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Subtitles: SRT or ASS? Let your CAT tool decide!

Written on December 8, 2015 – 11:19 pm | by Emily Taylor

There are two subtitle file types out there battling it out: SubRip Text, SRT, and Sub Station Alpha, ASS. (Yes, that is actually the abbreviation. Don’t feel bad about laughing about it – even I still do sometimes.) I joined a fansubbing group a few months before I enrolled in MIIS, and my job consisted of receiving pre-timed ASS files and opening them with the subtitling program Aegisub to translate dialogue from Japanese to English. When I finished the translation, I would save the ASS file and send it back to the group’s manager, who would have the English hard-subtitled onto the video. Essentially, I did very little of the technical work.

When it came time to do a group project for my first semester CAT course, I decided it was time to delve more into the technical aspect of this subtitling business. My group decided to subtitle a portion of an episode of an old, campy Japanese TV show called Fireman. We would use Trados to coordinate the project.

My first choice, whether to subtitle using SRT or ASS, wasn’t really a choice at all – of course I would use ASS, as it was what I was used to and I already had a pre-timed file from the fansubbing group (plus, as mentioned previously, the file abbreviation makes me smile).

This turned out to be a mistake.

Here’s how we went about it: the native Japanese speaker in our group typed out a transcript into a Word document. I divvied up the Word document into five parts, one for each team member to translate, and imported them into Trados. I created a project package for translation for each part and sent them out. My group members translated their parts in Trados and sent me the return packages, and then I had a complete translation. Editing and proofreading were carried out similarly, using project packages.

Then the real trouble began. Because I was using an ASS file, I had the additional step of exporting the translation as a Word document and then manually typing everything into the ASS file through Aegisub. And that’s not all. Because Trados had imported the Japanese text sentence by sentence, as it is supposed to do, the translations were also sentence by sentence. That’s a problem for subtitles, as they need to be broken up into readable chunks. I had to review the video and divide them into phrases, which occasionally meant rewording some of the translations. Ouch! And the final nail in the ASS coffin for me was proofreading. Although we had a proofreading step in our project to keep the subtitles at a reasonable length, because we had translated sentence by sentence, the translations didn’t represent the final subtitle lengths. I had to perform proofreading all over again after creating the subtitles. What a nightmare of inefficiency!

Lesson learned: Unless you’re working by yourself on a one-off project, don’t use ASS. Use SRT.

Why? The SRT format is compatible with Trados.

What does that mean?

You can create the SRT subtitle file first, and then import it directly into Trados. Here’s what that would look like, using the opening theme song of our TV show as an example:

 

Notice how each line is divided according to subtitles, not sentence by sentence!

This way, each line in the translation is also a subtitle, meaning that checking the character counts with Trados’s QA function becomes meaningful again. It also allows you to export the translation as an SRT file, meaning that once TEP is done, you just export the file and you’re finished! No additional conversion steps needed.

Here’s a question you might be asking. Sure, we were lucky to have a native speaker transcribe the dialogue for us. But what about when you lack the resources (or time) for that, and want to leave interpreting the dialogue to your translation team? Here’s an easy solution:

Make the SRT file and use numbers as placeholders instead of entering the actual dialogue. Then your translator(s) simply listen to the video and enter the English for each line as they work. Once it’s exported, you still have a completed SRT file.

 

Does this defeat the point of using Trados since you won’t be building a translation memory? Not at all!

Trados is much more than translation memory. Consider the aforementioned QA check that allows you to check character count limits with a single click. Another important feature is the terminology base you can include. This is crucial to use if you are translating with a team, or even if you plan on translating more than one episode, as it allows you to stay consistent.

For example, in our case, we needed to keep the character names consistent. In Japanese, characters can be referred to by first or last name, and various honorifics can be added to the names depending on the relationship between the characters. However, to make the show more accessible for an English-speaking audience, we needed to choose one name for each character and use it consistently. We used a term base for that.

And finally, when coordinating a project like this, being able to send and receive project packages through Trados will save you a lot of time and effort. It’s so easy to divide up the work that way and make sure everything is integrated seamlessly into the final product.

Moral of the story: if you’re adding subtitles as a team effort, don’t be an ASS – use SRT!