Unofficial Translation of
Final Fantasy VII Advent Children

Translation by Nathan Mallory (contact)
Completed on 10 / 18 / 2005
 

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Purposes:

Learning any language is a tricky process, but practice always helps. That was the main purpose behind my decision to produce my own translation of Advent Children despite a marginally accurate fan translation already available, and the official release in the next two months. I majored in East Asian Studies as an undergraduate, and despite decent Japanese language skills from coursework and a one year study abroad, it never reached the level of fluency I would like. In the years since I returned from Japan, my exposure to the language has slowly decreased, a formula for atrophy unless some effort is made. By taking advantage of my love of videogames to translate the games and movies that interested me, I killed two birds with one stone, enjoying the games and, with luck, improving my Japanese.

Another purpose was to improve my skills at Japanese to English localization, quite a different beast from rote translation. As anyone who has attempted a fansub or even noticed the difference between what a character literally says in a foreign language and what appears at the bottom of the screen can attest, there is a finesse to accurately preserving the meaning behind the words and tone of the original language, while fluently expressing the same in English. Japanese and English are two particularly different languages and where one has depth, the other may have very little. In Japanese, there are at least six different ways to refer to oneself. Each has the same literal meaning, but conveys something slightly different about the speaker. English has very few ways other than “I” or “me”, but then often has more ways of expressing what “I” am doing than Japanese. The trick for a localizer is to comprehend the full meaning of what is being conveyed in the original, then step back from it and ask, “How would the same be said by this person in English?” I see the process as a spectrum. On one end, the absolutely literal translation expresses the translated version of each word and phrase of the original, with only a little change for grammatical correctness. This may be culturally jarring to speakers of the target language, and indeed may actually lose some of the meaning by not conveying the tone and context. On the other end is the pure localization, which may sacrifice all the words and grammatical structure of the original in the attempt to convey the meaning, regardless of its resemblance to what the speaker originally said. In a professional context, the latter is more common than the former (which is generally regarded as poor localization), but is only available when all references to the original language, such as mouth movements and body language, can be redone to suit the localization. Most of the time, a work on the translation/localization spectrum falls somewhere in between. In the case of this project, I had the freedom of reworkable subtitles to allow me to localize the translation with more freedom than a similar translation of a videogame (where the script cannot be tinkered with, and the player is often using the translation as a guide rather than a true translation, integrated into the presentation). As a result, careful scrutiny, even by someone without knowledge of Japanese, will reveal a skew to localization. One character will say something and another will repeated it as a question, yet the subtitling will be different. Whether it conveys the true meaning of the scene better than a more literal translation is a matter of opinion, but it stems from the localizer’s role of looking at more than just the rote meaning of the words.

A third and more corollary purpose was to refresh my technical abilities regarding DVDs and video editing. Over the course of the project, I extracted the original movie from the disc, extracted the subtitles, converted my translation from a Microsoft Word document into a subtitle file that could be applied in place of the original subtitles, and assembled it all into a disc that was then burned a dual layer DVD+R. The result was a 100% intact version of the movie, including unaltered video and surround sound, with the option of either (my) English or (the original) Japanese subtitles, although the menu system of the original disc was scrapped for simplicity. In addition, since some of the people who would view the product were not intimately familiar enough with the story of Final Fantasy VII to fully enjoy the movie, I also extracted the Reminiscence of Final Fantasy VII story digest. For brevity’s sake I matched the dialogue in the digest its corresponding English from a script, translating missing parts as necessary. Using Adobe After Effects, I overlaid a new background onto the video’s dialogue boxes and inserted my own text, resulting in a poor man’s translation of the video. My sympathy goes out to the Square-Enix employee that has to locate and record each of those segments in an English version of the game for the official release. The final video was then converted into an SVCD, viewable on any DVD player as necessary before showing the actual movie.

Finally, the project was also a lot of fun. It provided a real sense of accomplishment and was rather reassuring as far as my Japanese skills. Seeing the final version was very gratifying, and unlike previous translation projects on videogames, produced a tangible result beyond a website or text document that could be appreciated as well as the official version (though I dare say they’ll have a better rendering of “zuruzuru zuruzuru”, for a variety of reasons).
 

