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  • #16
    Especially the "translate each line of dialogue individually in real-time" part. That would mean paying a native Mandarin speaker who is also fluent in US English to do that, a task that would likely take weeks for a full feature.

    Foreign language subtitling is arguably one of the highest skilled, exclusive jobs in our industry (hard-of-hearing subtitling in the same language is also a lot harder than one might believe). Ideally, you have to be a native speaker of the destination language, and have near-native fluency in the source language. Keeping the on-screen verbage to a minimum while preserving the essence of what is being said can often be especially difficult. Google Translate will not cut it for an application like this.

    I once subtitled a three-minute clip from French to English (using a combination of my schoolboy French, and a co-worker who had fluent French but not very good English) to play at a conference: it took me two days. Part of the reason was that I did it using an early version of Adobe Premiere, which does not make the typesetting, positioning and timing easy. But what really took the time was avoiding unnecessary words in the translation (the three word difference between passive and active voice can easily cost half a second of reading time, for example), and keeping each subtitle on the screen long enough for the viewer to read it, but not long enough for the viewer to lose track of the visuals and sound.

    Surely there must have been Mandarin subtitles written for this pic, assuming that it's a mainstream movie? If so, rendering a VF of the DCP with Mandarin CCAPs would take a matter of seconds, if it hasn't been done already. If the distributor could be persuaded to do this, it would be by far the most efficient solution.

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    • #17
      You can use an on-line translation service and stuff like Google Translate even has APIs to do so, but I'm not sure what the results are.

      I've tried to watch some real-time subtitled YouTube videos from Asian languages, but the results aren't really stellar.

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      • #18
        It would be interesting to try a machine translation of each Text element in the existing timed text files. These are available decrypted via HTTP from the server. I don't know when the decryption happens. It could be on ingest or on show load. They are definitely available decrypted at show load since the IRC-28C fetches them then. The URL for each caption file (a timed text file for each reel) is in the Auxiliary Resource Presentation List (RPL). There is a link to the RPL on the IRC-28C home page and also in the log. You can then fetch each of the timed text XML files, and try to translate the Text elements. But, how you get these back on the server and whether the server will complain are a different matter.

        Here's a quick sequence of captioning using SMPTE 430-10.

        ACS (auxiliary content server - the captioning system) connects to the DCS (digital cinema server) using TCP port 4170.
        DCS sends announce request and ACS responds.
        DCS sends set lease request and ACS responds.
        DCS sends Set RPL Location (URL of the RPL) and ACS responds.
        ACS fetches and parses RPL getting URL of each timed text file.
        ACS fetches and parses each timed text file.
        DCS sends timeline update request and ACS responds. This tells the ACS where playback will start.
        DCS sends SetOutputMode on indicating start of playback. ACS responds, starts its edit unit counter, and sends captions at correct time.
        DCS sends occasional timeline update requests to ensure system still in sync and renewing lease.
        DCS sends SetOutputMode off indicating end of playback. ACS responds.

        The DCS is allowed to have one RPL per show or one RPL per composition. It appears that most have moved to one RPL per composition. I saw some with one composition per show, but they changed to per composition with various frame rates were introduced.

        I also wrote notes for DCS manufacturers on how to make it easier for ACS systems to work. Those notes are at https://isdcf.com/papers/ISDCF-SMPTE...es20180308.pdf .

        Harold

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