Collaborative Digital Release: Byousoku 5cm English Subtitles
Windbell and I were having another of our little discussions about how fansubbers don't seem to be picking up the Byousoku 5cm film even though there was all the hype when the trailer came out. Where are all the subs by the quality groups? I was especially looking forward to subs by the one group which has subtitled almost every single Shinkai release. Ah well. Perhaps they're still in the middle of it and we'll see a release in the next few weeks. In any case, we decided to take matters into our own hands and sub it ourselves. Subtitle file available for download (right click and save if need be). If you have downloaded a torrent of this release, please replace the subtitle file from that download with this one -- several problems have been fixed in this version. For the actual movie itself, raws are not hard to find, or you could buy the R2 and watch it with these subtitles, or you could wait for the R1 in November.
Time taken: Approximately 2 days: 36 hours of solid work.
Format: Advanced Substation/Aegis Subtitle Script (.ASS)
Language: English
As anyone with a passing notice at my prior subtitle releases will know, I don't do a lot of fancy stuff. I do h.264 sometimes, and karaoke, if it shows up, is fairly simple. Think of this release as a back-to-basics exercise. In light of recent discussions, I have dispensed with karaoke totally this time, opting for static subtitles for the romaji and translations. For this movie, since its a Shinkai production, you don't really need more eye candy than what is already on the screen. Keep focused on the footage, and grasp the true meaning of the song!
For the basics of how this subtitle was produced, we executed a SubRip of the DVD hard-of-hearing subtitles into bitmap picture files and an SRT. However, I might have stuffed up this process as the timing came out wrong. Nevertheless, we had a foundation of roughly-timed and separated lines. The rest of the process just involved translating the lines (with reference to WWWJDIC and the subtitle bitmap files) and adjusting the timing according to the audio as needed.
This is a "fan-sub" in the purest sense of the phrase. We are fans, and we subtitled this. We're not professional Japanese translators and I relied heavily on WWWJDIC. We do, however, have more than the average experience with the Japanese language and we wield some pretty good English writing skills. We did our best with the resources we had and I am pretty certain that it came out pretty accurate. That said, if you find errors and stuff, please don't be too hard on us. It's soft sub, so it's not hard to edit and correct them.
Since "Oukashou" takes up around half an hour whilst "Cosmonaut" and "Byousoku 5cm" together take up the other half an hour, we had split it so Windbell would do Oukashou and I would do the other two. Unfortunately Windbell had various engagements, so I ended up doing quite a bit of the Oukashou part as well. It must be said that Oukashou was one of the hardest parts to subtitle, and most of the difficulties encountered with this project emanated from there.
First of all, in the childhood part of Oukashou, the characters were reading a book about prehistoric animals. They mentioned three of these animals by name, with katakana, and it took some Googling to at last find a list of prehistoric animal names so I could match up the approximated pronunciations with the proper names. In any case, those names are accurate and have wiki entries for them, so you can look them up if you're interested.
Previous subtitles of Oukashou were notably (for me) deficient in their treatment of the cat which Takaki and Akari encountered on the street. The name "Chobi" for the male cat (and "Mimi" for its missing girlfriend) are notable memes in Mr Shinkai's work, starting from Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko onwards, and making a cameo appearance in Kumo no Mukou.
The hardest part to sub was the long train journey in Oukashou which Takaki undertakes. This was one of the most boring and work-intensive sequences I have done, due to the regularity with which the train announcements rear their heads with unintelligible place names mixed with the background noise, meaning that almost every mundane line had to be transcribed. As it dragged on, even I began to feel the frustration and despair that Takaki was feeling on his journey. :P
All in all, it was a project which was immensely frustrating, yet immensely rewarding to complete, especially in such a short time period. In the unique emotional space of sleep-deprivation, the clock in the corner of the screen reading "5:12 AM", and a single line of dialogue blaring out of your headphones repeatedly, the contents of what is being translated become extremely vivid, the meanings and emotions behind some of those lines of character monologues come across as it could never do if I was just watching the raw. As the sky outside the window turned fish-belly white, and the clock read 7:19 AM, a torrent was created, and seeding was started. Then, with the full knowledge that in 4 hours I would have to go to work, my body wracked with muscle pains in strange places, I fell into my bed, exhausted but at the same time with a sense of accomplishment unlike any I've felt before.
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Thank you for this release. You are the best! And you did lot of hard work. Thanks
thank you very much –
been waiting for this over a year :)
Kudos for all the hard work.
B5C is truly a masterpiece :).
Awesome! Been waiting for this since the trailers of the first part. Last week, downloaded 4 versions already only to find that all are untranslated raws ;-/
[...] Anyways, here are pics of it, as per traditions of this type of post. I’ll not go more in to detail, but for those looking for a sub for B5C, head over here to get one. [...]
