Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: subtitles in English, Chinese, and pinyin

[roddy]

Produced not by myself, but by a contributor who sent them in by email, a (and I quote) set of subtitles (English, Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks, Hanyu Pinyin without tone marks, traditional characters, and simplified characters) for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Enjoy, and if you find them any use don't forget to add a little reply of gratitude . . .

See attachment for the actual zipped files

crouching_tiger_hidden_dragon.zip

[atitarev]

Thank you, Roddy. I think I know where you got it from.

I was asked if these files can be combined into one. It is possible manually (very time consuming) as long as there no extra line between scripts, you could make Chinese, pinyin and English into one but to do it smarter, you would need to write a program or a macro. If anyone manages this, please share!

[roddy]

How is this? If it works I'll write up the process, but it's basically a bit of fancy footwork in Excel. It may also have messed up the subtitles a little bit.

Crouching_Tiger_Hidden_Dragon.PinyinHanzi.txt.zip

[atitarev]

Thanks, Roddy! Have you used concat function in Excel?

Have you tried it? I will test it when I can. Perhaps it needs a single carriage return, so that the Chinese subs appear just below the pinyin.

It's a good idea. I was thinking of combining Chinese and English subtitles for some movies (pinyin is an extra benefit). Trouble is they not always match in timing.

I think that's quite helpful for language learning. When I watched 甜蜜蜜 or 天下无贼 with dual Chinese and English subs, I found it really helpful to learn (or at least understand) new vocab or expressions. Usually this type of subs is in the image.

[roddy]

Nope, haven't tested it.

All I did was copy the two files into adjacent Excel rows, then do a bunch of search and replaces to get rid of all the timing information in the second row. Then paste both rows out into a text file, another search and replace to get rid of the tabs, and you're done. Messy, but it works - I think.

[atitarev]

I see. Thanks, Roddy. Excel can be handy, really. Textpad can also do many things with text, only to support Chinese, some changes are required. I used it to generate copy, rename DOS batch files or multiple inserts or updates in SQL. Block function is very useful - as you can select vertical portions of text and paste vertically. Did Microsoft ever think about this?

You gave me ideas with Excel, which I have just tested:

The two cells can be joined like this:

=CONCATENATE(A1," ", B1)

The above will join with a space in between.

=CONCATENATE(A1, A1&CHAR(10)&A2, B1)

The above will join with a "carriage return" (the cells should be set to "wrap text" in properties).

[roddy]

If you can figure out a way to get rid of the timing information for one file, without using the search and replaces, that would be good - the way I've done it will have lost any numbers actually in the dialogue. Excel does seem to have functions that will let you work on every Nth row, which might do the trick.

[atitarev]

I uses autofilter.

All timing rows start with a 0.

Select all rows starting with 0. Delete those cells in the 2nd column.

There are also numbers. I used a different custom filter - >0. again removed all rows with just numbers.

The result looked OK but I had to removed all tab characters as you did and pasted into word and replaced double paragraphs with a single one.

Attached is the result and the Excel spreadsheet to show what I did.

Also the picture of MS Word - replace double paragraphs.

EDIT:

I realised that the rows didn't match - Hanzi and Pinyin. Will have to do it again but I hope my quick explanation is readable.

EDIT 2:

Fixed the file. It's good to use. There was one pinyin line out of sync, which I corrected.

Crouching_Tiger_Hidden_Dragon.Hanzi-Pinyin.srt

crouching_tiger_hidden_dragon.doc

crouching_tiger_hidden_dragon - Excel demo2.xls

Edited March 29, 2010 at 10:15 PM by atitarev

[atitarev]

I fixed it today. Looks good. Thanks for advise, Roddy. I will try to make some Chinese-English mixed subtitles using Excel.

Also attached the MS Word file. Word is good for replacing double paragraphs. There should be no extra line between the number, the timing and the subtitle line. The subtitles should not have an extra line either.

Like this:

6

00:01:12,600 --> 00:01:15,700

秀莲，李慕白来啦

Xiùlián, Lǐ Mùbái lái la

7

00:01:20,400 --> 00:01:21,500

李爷

Lǐ yé

8

00:01:22,500 --> 00:01:24,100

家里好吗? 挺好的

Jiāli hǎoma? -Tǐng hǎode

[Taibei]

I've just written directions for how to combine Pinyin and Chinese character subtitles.

