HRWiki:Subtitles
From Homestar Runner Wiki
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Purpose
Some of us have started working on subtitling Homestar Runner Flash cartoons to make them accessible to a wider audience. Some non-native speakers sometimes need to go over the wiki transcript just to see what a word or two means. This way, it's already inside the toon window itself. Also, we could open the door for people with hearing problems who still want to experience Homestar Runner like the rest of us.
Some flash artists like Weebl from Weebl and Bob and the people behind Too Much Spare Time Animation have already added subtitles to some of their toons. Apparently, The Brothers Chaps have thought about subtitles already.
Where we stand now
We have a beta version up and running here. The subtitles are tested for the latest Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. Go check it out! Click on "watch" to watch the toon with subtitles, and click on "XML" to watch the subtitles source file.
We are in the process of changing the subtitle file format, so please do not use those XML files as examples for your own work.
How to Write Your Own
- To write your own subtitles, you need to watch the toons with a seekbar. The best way to do this is with Phlip's all-in-one Homestar script. You need to install Firefox and Greasemonkey for this.
- Then open the sample subtitle file (link will follow). The root element should look something like this:
<transcript xml:lang="en-us" width="550" height="400">
- Make sure that every value is set correctly. The language should be set to "en-us" if you make English subtitles. The width and height values must be taken from the homestarrunner.com HTML page for your toon. In Firefox, right-click on the page (not the Flash toon), and choose "View Page Source" to find the values. For most toons, this will be 550 and 400.
- Now copy the transcript from the toon into it. Go through the transcript and put each sentence on one line (or a few sentences, if they are said together).
- For each of your little chunks of transcript, use the seekbar to find the number of the frame when the chunk starts, and the number of the frame when it ends.
- Now you turn all this information into XML like this:
- Assume that Strong Bad says "I have my very own a-The Cheat!" from frame number 348 to 372. You would write it like this:
<line start="348" end="372" speaker="strongbad">I have my very own a-The Cheat!</line>
- Every line that you define like this will be displayed as one subtitle between the frames 348 and 372. The text will be red, because that is Strong Bad's color for the subtitles.
- Here is a more complicated example from cheatar:
<line start="512" end="529" >
<strongbad>Then what good are you?</strongbad>
<thecheat>The Cheat noises</thecheat>
<sfx>Pop!</sfx>
</line>
- Three things happen between frames 512 and 529, and they are all displayed as one subtitle. Strong Bad's text will be red, and the Cheat noises will be yellow. Both the sound effect "Pop!" the the cheat noises will be displayed in parentheses to show that they are not actually spoken.
- In the first example, the <line> tag has an attribute speaker="strongbad" that indicates that the whole subtitle text is spoken by Strong Bad. In the second example, this attribute is missing, and each speaker has it's own element.
- Now, how do you know that it's "strongbad" and not "Strong Bad"? These IDs are defined here. Every character has his or her (or its) own ID that you can use to indicate who is saying what. You have to use one of the IDs listed in that file. Of course, new characters will be added over time.
- In addition to these character IDs, you can also use "sfx" for sound effects such as "Preeeeow!".
How To Test Your Subtitles
- Got to our external website (or one of the mirrors listed below) and download the testing environment. To do this, right-click on the testing environment link at the top and choose "Save Link As..." (or "Save Target As.." if you use the Internet Explorer). The external server does not want us to upload .zip files, so we had to cheat. Remove the ".thisIsReal" from the file name to open it as a zip archive. Extract the archive in a directory of your choice.
- Download the Flash file that you want to create the subtitles for from homestarrunner.com, and put it in the same directory as the rest. You find the link to the Flash file at the bottom of the HRWiki article for it. Again, right-click on it to save it to your harddrive.
- The name of the Flash file is important for the next step. If the Flash file is called "sbemail42.swf", then you want to rename the sample XML subtitles file ("cheatar.english.xml") into sbemail42.english.xml
- Now open subtitles.html in your browser. You can do this by dragging the file onto the browser. No Flash file or subtitles should be displayed yet.
- In the URL address field of your browser, add ?sbemail42.english to the end of the URL, so that the URL now ends with subtitles.html?sbemail42.english. Hit enter or "Go", and Sbemail 42 will be displayed with the subtitles defined in sbemail.english.xml. If you haven't changed the subtitles yet, the Cheatar subtitles will be displayed.
- Hit reload every time you want to check your subtitles.
If you have any questions or problems, please post them on the Talk page, or ask Loafing, Phlip or Elcool on IRC.
Standards
- The subtitles should match the transcript. Don't make up words that aren't in the transcript. Fix the transcript if you find mistakes, but make sure to read the toon's Talk page before you change disputed pronounciations.
- Make sure that subtitles appear on screen long enough to be read comfortably. Always assume that your audience cannot actually hear what is being said.
- Subtitle everything that is being said. Even if, for example, Strong Bad is typing what he says.
- Don't put words in The Cheat's mouth. He only says "The Cheat noises" or "Angry The Cheat noises" etc. He does not say "meh".
- If you're super-cool, you will also make subtitles for relevant sound effects. Examples are
<sfx>The Geddup Noise</sfx> <sfx>Preeeeeow!</sfx> <sfx>chainsaw noises</sfx> <sfx>buzzing noise</sfx>
- You can put HTML formatting in the subtitles, but it is discouraged. The subtitle system will display everything in standardized, great-looking ways. Exceptions are for example when spatial layout makes it much clearer what is going on, or <em> and <strong> for emphasis.
- Do not put JavaScript in the subtitles. Never. Ever. <embed>, <object>, <img>, and <a> tags are also a no-no.
Translating Subtitles
Creating international subtitles is a great way of making the Flash toons more accessible to a wider audience. Plus, it's fun!
- Always start from the English subtitles. This saves a lot of time and work.
- Use the same start and end values for all languages.
- Translate the character names in the character file into your language.
- If your language is written from the right to the left, put dir="rtl" in the opening <transcript> tag.
List of subtitles
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