Yesterday, I met with my translator for this project to go over lingering questions I had about some of the dialogue. Part of it was trying to make some of the lines flow better as conversation and part of it was exploring whether certain lines could have a different meaning. It was a fascinating session as we pondered how to restate idioms and odd phrases in ways that would make more sense in the context of the story or just simply compute better for native English speakers. One bit that stands out for me was a Faye line near the end that sets up a funny exchange between her and Jet, but sounded rather odd translated literally. We came up with a solution that is far from literal, but gets the same meaning across and sets up the gag much more naturally. Having read lots of anime translation notes over the years, I guess it should be no surprise that translation often involves one’s personal interpretation.

Now that I pretty much know everything that’s going to be in the video (a second look at one scene saved it from deletion), I can get started on the sound mix and subbing. Having learned how to adjust volume levels for an entire track cutting the trailer (so much more convenient than the old method of adjusting each clip individually), the mixing should be simple. I’m also looking to replace some of the sound effects to give them more punch. And to save me time and frustration, I’ll be doing all the subbing in Premiere where I can time all the subs visually. I figure at Fanime and even for whatever form Song’s web release will take, hard matted subs won’t be an issue. Song will be mastered to DVD eventually with removable subs the old-fashioned way (BTW, if there’s some program for making a DVD subtitle track that has the same WYSIWYG simplicity of an NLE program, I’d love to hear about it).

The last technical question is what to do about the game’s own subtitles. You might’ve noticed some Japanese writing appearing in the lower-left corner of the frame in the trailer. That’s a remnant of the game’s subs which displays the dialogue and the name of the character who is speaking. The dialogue appears over the lower “black bar” and thus is easily cropped out with a letterbox matte but unfortunately, the character name appears in the frame itself and there is no option in the game to turn the subtitles off. This leaves me with three options:
1. Leave the name alone (a la the trailer)
2. Blur the name out
3. Extend the letterbox matte to crop out the name

Obviously, there are downsides to all three options. Would a constant blurry section be even more distracting than the name already is? Is it worth losing a good chunk of visual information to eliminate the annoyance completely? I’ll experiment with the three prospects but if anyone has thoughts on the matter, don’t be shy.