Thanks for the hardwork!
Now to see if I can get the audio and the subs to come together properly with the raw that I have..
yey, I think all Shinkai fans apreciates your hard work same as me. Thank you :) Putting your blog in G reader…
I’ve been waiting for this sub since February and was very excited when the DVD came out last week :)……You’re right, it seems very odd that none of the popular fansub groups (thus far) have picked up this project…….Wonder what the hold up was……
Thank you guys :)….You are awesome :)
Dear all: thanks for all the comments. makes me all warm and fuzzy inside :)
Liingo: you shouldnt have too much problems with the sync. If the raw providers ripped the movie from the dvd properly, the timing should be around the same. otherwise vobsub will allow you to delay (or push forward) the subs manually. Or you could just download the release torrent (not linked here).
Haha, sometimes I use the IME handwriting pad when I’m translating too XD
thanks man i loved softsub!
I was also downloading a lot of raws the week the DVD came out. When your torrent came out, I was overjoyed! Thanks!
Yeah I got it working eventually.
For everyone who has the raws from Saiyaman, you have to alter the sub timing to -4000 milliseconds in vobsub for the audio and the subs to come together
Congratulations on your hard work. Can you tell what are the differences between the softsub and the one that went with the torrent? Thanks a lot again, you really made my day (while waiting some sub for 5cm/sec).
The file from above is an updated version of the one which came with the torrent. Fixed things include:
- Typo during the motorcycle breakdown part “It was my sister’s” as opposed to “I was my sister’s”.
- Typesetting errors in rendering a few lines as thoughts when they were actual conversation.
- The over-long subtitle for the end of cosmonaut (I think)
- Missing subtitle for “Chapter 3″
- Last line: credit sub: licensed under copyleft, not copyright.
With the exception of the typo, all the above errors (which are pretty minor) were made during the final half an hour of preparation, probably due to fatigue. It’s fixed now though. If there’s one thing I love about soft subs, it’s the ease with which errors can be corrected: simply download a small file and replace the original. no big v2 releases from here! ^_^
Edit: if you downloaded the mkv from “Parade”, I’m not sure which version of the subtitles they used. Hopefully the fixed one. If they used the old one it shouldn’t be too hard to tweak vobsub or whatever to load the new ones.
Thanks for the clarification. I’ve found something else as well. In the ED song, at 59:10.14 you have a line which says “Mou nanimo nai”, but it says something more, I think it is “Hoshii mo no nado, mou nanimo nai” (欲しいものなどもう何もない). Congratulations again on your work.
Wow, I just had to pop in and say thanks to you and Windbell for taking the time to subtitle this movie
I can offer payment in hugs, but I’m a dude so maybe it’d just be better to stick with a hardy handshake ;)
Thanks so much for the Sub file! I watched the first part a long time ago and having gone through my own bout of longing for someone, remembered to watch the other two parts.
The torrent I got had a different framerate than the sub and the sub/audio didn’t match up. After a lot of trial and error I finally got everything to match up and just wanted to post the timing ratio for anyone with this problem and Direct Vobsub…
5cm Timing Ratio (Direct Vobsub)
subtitles-video
4800-4604
Hey man,
I actually got your version of Byousoku after getting pissed off with everyone else’s low quality subs. Great Job! Your translation of the movie, was great! Simple and all! I really appreciate you doing all that work! I hope you keep doing more of those! You could become better than Anime-RG! =)
Mike Kuo
Thank you for your hard work!
I just bought the r2 disc, and am wondering how to get the fan sub to work… this is definitely a noob question, but is there any way short of ripping the DVD, so that I can use your subtitles? I am using Media Player Classic 6.4.9.0 with VMR 9.0 DirectShow output, and while the subs and audio worked, the video output is blanked (black on the letterbox background).
Thanks!
Felix
Interesting. I haven’t actually gone through the hoops to get the subs working with the DVD, and in my initial attempts the subs tended to be the ones freaking out. Try changing the output method used by MPC?
Tried both VMR 7.0 and 9.0 (renderless), no luck… Maybe ripping is more straightforward. I want a new hard drive…
well great these subs r free to download .. going to translate it into my mothertongue, like i did with the first part. So i can agree that train self-speech was really difficult one ..
anyone that wants to watch the actual DVD with these subs, use VLC player.
Load the DVD with sub file locations and it will work ^^
Is it possible to burn the sub into the R2 DVD so that we can enjoy the movie on a big screen TV?
I’ve just watched it for the Nth time, and felt a need to thank you again and praise the translation. This movie has a lot of nearly-poetic language and your English translation is rich and beautiful!
thank you for the translation..^_^ I’ve been waiting so long for this…since DB hardsubbed the first part..
Add to my Bookmarks ;)