We had fun today learning a little Japanese! Our client Coalition asked us to add Japanese subtitles to the video we produced for them. Subtitling is always tricky, you have to give a more breathing room for people to read the copy. English is a relatively ‘quick’ language; French, for example, is around 20% longer than the same content in English. To make the Japanese subtitles work, we extended some clips to make the video longer than the English language version.
As Japanese uses non-Roman alphabet, it’s harder to match words to what’s being said than say, French or German. We always pay attention to how we split the copy on the line, so we don’t break up phrases.
Luckily, the translator reviewed the piece for us, and after we sent a versions back and forward, we had the copy properly aligned.
Need subtitles for your video? Get in touch!!
