Transcription Project

[markhavemann]

Project Description

 

Project Home Page: https://sinodex.online/projects/transcription-project

 

Spoiler

I find it a constant frustration that there are basically no transcriptions available for Chinese TV shows, so I have decided to start my own transcription project. Once enough episodes have been added to a particular series I will generate statistics for them (word occurrences per episode/series, HSK level and anything else I can think to add) which will appear in the same folder on the Google drive as the transcripts. 

 

There is a service that will type up one episode for around 30rmb (or 5 USD). If you would like to contribute even a single episode to the project, by paying for it (or if you already have it) you can contact me directly. I will be paying for a few episodes every month myself depending on my own finances. EDIT: Recently I have gotten this down a bit and you are looking at around 20rmb for a 40/50 minute episode and probably half that for a 20 minute episode)

 

EDIT: iq.com seems to be iQiyi's international version. Shows here have soft subs. If you find a show that you want subs downloaded for, let me know and I will see what I can do. This goes for shows in NETFLIX too. 

 

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome too! 

 

Download Link

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w2BPsbMmuruTONmr4xy6s1CwG7IJ5CTd?usp=sharing

 

What to do with transcripts/subs and how to use them as learning tool.

Spoiler

See this discussion on how to use transcripts to study.

 

Edit April 2023: I'm starting to make vocabulary decks and other useful things to use along with these. You can find links to everything below the list of transcripts in this post.

 

Edit Feb 2021: Have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbg6ztWecbU and MPVacious for easily creating audio/video flashcards from videos with subtitles.

 

and this thread about studying entire movies/episodes with subs2srs.

 

Legend:

???? Difficulty - green shows you can try to start watching at around HSK 3-4, yellow maybe around HSK 5-6

⭐⭐⭐ My own rating – shows that I found enjoyable or useful for learning. More stars is better

 

Chinese Name	English Name	Year	Episodes	Complete	Subs	English Subs	Text Transcripts	Links	Vocab & Study Companions	Difficulty
三体 S1 (Tencent Version)	The Three Body Problem S1	2023	30	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️
漫长的季节	The Long Season	2023	12	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️
狂飙 ⭐⭐	The Knockout	2023	39	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️	iqiyi		?
暗夜行者 ⭐	Day Breaker	2022	24	✅	✔️		❌	iq.com
谁是凶手 ⭐	Who is The Murderer	2021	16	✅	✔️		❌	iq.com  iqiyi		?
华灯初上 S1-3 ⭐⭐⭐	Light The Night	2021	8, 8, 8	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️	(Netflix)		?
赘婿 ⭐⭐	My Heroic Husband	2021	30	✅	✔️		✔️	iq.com		?
谁是被害者	The Victim’s Game	2020	8	✅	✔️		✔️	(Netflix)
以家人之名	Go Ahead	2020	40	✅	✔️		❌	MangoTV iq.com
预支未来 S1 ⭐⭐	Futmalls S1	2020	8	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️			?
鬓边不是海棠红	Winter Begonia	2020	49	✅	✔️		✔️	iq.com
返校 ⭐⭐	Detention	2020	8	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️	(Netflix)		?
沉默的真相 ⭐⭐	The Long Night	2020	12	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️	iq.com iqiyi.com		?
隐秘的角落 ⭐⭐⭐	The Bad Kids	2020	12	✅	✔️		✔️	iq.com iQiyi	✔️	?
想见你 ⭐⭐⭐	Someday or One Day	2019	13	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️			?
独家记忆	Somewhere Only We Know	2019	24	✅	✔️	✔️	❌	iq.com
都挺好 ⭐⭐	All Is Well	2019	46	✅			✔️			?
伍六七 ⭐⭐⭐	Scissor Seven S1,S2,S3	2018	14, 10,  10	✅	✔️	✔️	✔️	(Netflix)		? ?
延禧攻略 ⭐⭐	Story of Yanxi Palace	2018	70	✅	✔️		✔️			?
河神 S1	Tientsin	2017	24	✅	✔️	✔️
鬼吹灯之精绝古城	Candle in the Tomb	2016	01-11				✔️	Watching With Transcripts
北京爱情故事 ⭐⭐	Beijing Love Story	2012	39	✅			✔️	Thanks to Flickserve for contributing this series.		?
爱情公寓 S2 ⭐	iPartment	S1; 2009 S2: 2011	01, 03, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20				✔️			?
三国	Three Kingdoms	2010	E01				✔️
爱情公寓 S1 ⭐	iPartment	S1; 2009 S2: 2011	1-19				✔️			?
潜伏	Lurk	2009	39	✅			✔️	Youtube Youku
奋斗	Struggle	2007	E01-06、E24				✔️
武林外传	My Own Swordsman	2006	80 (missing episode 78)	✅			✔️	Youtube
士兵突擊	Soldiers Sortie	2006	30	✅	✔️			Youtube 1st Ep. Project
家有儿女 ⭐⭐⭐	Home with Kids	2005	S01E01-E23, S01E56				✔️		View	?
我爱我家	I Love My Family	1993	120	✅			✔️	Youtube First Episode Project Page
红楼梦	The Dream Of Red Mansions	1987	36	✅	✔️		✔️			?

