Making Subtitles Is Nasty
I was saying I had volunteered to help with a translation and it seems that I only finished with that today. At first I had simply translated the ten-minute “slice” I had volunteered for, without even using proper Romanian characters, since my brain just ignores those and replaces them with the standard letters they’re similar to, so I had to go through it all again several times to add those where needed after being told I should do that. Then there was the matter of adding the timestamps as well, since the guy coordinating this effort said the translation itself is more important and he could ask for other volunteers to do that part but it’d be a whole lot better if the actual subtitles would be done along with the translation. And then, once that was done and he looked over what I did, I also ended up looking over the “slice” he had done, since he said it seems a better idea if I check his instead of the other way around.
Well, I did that as well, made a number of changes, sent it back to him and didn’t get any reply in about a week… Until immediately after I said the matter was probably all settled by then and deleted the files, only to get a message from him some five minutes later saying he tried but there can’t seem to be any more willing volunteers and it’d be a pity to throw it all aside and waste the effort we made so far, so if I could please do another ten minutes and he’ll do the last part.
That was Tuesday night, so I did the translation itself on Wednesday and then yesterday and today went through it again to add the timestamps and also as many of those annoying Romanian characters as possible. Tried to use them as I was translating, but that only made that take a few times longer than it should have taken and, based on how many corrections I had to make later, I think I barely got a little more than half of them put in the right places, and there’s of course a pretty high chance that some were still missing when I sent the file. Doing that just about broke my brain even more than it usually is anyway.
Now I do have some experience with such translations from the interviews dad was asking me to help him with now and then, and now the sound quality was mostly better and in a few cases the images also helped, but there were still a few places where I simply couldn’t make out what was being said and a few others where I’m not entirely sure what was meant, since certain words in English may mean different things in Romanian. What’s worse is that, if in case of the translations I was doing for dad it didn’t exactly matter if there were some question marks here and there, since he generally knew what it was about and could fill in names or specialized terms and pick the correct meaning when I was uncertain, here I doubt there will be someone to do that accurately, so I’m feeling pretty bad about everything I couldn’t quite figure out…
But I guess it at least counts as doing something, and also as finally living up to the fact that I did state I was willing to help out with English translations when I filled a form during a protest, yet so far had never offered. Whether I’d do it again, I’m not sure, but right now I’m just going to have a shower and then crawl in bed… Perhaps surprisingly for some, getting something done when you don’t feel like doing anything, for the same reasons you haven’t felt like doing anything for the past more than nine years, doesn’t make me feel better at all.
