editing Japanese subtitles

[marukomu]

I have a poor quality avi file with English subtitles. I also have the retail DVD without subtitles. It has Japanese subtitles only.
I want to edit the Japanese using my English translation. How can I do it?

If I can't edit them, can I rip the Japanese subtitles and manually change them. I know that kanji is difficult to rip, but is it possible to make an .srt file of complete gibberish. This would be ok as long as the timing was there, and all I would have to do is edit the text.

Any one done this before?

[manono]

Hi-

Is there anything wrong with the subs that come with the AVI? If not, convert them to SUP (using SRT2SUP, for example), demux the DVD using PGCDemux, replace the Japanese subs with the English language ones, reauthor with Muxman, and replace the old DVD with the Japanese subs with the new DVD with English subs, using the Replace button in VobBlanker. If the timing of the English subs is a little off, fix it in DVDSubEdit after you're done. That's one way to do it, if the English subs are OK.

[marukomu]

the avi subs are hardsubbed. Is that a problem?

[manono]

Hehe, well, it's a problem only if you try and do what I suggested. I figured you had them in SRT or maybe IDX/SUB format.

I've never done quite what you're trying to do, but I think I'd try and OCR them using SubRip to get the timings, as you want to do, and replace all the Japanese characters with periods or some such easy-to-type character. After a whole lot of ......... typing, you should have an SRT format subtitle of the movie, filled with periods. Then you can then replace the periods with your translation.

[marukomu]

that sounds like a good idea Stanley. I'll give it a try over the weekend and see what happens/
Thank you very much for your replies.

[marukomu]

Just a thought. I also have similar avi files and DVDs with no subtitles at all. Can I create an SRT from scratch?

[manono]

Sure, you can do whatever you want. When I create subs I use SubStation Alpha, which creates them in SSA format. You get the timings by creating an 8 bit mono WAV file of the audio which it can use. When done, if you really need them in SRT format, they're easy enough to convert.

Others use Subtitle Workshop for this sort of thing.

Edit: Meant to say Subtitle Workshop, instead of Subtitle Creator

[marukomu]

Thank you. You're a star.

[marukomu]

It's looking good with one of the disks I'm doing, but taking a long time.

Another disk I tried gave me a problem. It stopped at 81%. I also tried again from the HDD. I think maybe too many characters as a lot of the kanji are recognised as 5 or 6 characters.
Originally I tried to use the same matrix from the first film, but I got an error saying the matrix was full. I started again and made a new matrix, but like I said, it stops at 81%.

[manono]

Since I don't do exactly what you're doing, then I haven't run across your problem before. In English, you'll usually have, at most, 104 characters to type, small and cap regular letters, and small and cap italics. Maybe plus a few other odd characters, and maybe a few more if there's something slightly different between 2 letters. I guess Japanese has a ton of those things. I think what I'd do is to reconfigure the options (Options->Advanced OCR Setup) to allow for much wider characters, instead of the default settings, which are configured for European type alphabets. Maybe that way you won't have to type something multiple times for each character.