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Other Shows (Chinese dub with subtitles/transcripts matching audio 95+%)

Spoiler

Chinese Name	English Name	Year	Episodes	Complete	Subs	English Subs	Text Transcripts	Links
我的英雄学院S1 (Netflix)	My Hero Academia S1		13	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	Netflix
我的英雄学院S2 (Netflix)	My Hero Academia S2		25	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	Netflix
我的英雄学院S3 (Netflix)	My Hero Academia S3		25	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌	Netflix
我的英雄学院S4 (Netflix)	My Hero Academia S4		27		✔️	✔️	❌	Netflix

 

 

 

Vocab Lists, Anki decks, and Study Companions

• 家有儿女
• The Bad Kids 隐秘的角落 - Vocab.xlsx - to be moved to its own thread.

 

 

The Bad Kids 隐秘的角落 - Vocab.xlsx

[vellocet]

 家有儿女 Ep. 1-10 

01.doc

02.doc

03.doc

04.doc

05.doc

06.doc

07.doc

08.doc

09.doc

10.doc

[edelweis]

12 hours ago, markhavemann said:

I find it a constant frustration that there are basically no transcriptions available for Chinese TV series, so I have decided to start my own transcription project.

 

But what do you use those transcriptions for?

[markhavemann]

Thanks vellocet, those are great! 

 

 

edelweis, that's a good question. I basically want them for 2 different reasons: 

 

Firstly:

Reading along while watching/listening is, for me, one of the best and most enjoyable ways of learning. Hard coded subs are fine but kind of annoying if you don't know the word, especially if you aren't really sure of the pronunciation (you aren't familiar with the character and they were speaking really fast). Having transcripts is really useful for copying and pasting the word. You could even get really creative and make an HTML document and use something like "Zhongwen Popup Chinese Dictionary" on Chrome to look things up automatically when click them. 

 

Secondly:

Being able to generate statistics about episodes/series/books is really useful for me. I've made a set of tools to analyze this stuff and generate info for me so that I can make good decisions about what words to learn or preview before approaching an episode/series/book.

 

Below I've attached a really simple one that shows all the unique words (I can see there are 561) that occur in 家有儿女 S01E56 (the transcript itself will follow soon). Next to each word is the number of times that it occurs in the episode as well as the HSK level (if it has one). 

 

You can probably get creative with Excel and filtering and sorting to make this even more useful. You can imagine that if we had an entire series of transcripts then this could be much more informative. 

 

 

 

家有儿女S01E56.xlsx

[markhavemann]

Here is a folder on Google Drive with full statistics for 家有儿女 S01 E01-10 along with the transcripts that vellocet provided. There maybe be a few mistakes in the statistics because of the way that I'm breaking up words but as I go through it myself this should be corrected and it's probably at least 90% accurate right now anyway.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w2BPsbMmuruTONmr4xy6s1CwG7IJ5CTd?usp=sharing

[david387]

If I wanted to fund a show of my own choosing, would you be open to telling me how to reach out to this service. I like your strategy!

[markhavemann]

Of course. It's a store on Taobao:

 

【靡尚网拍摄影旗舰店】，復·制这段描述￥yqGDbLNbAjz￥后咑閞手机淘宝或者用浏览器咑閞https://m.tb.cn/h.3qtPhk7?sm=9ce409查看

 

(In case you aren't sure: just copy that link on your phone and open Taobao, it should detect it and ask if you want to visit the store.)

 

But just to explain the process: 

 

Because (I imagine) actually transcribing from the episode would be much more expensive since, even with subtitles, it's a lot more labour intensive with playing and pausing the video all the time, I extract the subtitles as images and make them into a PDF document which I send for them to "录入". Basically the process is: 

 

1. VideoSubFinder to extract the subs as images. https://sourceforge.net/projects/videosubfinder/

2. Powershell script and ImageMagick to crop out the white space. 

3. Python script to join them up into A4 sized images. 

4. Adobe Acrobat to turn the images into a PDF file. 

 

PM me and I'll send you the scripts. 

 

I realise that not everybody may be inclined to go through all of that so I'd be happy to do it for you if you tell me what series you want. I've got the process kind of streamlined but I want to automate it even further.

 

Also, if you are not based in China or can't use Taobao for whatever reason I'd be happy to facilitate that too if you reimburse me over WeChat/Paypal. 

 

Since I would like transcripts for almost any show, I'm happy to put in a bit of work to make it happen. 