Getting this to work with English would be much trickier, because the Mandarin and English versions of subtitles are often made separately and thus don't correspond exactly.

See also

* How to create Hanyu Pinyin subtitles

* How to strip subtitle files down to text

Edited April 7, 2010 at 02:29 PM by Taibei
forgot this didn't like HTML

[atitarev]

Getting this to work with English would be much trickier, because the Mandarin and English versions of subtitles are often made separately and thus don't correspond exactly.

Certainly, it applies to any merger of subtitles where the 2 texts don't match, be it a translation or a different script or transliteration. We used identical Hanzi/Pinyin files for the exercise where timing and the text have the same meaning.

[andcope]

Hey there,

I was really happy to find this link and obtain the subtitles in pinyin, and simplified characters. A very useful way to practice both comprehension and learn new words. I am having one slight difficulty. I'm using the corrected version by "atitarev" in VLC on a Macbook Air. The subtitles come through just fine, but they appear about 3-4 seconds in advance of the spoken dialogue. I'm not sure if there is an easy fix to this, but if not, I still very much appreciate the work put into this project. Thanks.

[roddy]

If you have a look in the VLC options menu (no idea exactly where) there'll be an option to offset the subtitles by a certain amount of time.

[andcope]

Thanks roddy, that did the trick. I guess a little search on my part would have saved you the trouble of responding, but in this way I can thank you again for subtitles. For the record, VLC for Mac has hotkeys h and j assigned to delay or advance the subtitles. I had to advance my titles 22000ms to sync it with the dialogue. Cheers!

[綠色的外星人]

Thanks Roddy, these subtitles are great! This film is one of my all-time favourites...

As it happens, there may be a much simpler, automatic way to combine the Chinese subtitles with pinyin.

Pre-requisites

For this method to work, you'll need access to a machine with the following (very handy) Unix tools:

1. paste:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paste_(Unix

)

2. uniq:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniq_(Unix

)

As it happens, my machine is running Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/), and these tools come installed by default.

If you're running Microsoft Windows, then don't worry, you can still get the same tools as part of Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/).

Method

Once you have the tools mentioned above, then fire up a terminal and issue the following command:

paste -d "\n" Hanzi_in_UTF-8/Crouching_Tiger_Hidden_Dragon.Traditional.srt Crouching_Tiger_Hidden_Dragon.Pinyin.srt | uniq &> Crouching_Tiger_Hidden_Dragon.Traditional.Pinyin.srt

(Optionally, replace "Traditional" with "Simplified", depending on your preference.)

Results

On my system, this results in a file that looks like:

1

00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:51,500

喲! 李爺來啦

Yō! Lǐ yé lái la

2

00:00:52,200 --> 00:00:53,600

李爺來啦

Lǐ yé lái la

...

Explanation

1. the first command (paste -d "\n") takes two files and splices them together in an alternating line-by-line fashion.

2. the second command (uniq) removes all duplicate consecutive lines.

Of course, this only works because the two files are perfectly matched, having identical time codes for Chinese and Pinyin.

Hope this helps someone! Have fun

[Cher]

love , love, love this movie !

[scoopneals]

Hi,

Does anyone else find these subtitles to be completely off? They seem completely out of sync... and when you sync them at a certain point, they eventually move out of sync. They're like 3 minutes shorter than they need to be. Anyone else experience this?

[tysond]

When I've had this problem before it's because of PAL/NTSC issues.

These two video formats have different framerates and the subtitles may be syncronized with the other format. 3 minutes over a few hours sounds like the difference between 25 frames per second and 23.976 frames per second.

See http://www.paradiso-...ersion_faq.html for more info. There are tools out there that will stretch/compress the timing of the subtitles to match the video to overcome this.

[gterzian]

Actually this is a better link for the subtitles combiner:
 

http://gterzian.github.io/Subtitles-combiner/

[Renan Silvério]

Hey, guys how're you ? 
 

I'm new here, I download the subtitles, but, it shows me perfect in the movie, but not in perfect sync.

 

The subtitles are a little early than the movie's voice, do you know how I can fix it ? 

Or someone here already did it ? and have a new file to download? ^^ 

 

Thnaks,

 

R.C.S.