From time to time, you may receive video transcripts for translation. You will recognize these jobs as transcripts because, in addition to have a “transcript” feel (like a continuous flow of narration), you’ll see that:
1. Each segment will be accompanied by a timestamp range on the Notes side panel. This timestamp indicates the amount of time the text will appear on screen (in this case, a bit over 4 seconds). You do not need to do anything with this information, at the moment:
2. What constitutes a segment is determined by the spoken words and the time the viewer has to read them, not by the classical definition of a sentence. So you can expect what, would be a full sentence to be spread out across several segments:
This implies that, when translating subtitles between languages with different syntactic structures, such as from an SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) language like English to an SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language like Japanese or Korean, or sometimes German, you will very likely need to rearrange your translations across several segments, to ensure the translated text is both grammatically correct and natural sounding. Do not constrain your translations to the segment level.
For example, the following (very simplified) two subtitles:
[Segment 1]: I believe that Anna (Subject) is playing (Verb)"
[Segment 2]: "the guitar (Object)."
Would need to be translated into German as the equivalent of:
[Segment 1]: “I believe that Anna (Subject) the guitar (Object)"
[Segment 2]: "is playing (Verb)"
In conclusion: when subtitling between languages with different syntactic structures, it's crucial to reorder elements as necessary to ensure the subtitles are grammatically correct and natural to the target reader.
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