Methods:

My translation process for this project was designed to maximize the practice writing and reading Japanese, and little consideration was given to speed. The first thing I did was watch the movie entirely. For a movie this seems simple, but if the subject is a videogame it may not seem so obvious. Doing this allowed me to gain a basic understanding of the plot and better anticipate any instances of foreshadowing and references to later events (and this movie featured plenty of both).

The second step, the beginning of the actual translation, was to go back and a small segment of the film, usually five minutes or so in length, with the subtitles turned on. This was to be the focus of my translation. After watching the scene(s) as a segment, I went back and halted at each subtitle, writing down each line as a script by hand, and attempting furigana for unknown kanji. This slow process of translation gave me not only more opportunity to actually write Japanese again, but also more time to formulate a proper localization.

Once the entire segment had been transcribed, I proceeded to my PC, where I retyped the Japanese text into Word. This time, however, I translated each line as I went. Where easy localization presented itself, I took advantage, but in cases where of convoluted dialogue and odd vocabulary, I often left the translation more literal than not. At the conclusion of each segment, I would review and localize the English version, frequently returning to previous segments to retool phrases where necessary. An example of this would be Kadaj’s initial use of “shinentai” in his conversation with Rufus. Without a better clue of exactly what the “shinentai” represented, I put a very literal translation in place, ultimately returning to my final choice for localization – “remnant”. It was more than ¾ of the way through the project before I finally settled on that translation.
 

Conclusions:

The entire project took just under one month to complete, taken at a fairly leisurely pace given the constraints of school, about a week of which was spent tweaking the script and learning the DVD utilities.  Three to four days was taken out part-way through translate the Reminiscence of FFVII story digest.

In trying to improve my Japanese skills foremost, much of the localization and DVD creation process was unnecessary. A great deal more time was spent puzzling over a coherent English rendition than simply absorbing the written and spoken Japanese. In the future, especially if the subject is a lengthy game rather than a 90 minute film, I might do well to attempt a project that produces no tangible product, focusing instead on comprehending it better simply in the native Japanese. That would free up more time to study new kanji and vocabulary.

As far as localization goes, several changes from previous project were very helpful. Taking in the entire subject first, rather than translating from start to finish, made a huge difference when the actual translation began. Arguably from the perspective of a consumer this method spoils some of the surprise, but as my language skills improve so will my comprehension on the initial run through. Also, the tendency to mistranslate (sometimes as a result of uncertainty and sometimes intentional garden path-leading by the creators) that arises when translating “on-the-fly” ultimately outweighs whatever gets “spoiled” by a lack of initial comprehension. It may prove unwieldy in game localization, however, where time constraints are just as great, but games extend much longer. I am curious how the professionals do it.

I would like to try this same method with a game, to gauge whether it proceeds too slowly. If so, in the future I may need to decide beforehand whether to focus on localization skills or language skills (ultimately, hopefully, needing the language skills improvement less and less).
 

Build Your Own DVD:

The following are some instructions for how I replaced the Japanese subtitles on the original DVD with my translation. You’ll need approximately 20 GB of free hard drive space, although you can shave a little off if you delete the original .vob files after step 2 (but be sure to leave the original .ifo files!). I also recommend a DVD+R DL or DVD-R DL (that's Dual Layer), since otherwise you will have to reconvert the movie to a lower quality.  I also used Windows XP Professional SP2, though a different version may work.

For this process I used the following (completely free) utilities:

  1. Rip the original DVD to your hard drive.

    Start by opening DVD Shrink and clicking the Open Disc button at the upper left. Select the DVD-ROM drive with your disc in it and let it go. It will take a few minutes to analyze the disc before showing you its contents. Click the Re-author button, which will let you add the specific portions of the DVD you want to rip. In this case, you just want the main movie, so add it to your list by either double-clicking or drag-dropping the Main Movie title, Title 2, which should have a running time of 01:40:55 and a file size of 5,778 MB. After this is added, click the Backup! button and, keeping with the default settings, choose a directory on your hard drive and rip away.
     

  2. Split the movie.

    Once the DVD is ripped, you should have two new directories where you specified, /AUDIO_TS and /VIDEO_TS. We’ll be focusing solely on the latter.

