valuable teacher ever”, which means no matter how difficult it is, you can accomplish it because you enjoy it. By the end of December, I hope to have finished episode two. And I wish I can finish five more episodes in the next three months.
The video
Work Consulted:
Nirvana in Fire. (2022, November 2). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_in_Fire