Spanish subs

¡Hola!

I'm Cinemassacre's Spanish translator.

Currently the whole AVGN series, the whole "You know what's bullshit" series, the first five episodes of "Board James" and some other Cinemassacre videos, such as Dragon in my Dreams and some of the video formats videos have all been subtitled.

The last video I translated was the Game Gear games review, which will have subtitles enabled shortly.

The next videos I'll do after that will be the Top 10 NES obscure gems, Contra Memories and Mike's Game Glitches.

At some point I will also try finishing Board James.

Hi there. I'm currently working on the Polish subs and I'm working with your files for help with timing. However, as with many European languages there's the problem of translating the word 'you' and selecting from either the singlular or plural forms and the verbs that follow. I've noticed that you use both ('tu' and 'vosotros') in different situations. Since you seem to be the most experienced, could you please explain your rationale for picking the right translation?

What I have been doing up until now is using plural forms whenever the Nerd is addressing the audience ("[people], don't play this game") and singular whenever the Nerd is playing a game (e.g. [player], "you have to jump", "you die" etc.), which seems logical. But sometimes the Nerd is addressing the audience as a single person ("If you're a serious Nintendo collector"), which prompted me to convert every instance of 'you' in the video into singular and treat the review as a personal confession. And sometimes, I just use my own aesthetic preference.

So I'm curious about how do you deal with this as the Spanish translator.

Generally I choose to translate it as the singular, unless it's painfully obvious that the intention is for him to address a large crowd of people.

I have two reasons for this, one is more technical and the other has to do with a feature of the language itself.

The technical reason is merely because it takes less room, which you need to use efficiently when writing subtitles. The linguistic reason has to do with the fact that I write the subtitles for an international audience and I thereby try using a register as neutral as possible. When it comes to the use of the second person plural, in Spain people use vosotros + the stem endings -ais/eis/is, whereas in Latin America people use what in Spain would be considered a formal register, with ustedes + the stem ending -en.

However, the use of the second person singular is more uniform and sounds more natural for every speaker.

Juanako, you've done a great job with these translations, congrats!

Still, i wanted to quote you and say that i (as many others, probably) dont like the fact that yoo used "vosotros". There's ALWAYS a way to avoid such words, by rephrasing what he's saying. I think this point is very important if you want to make your translation really "international". Else, we'll end up with 2 spanish versions (which is kind of pointless, but happens with many software applications). i saw in some videos that you used words like "sabéis" without using the "vosotros", that means you could've rephrased that.

I dont want to be rude, in fact i think that your translation is really good, but it's these kind of details that piss off latin-american viewers (i also do translation jobs myself on the internet and know this for a fact). i could help you out if you wanted to "fix" this in the future Im from latin-america so i could proof read your translations and make them "more international".

Regards

Yeah, I'm well aware that it's impossible to have a translation that fully satisfies everyone, but I think with time and experience I've achieved a good balance. The fact that my subscriber base on Youtube is primarily Latin American (especially Mexico) with Spain coming second leads me to believe that I'm doing things right on that front. Although it may also have a little to do with the fact that there are many more of you than there are Spaniards, hehe.

I'll admit, though, that some AVGN episodes may still present some lack of neutrality because the AVGN was the very first series of videos that I ever translated; it's only with time and experience that I've improved on that front. In the begining, when I started, I used to get a couple of hate messages every month, so I DO KNOW what you are talking about when you mention people getting royally pissed off.

I've also been translating the Nostalgia Critic since november 2009, by the way. My name on Youtube is MrDonZea.

I don't know if this is the correct place to post this, but I noticed that in the "Little Red Hood" video, when the Nerd was explaining the whole "you can't finish the level until you collect exactly X of A, B and C" (time-stamp is 13:48), you wrote "Goomba" as "Woomba" in the subtitles.

A bit of nitpicking:

I also noticed that instead of using the translated name of the game (Pequeña Caperuza Roja), you eventually switched to Little Red Hood at 14:07

And, when James reads the ending at 14:29, he says "Oh! My Little Red Hood! Thank you for your coming", shouldn't you have translated it as "Oh, mi pequeña caperuza roja, gracias por tu venir/gracias tu por venir", since it's incorrectly written in the Ending screen? (I have never heard somebody say "Thank you for your coming")

Otherwise, excellent job in the subtitles!

Thanks, Ultra64. I'll go back to the file and change any minor errors.

That's the great thing about Closed Captioning subs on Youtube. Any mistakes can always be corrected.

i dunno what you did in the end, but i'd leave the game titles with no translation at all (i hope big companies dont start translating game titles, i hate the stupid names they give to movies that have nothing to do with the original lol)

More nitpicking/feedback, yay.

On his "Zelda II" review, when describing the strange names for Zelda enemies, you translated most of them ("Darknut" becomes "Nuez Oscura", etc.), except for "Pols Voice" (1:34)
Also, "Death Mountain" was left untranslated (5:57 , 6:30 , 6:51 , 7:08)
And "Thunderbird" (12:56)
(I'm pretty picky about untranslated stuff, right?)
Aaaand, at 10:40, wouldn't it be better "Oye, Link. ¿Has visto el control remoto del televisor?" instead of "Oye, Link. ¿Has visto el mando para el televisor?"

Hi there, I'd like to contribute with the Movie Trailer's subs.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?phypama8y6y8j59

On the file are two versions: The cleaned up one and the one with the lines I had difficulties to hear (Three in total).

I hope I'm not trespassing into anyone's turf.