    Now open Vobedit and select Open at the lower left. Navigate to your /VIDEO_TS directory and select the .vob file of your movie, VTS_01_1.vob. Confirming this will bring up a dialogue box asking what you want to demultiplex, or split up. Check the boxes to Demux all Video streams, Demux all Audio streams, and Demux all Subp streams. Choose a new directory for the output of this (I just tossed it into my /AUDIO_TS directory which isn’t used otherwise) and start the demux. This will split the movie into it’s video component (.m2v), audio components (.ac3), and the subtitles (.sup).
     

  3. Extract the chapter information. (Optional)

    If you want to be able to browse the chapters of the original DVD, you need to extract the cell times for the chapters from your ripped movie as well. IFOedit is a powerful program for tinkering with many aspects of a DVD, but for our purposes we will just use it to get the chapter information.

    Open IFOedit, and load the .ifo file from the /VIDEO_TS directory.  Select VTS_PGCITI in the upper part of the program, then VTS_PGC_1 which expands out from it.  Finally go to the Tools menu and select Save Cell Times.  This will save all the chapter information to a text file for later use.  Close IFOedit and move on.
     

  4. Download and convert the translation file (.srt).

    Next you need to get the file with my translation, available here. It is in a text-based format (.srt), however, and DVDs store their subtitles as bitmaps, so it needs conversion. Open Txt2Sup and click the Load Ifo button at the upper left, then load the original IFO file from your /VIDEO_TS directory, VTS_01_0.IFO. This should produce a color scheme at the top. Next click the Load Srt, Sup button, also at the upper left, and select the translation file. After you do this, a dialogue box should pop up telling you Subtitle Style Modified/Loaded Successfully. If it doesn’t, you may need to adjust the font size. Next click the Generate Sup button and Txt2sup will process the .srt file and create a Generated.sup file in the same location as the .srt.
     

  5. Recombine the movie parts with the new subtitle file.

    Finally you need to recombine the parts with the Generated.sup file and turn it back into the DVD format. Open ReJig and click the DVD Author button at the upper right. In the dialogue box that appears, select the different aspects of the movie you want to combine. For the Video, choose the VTS_01_1.m2v file that was Demuxed. For the Audio, choose each of the 3 audio tracks, VTS_01_1.80.ac3, VTS_01_1.81.ac3, and VTS_01_1.82.ac3. Be sure to change the audio language to Japanese on the left. For the Subpicture, choose the Generated.sup file that was created by Txt2sup. If you extracted the chapter information, you need to include that in the Scene changes / Chapters section, so load the .txt file there. Also, if you are in the United States, be sure to change PAL to NTSC (unless you are in Europe). For the Copy Subtitle Colours – Original IFO section, choose the IFO file from your /VIDEO_TS directory, VTS_01_0.IFO, which will load your subtitle color scheme. Select another new directory for the Output Stream, and press Create.

    This will recombine all the parts and create new /VIDEO_TS and /AUDIO_TS directories. If ReJig happens to crash (as it did the first time with me), make sure you haven’t run out of hard disk space!
     

  6. Set the subtitles on by default. (Optional)

    Since your DVD will not have the menus of the original, navigating to turn on the subtitles, depending on the DVD player, can be tricky. Therefore you may find it easier to turn them on by default (you can always turn them off).

    Open PGCEdit, click open and select the new /VIDEO_TS directory.  After it is loaded, right-click on the pre-commands line in the PGC Command Table and choose to Add After.  It will add a NOP (No OPeration) command in the pre-commands section.  Double-click that command to bring up a dialogue box where you can choose the command.  You want the Alphabetically menu, out of which choose the SetSTN command.  This lets you set the default sub-picture (currently set to "No change").  Change the sub-picture to "set to" and the first available sub-picture (SubPic 0) should already be chosen.  Clicking OK should take you back to the main PGCedit, where your NOP command should now read "(SetSTN) Set Sub-picture stream = 1, on".  Click Save for your project and exit out.
     

  7. Burn the results to a DVD.

    Although many programs will suffice for this step, I used ImgSrc Burn, which uses the Nero Burning Rom engine to burn the new /VIDEO_TS directory with all the proper DVD settings.

Acknowledgements

Small though the project was, I would be lying to say it came without any help.  These are a few of the sites and people without whom things would not have gone nearly as smoothly:

. unofficial translation of final fantasy vii advent children .
english translation © 2005 nathan mallory. all rights reserved
final fantasy and all related material © 2005 square-enix co., ltd.
original graphics and html by nbm