The V

Fuck you rain for destroying a small chunk of my comic book collection.  Now I have to replace some of my Alan Moore and rare Howard Chaykin collections. Not to mention some of my other trades.

Every company that doesn't subtitle commentary tracks (so, all of them)-- on the fudging list!

It's bothered me a bit in the past, but I bought the Prisoner on Blu-Ray due to the combination of the alternate cut of Arrival and commentary tracks from people who worked on the series. Unfortunately, they're old and can't speak very well or clearly any more and it's difficult to hear or understand the speaks without cranking the volume up way too much.

Is it really that hard to hire some schmuck to transcrible the commentary tracks and stick them on discs?

There's a commentary on EVERY Simpsons episode, and they're all subtitled (same with Futurama I think), so it's obviously do-able, but it's not an expense most DVD producers go to.

It's awesome that someone does that, at least.

Subtitling is a very technical and complicated job and can't just be carried out by any schmuck. It's also something most production companies won't pay for despite the vast proportion of people with hearing difficulties out there.

Why is it difficult and technical?  Don't court reporters do it every day?

Court reporters - or stenographers - are transcribers. There's a whole extra layer of work on top of that. In fact, unless you're subtitling something live, you can do it with a normal keyboard. It's not just that you have to be a whiz-bang audio transcriber, you have multiple source audio, some of it poor, you have to recognise technical terms, you have to have perfect English and grammar and punctuation and... ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT! IT'S A PISS-EASY JOB ANYONE COULD DO!

What I find weird is that in certain anime and/or dubbed films the audio does not match up with the subs sometimes.  They will be similar phrases, but often different words are used, or the word order is changed a bit.  Kind of odd if the subs are coming from someone transcribing directly from the dubs. 

For an example even from professional houses, watch the subtitles on something that's been captioned live, followed by the subtitles on a deluxe DVD edition of a prestige film. Ideally, captioning will have a nuance and understanding of the material that your general schmuck in a pair of headphones won't be bringing to every job; and captioning multiple DVD tracks on a box set with no technical knowledge, ignorance of the specific production, or even visual cues as to the speaker - not to mention multiple speakers in most cases - is actually going to be pretty complicated.

That's usually to get the gist of the speech across in a shorter or differently-constructed sentence, that the average viewer has time to read and process in the short time that the character is speaking.

I'm fairly positive that subtitles are NOT done from the dubbed dialogue, in most cases.

The difference comes from when the script has to be altered slightly in order for the dubbed voice actors to match the mouth animation. When the subtitling script is taken from the dub script, it's derisively known as "dubtitling".

(Back in the early 90s, this was a major point of contention in the sub vs. dub flame wars.)

I'm fairly certain THEY ARE as I spent three years working in subtitling for a company who do most of the cinematic subtitling in the UK. You can use scripts if they are available but most of the time they're innaccurate and, as Chris mentioned, we measly humans can only read so many words per second, so in fast-talking back-and-forths, dialogue gets edited down. I'll not start boring everybody with Characters Per Minute and the like, but it's a lot more complicated than it looks and we had specially designed software. Without that kind of thing, it'd be a nightmare.

I rented CITY OF LOST CHILDREN once and the French subtitles were a translation of the English subtitles.

My company does a lot of subtitling of commercials, and let me tell you the operators who do it well get paid a pretty high wage for their expertise.

I believe for out stuff they work from the final cut, with the assistance of the shooting script if it's available. There's a lot of skill in getting the core of the message across and knowing what you can leave out for space reasons. There's also the issue of which SFX need to be indicated in the subtitles.

I sit corrected.  I was under the impression subtitlers could use a different translation, because they didn't need to worry about lip flaps.  And I know that in some of the DVDs in my collection, the two aren't even close.

Suburban families coming into town on your, but not everybody's, day off, on the list.  There's only so much room on the sidewalk even when half of it is not covered in snow; you don't walk with everyone side-to-side, especially if you insist on crawling along at a snail's pace.  Oh, and I suspect you're mostly the same douchebag drivers who don't understand that, when you're turning, the pedestrians walking with the light have the right of way.

Justin Proctor
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<-And I know that in some of the DVDs in my collection, the two aren't even close.->

You have to remember, even setting aside the length and lip-sync issues, translation is always an art, not a 1-to-1 science.  Especially the further the languages are apart from one another.

Amazon's recommendations system, on the fuding list!

It always seems a bit blinkered, favouring recent purchases (which may just be a gift or something) over history.

Example: I just got a front page recommendation of a book on Bladerunner by Will Brooker, which makes sense as I've bought lots of Philip K. Dick and PKD criticism and a few books by Brooker through Amazon in the past. The book came out in 2006. Why wasn't I recommended it at the time of release?

I wish there was some way where I could have alert me for books on certain subjects, like PKD or superhero comics become available. it's always mildly annoying when I find out about such books years after the fact.

Probably because they put a great deal of weight into "customers who by X also by Y" in their analysis.  So, a newly released title that is somewhat obscure is not going to be recommended until enough orders come in from those who also bought Phillip K. Dick books.  If Amazon just relied on tags submitted by the publisher, then pretty much every small press book would tag to a best selling novelist in hopes of getting recommended (e.g. every sci-fi book would tag PKD).

Dear co-workers - I, personally, do not set the mileage reimbursement rate.  We use the guidelines set out by the IRS.  If they have decided that reimbursement is five cents less this year than it was last year, don't blame me.  Honestly, I don't care.

on the list: husband's siblings and their families...

i'm tired of traveling to see y'all in the summers.  more than that, i'm sick of your unwillingness to consider our suggestions about where we gather.  you are selfish, and i would rather spend our money/time/efforts visiting friends, who, you know? we actually like.

Funny, we must be married to the same man!  Last year we detoured via northern Indiana to pick up a neice and nephew to take to the in-laws place in northern Minnesota with us because my s-i-l and her hubby were 'really busy' and then later on in the summer she posted photos on Facebook of their family trip to Florida!  Must be nice. 

Move2Mac for being a buggy piece of shit: ON THE LIST.

When I woke up this morning, I wanted to surprise TAW by migrating her important docs, music and photos from her POS Dell to the newshiny Macbook Pro. Several hours and MANY GODDAMN PROGRAM CRASHES LATER, I am wishing there were some way to violently and painfully murder a computer program that has wasted both my time and my money (that's right! I PAID FOR THIS FUCKING THING.) and just brute-force the file transfer myself.

Being ill. Sitting in this crappy chair all day is uncomfortable enough WITHOUT my eyes and nose streaming constantly, thanks.

Ouch, sorry to hear that, my wife got laid off on monday just as she was coming down with the flu and got the double whammy of getting the news of being laid off due to lack of work at the company and being hellaciously sick. I felt like I was sleeping next to a furnace the other night, her fever was so bad.

Thankfully it hasn't moved into her lungs.

It would have been nice if they had laid her off BEFORE she got the flu from her fellow employees.

Ah shit that's way worse than my problems, sorry to hear it.

Influenza...is already on the other list, right?