Translation - art & business » Subtitling »
Bad dialogue list
Thread poster: translation1201
translation1201
translation1201
Oct 5, 2011

Hello all,
I am a student of translation currently writing up my MA thesis for which I have chosen to translate an episode of a Spanish webseries. I recently wrote to the producers of the series in order to request a dialogue list of the episode I want to translate. Unfortunately, rather than a dialogue list, I was sent a rather poor transcription of the dialogue exchanges which contains many inconsistencies and which includes no time codes and no information with respect to which charact... See more
Hello all,
I am a student of translation currently writing up my MA thesis for which I have chosen to translate an episode of a Spanish webseries. I recently wrote to the producers of the series in order to request a dialogue list of the episode I want to translate. Unfortunately, rather than a dialogue list, I was sent a rather poor transcription of the dialogue exchanges which contains many inconsistencies and which includes no time codes and no information with respect to which character is speaking. What is the normal practice in this situation? Should the inconsistences be corrected and time codes and speaker I.D be included in the translated version?

Also, is it absolutely necessary that a dialogue list include time codes?

Thanks to whoever responds ▲ Collapse
 
Just Opera
Just Opera
Belgium
Local time: 12:57
French to English
+ ...
Not quite clear what your question is... Oct 6, 2011

But, yes in theory a dialog list implies timecodes included (but often only the start of the spoken phrase), i.e. subtitles often on the screen longer than the spoken phrase to account for reading speeds

In practice, it's often down to working with transcriptions without timecodes, I was used to doing spotting with only dialog transcribed (makes work faster), a copy of the film and corrected the (frequent) transcription errors by ear.

It's a lot of work for the produce... See more
But, yes in theory a dialog list implies timecodes included (but often only the start of the spoken phrase), i.e. subtitles often on the screen longer than the spoken phrase to account for reading speeds

In practice, it's often down to working with transcriptions without timecodes, I was used to doing spotting with only dialog transcribed (makes work faster), a copy of the film and corrected the (frequent) transcription errors by ear.

It's a lot of work for the producers of films to get someone to mark the timecodes when they consider that to be included in the work of subtitle spotting anyway.

Best

J



[Edited at 2011-10-06 19:44 GMT] ▲ Collapse
 
Elizabeth Adams
Elizabeth Adams  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 03:57
Member (2002)
Russian to English
It depends Oct 6, 2011

on what you want to use it for.

If you just need help hearing what the characters are saying, what you have is plenty. If you need to publish parts of it in your thesis, you'll have to clean it up first. I'm not sure exactly what issues you're encountering, but I've found that client-furnished dialogue lists usually deviate somewhat from what is actually said.
 


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Bad dialogue list







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