 

 

 

[Flickserve]

@markhavemann

 

I had a quick look at the excel file on frequencies of characters. Thanks for that. It was pretty interesting to note that I know most of the words. However, when it comes to actually listening, I can’t really understand very much due to speed of delivery and unfamiliarity.

 

Another series with partial subs on this forum is 奋斗. From memory, it goes up to about the 5th episode. 

 

 

Are you based in China?

[markhavemann]

Yes I am based in China. 

 

Thanks for pointing out the 奋斗 transcripts, I've found a few which I'll add to the project. 

 

I'm glad you found the word frequencies interesting. I've also found that "knowing" words and actually following them in sentences can be two completely different things. Recently I've tried to make my studying a little more sentence focused. When I find a sentence that I know all the words in but actually don't understand in context, I try to extract a clip of it which I put on my phone. Now I have a little library of sentences that I shuffle through whenever I'm on the bus or have some time to kill. (I'm trying to automate the extraction process too and having transcripts should make that a little easier.) I've found this really helps and also gives me some patterns to call on when I'm talking myself, I think that Glossika may be based on this principle but I much prefer to have sentences that I've chosen for myself and find interesting. 

[Flickserve]

2 hours ago, markhavemann said:

When I find a sentence that I know all the words in but actually don't understand in context, I try to extract a clip of it which I put on my phone. Now I have a little library of sentences that I shuffle through whenever I'm on the bus or have some time to kill. (I'm trying to automate the extraction process too and having transcripts should make that a little easier.) I've found this really helps and also gives me some patterns to call on when I'm talking myself, I think that Glossika may be based on this principle but I much prefer to have sentences that I've chosen for myself and find interesting. 

 

You can do this with anki. I set up cards for listening (it repeats the sentence about ten times), shows me the answer and then repeats another 5 times so that I can try to shadow. Just copy the cards you want with the sentence into another anki deck which can go into your phone. Anki will do your shuffling for you. If you use iphone, anki app costs money. Instead, there is a free android version which works quite well if you have android or an old android phone around.

[milkmints]

Excited to see a project like this underway! Incidentally I ran the transcript for 奋斗 through CTA the other day and thought to myself "I wish there were more subtitles and transcripts available". 

While studying Japanese, having subtitle files helped me break into watching Japanese tv more comfortably so I'm eager to try that with Chinese

[markhavemann]

On 12/29/2018 at 1:33 AM, Flickserve said:

You can do this with anki. I set up cards for listening (it repeats the sentence about ten times), shows me the answer and then repeats another 5 times so that I can try to shadow. Just copy the cards you want with the sentence into another anki deck which can go into your phone. Anki will do your shuffling for you. If you use iphone, anki app costs money. Instead, there is a free android version which works quite well if you have android or an old android phone around.

 

Unfortunately I have an iPhone but I bought Anki a while back since I use it almost everyday. I like your idea of having the sentence repeating a bunch of times and of using Anki to do it in a structure way and I may start doing that too. 

 

The reason that I put them into the music player is so that I can use it as passive listening practice. I found that I wanted something to listen to on the bus/subway or while exercises or doing the dishes/laundry, whatever. At first I tried radio and things like extracted audio from TV shows but if I got distracted or there were words that I didn't know then it was just noise in my ears and not really learning. I decided on sentences that I'm already familiar with but are a little challenging. This way it doesn't matter if I'm not listening all the time and I (should) know all the words in the all sentences, or at least I could probably remember the source of the sentences and then remember the words if I've forgotten them.

 

This way I really only need at most a 15 second stretch of concentration to get a little practice in and it doesn't matter if something else interrupts me or distracts me because it's easy to get back on track when the next sentence starts. 

[markhavemann]

北京爱情故事

E01

 

Has been added to the project. 

[markhavemann]

爱情公寓

S01E01

 

Has been added to the project. 

[markhavemann]

鬼吹灯之精绝古城

E01

 

 

Has been added to the project. 

[markhavemann]

I've created a separate topic for 鬼吹灯之精绝古城. I'll be watching a few episodes every week and posting as I go. If anybody wants to join me please do!

 

https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/57728-watching-with-transcripts-鬼吹灯之精绝古城-candle-in-the-tomb/?tab=comments#comment-447797

[markhavemann]

鬼吹灯之精绝古城

E02

 

Has been added to the project. 

[markhavemann]

鬼吹灯之精绝古城

E02

 

Has been added to the project. 

[markhavemann]

Thanks to a post that I found by Roddy, I've gotten hold of what looks like most or all of 爱情公寓 season 1 and 2 transcripts. Once I've had a chance to go through them and process out all the extra junk I'll add them to the drive. If you want them sooner as they are, please let me know! 

[markhavemann]

红楼梦 (1987)

Full Series (36 episodes)

 

三国 (2010)

E01

 

Added to the project.

 

---------

Not sure if I will get a chance to do an episode of 鬼吹灯之精绝古城 today. Will do my best.