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Old 12-30-2015, 12:01 AM
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Scruffydog777 Scruffydog777 is offline
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That's a great idea zingy but I think it needs to be improved on quite a bit. I have a few projects that I started months ago and now that I'm back out of work for 2 months, I hope to finish up and there is one I'd like to start up and that is what you are doing here and that is promote Alizee by using French and English lyrics.

But if you look at some of the subtitles from where you got these videos, these songs don't flow smoothly at all lyric wise. I made a video of my own liking for the song Alcaline which I added both English and French subtitles, but I did it as closed captions.

When I did this video, there were very few English translations for the song and even with my limited amount of French, I could see they didn't do a very good job of it. Translating songs from French to English can be very difficult for even someone's who's fluent in both languages at least for the purpose of adding them as subtitles to a song. First there is a fact that some lines are just very difficult to translate period. But with song subtitlles, you want if possible for the English part that match up poeticly with the French words, but that's often impossible. But the main thing you want with a song is to have a story that flows smoothly and tells the original story in an easily understandable way.

Look at some of the lines from these songs you posted.

JPVA "Rather a long stay, but not (a) always (total[all]days)"

I mean holy crap Batman, even the Battranslator can't figure the English part out, when all I think it needed to be said was " A long stay, but not a forever"

There's another line that translated "If it's not for the life, so be it, then say yes."

which they should have dropped that first "life" out of that would have been "If it's not for life, so be it, then say yes", which I'm sure is what they meant but what they came up with did not flow smoothly and that's something you really need for these translations. Confusion in any one line can cause the story of the whole song to be lost.

Sometimes in my projects, I'm prepared to use poetic license I guess you call it to change the meaning a "little" bit of some lines to get that smoothness of a story, but it worked out that I didn't really have to with Alcaline. The English story flowed well and for the most part, I think it was true to the song.

So what I'd like to do is come up with good English stories for these songs that will be as true as possible to the French words, then add them as closed captions, rather than Subtitles. That way if you find out you made a mistake it's easily corrected.

Another thing I'd like to do to is add Spanish closed captions too, but I don't know an Alizee fan who speaks Spanish and is willing to do something like this.

Again look at my video below. The toughest part was to translate in the beginning that she was putting on a headset and clicking on a button to listen to music to escape the world she was in. But I think it came out as well as could be expected and smoothly tells the story.


Last edited by Scruffydog777; 12-30-2015 at 12:10 AM..
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