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To learn more about our privacy policy Click hereJapanese is a language spoken by about 128 million people, primarily in Japan but increasingly across the world. With the spread of Japanese culture across the globe Japanese subtitling and captioning for video content are bound to have a big impact in the future.
According to Google, around 10 to 100 million people look up for anime every month. Anime series like Naruto and Attack on Titan are liked all over the world. Also, Japanese films have had a noteworthy influence on Western movie attitude. Japanese movies like Seven Samurai, Tokyo Story, and Spirited Away are considered some of the masterpieces and influential pieces to come out of the Japanese movie industry.
Japanese is often painstaking to learn for non-natives. First, there are the feared three systems of writing - the 2 kanas (Katakana and Hiragana), and traditional Chinese (Kanji). The Katakana and Hiragana are sound based scripts used in day to day communication. Katakana is the basis for neologism (borrowed words). Modern Japanese is written with a combination of all the three scripts (sometimes the boundary is unclear) and to makes matters more confusing written sentences are written often with limited use of Latin alphabets (this is known as “rÅmaji†in Japanese). A subtitle is a convoluted combination of these four writing systems.
Also in terms of digitalized written text, Japanese typescripts are double the wide as normal alphabetic fonts. These are termed as double-byte fonts. To solve the issue Japanese subtitles must be encoded in UTF-8, UTF-16, or Shift-JIS or such that the digital subtitles remain accessible during the video viewing. Sometimes full-stops, commas, and punctuation marks need to be encoded into subtitles. All of these are the necessary component of digitally subtitled Japanese.
when the translator translates subtitles from Japanese to English or vice versa, one has to pay cautious care to cultural colloquialism, contexts, lingo, and vernaculars behind each translation. The article titled “Why English Subtitles Are Not Accurate†published in japaneselevelup.com highlights several reasons on how subtitles and translation of subtitles miss out on transferring the contexts, connotations, and colloquialism from Japanese into other languages. Thus, the primary and the logical thing to consider during the course of subtitling and translating are to hire online Japanese subtitling services.