One or the Other
What I Learned Making Subtitles For The Fifth Seal
“When you overcome the 1-inch barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” — Bong Joon-ho
It all started as a joke.
Everyone did some overhaul during the pandemic. Some of us learned a new skill or changed our wardrobe, or broke up with our long-term partners and ended up in rehab. My biggest pandemic shift, besides shifting my wardrobe a bit (the secret? More belt buckles) and torrenting. But I wasn’t there for the latest releases or anything like that. No, I wanted the things you literally couldn’t find anywhere else. My friend and I kept digging deeper and deeper, hoping to strike gold.
We also worshipped at the altar of the IMDb recommendations algorithm, or “The Almighty Alg.” No other film site quite has the recommendation power of IMDb’s. After 10 years of rating films through it (sorry Letterboxd), it amassed a wealth of film viewing and pulled from the deepest depths. It will tell you what to look for, but it not where to find it. “We found a 1985 Serbian serial killer procedural that has a 8.3. How do you find it? That’s YOUR problem.”
Thus, we were tossed the bone that was The Fifth Seal. We had watched another film from its director, Zoltan Fabri (Two Halftimes in Hell) two weeks before and clearly wanted more of his particular brand of Hungarian despair. We were forever changed. Over the years, it has seeped into our lexicon, constantly referenced and never far from our minds. It is the exemplar of hidden gems, a high we have chased ever since. We’ve gotten close, but never to the same extent. We knew that it would be a film we would revisit with time, but that time had to be right.
I could feel a rewatch of The Fifth Seal coming around the corner and decided that when the time came to revisit it, I would be ready. As the primary content provider and quality checker, I’ve been lambasted in the past for the quality of the sourced movie itself and of its subtitles. Bong Joon-ho’s legendary “one-inch barrier” quote is beautifully well-put, but what he didn’t mention is that while that barrier is one inch tall, it can be miles long. When you go into uncharted waters, you’re faced with waves of bad translations, wonky syncs, and giant squids. To quote Bruce Goldstein in “The Art of Subtitling,” subtitles are “rarely noticed… unless they’re bad.”
For those that are unfamiliar with outside subtitles, when you download a movie in another language, it will usually be either an .mp4, .mkv, or .avi. Sometimes, there are subtitle tracks embedded in the file itself that should be synced to the video through their timecodes. Oftentimes though, the subtitle file (.srt) is a separate file that needs to be included in whatever player you’re running the video from.
Now, 8/10 times, the .srt is included in the package you’re downloading, so it’s safe to say that the sync will be good. However, there are times, more than I would personally care for, when that isn’t the case and you must find your .srt files elsewhere. Obviously, you want to source your .srt as close to the original video source file as possible. Sometimes that’s not easy to discern. And that’s where the trouble begins.
The thing is, you have to make use of what you can get your hands on, but you have no control over what you’re getting. Common issues are:
- The subtitles are off-sync because of frame rates, it’s a different cut, or something else throws everything off by seconds or even minutes.
- The person who translated these subs was only listening to spoken dialogue, which is good, but not translating things that were written.
- Some lines don’t get translated at all because the translator either found them unimportant or weren’t paying attention.
- The translation is just not up to snuff. Best example being for an .srt for Shin Godzilla where the line “Let’s get to work, everyone,” was translated to “A work, everyone.”
This isn’t exclusive to torrent .srt files either. I’ve had some imported DVDs where the subtitles were all out of whack. Most of the time, you just remedy it in VLC by utilizing the subtitle delay feature, which is annoying, but relatively easy once you have it set. But in the worst cases, it can only be solved by going frame by frame to fix the .srt by hand. Which is a taxing process. How do I know?
Because for The Fifth Seal, I decided to do it.
Now I know what you’re thinking: “Gee Kegg, that sounds bonkers and time-consuming. Why would you do something that insanely esoteric for what will essentially only be for you and one other person? You must have nothing but time on your hands” To that I say:
Yes. Yes, I do.
The original version that was watched, which included subs, was still about 5 seconds or so off. If we were to revisit this, I was going to make sure we had the best possible subs. In the time since we watched it, a remaster of The Fifth Seal with better-synced subs became available, which I jumped on, but there was only one problem: the translation.
Something I’ve noticed about the high-wire art form of translation is that you balance the poetic with the technical. Some translations play it safe by being as literal as possible, fearing the reader will be too confused. Which is all well and good unless someone specific is referred to, instead of just saying “Tchaikovsky,” it could instead read “Russian Composer.” Which is certainly not in the spirit of the author’s intent.
SO it was back to the original subs which offered a much more unique and memorable line of translation. All I had to do was combine the two. Take the timecodes of the newer one and put those over the lines of the older one. Should be easy, yes? Thus I embarked on my three-week voyage fixing the subtitles for The Fifth Seal.
Before we really get into the weeds here, I’m going to say that I’m well aware my process was about as ass-backward as anything could be. I started running before looking at my feet to see if I was wearing the proper shoes. I eventually came to the right conclusion, but not before making it insanely hard on myself. Which, for those of you who personally know me, will find this wholly unsurprising.
I thought the process was going to be simple: copy over the time codes from the newer restoration and translation and put them on top of the subs of the original translation. Should be simple enough, right? That process alone took me about 3 days overall, working on and off on top of my actual job that pays me money to do things like not painstakingly adjusting the subtitles for a Hungarian film from almost 50 years ago.
It took time because some lines weren’t translated or were broken apart differently, so I had to condense meanings or sentences to keep things from becoming too overwhelming or ponderous. I finished the timeline transfer and thought that should do it. However, something nagged at me. I had solely worked on the text without seeing how they looked on the image. I decided to take a look at the whole thing again piece by piece, minute by minute onscreen. And that’s where the real work began.
I will now never unsee subtitle timing onscreen, professional or not. We normally don’t pay any mind to this when it’s done properly, but there are a lot of times when the subs come up earlier than when the line is actually spoken either because it’s a long line or whoever did it maybe doesn’t fully understand the cadence of the language. The only time you would notice something like this is if the subs were incredibly out of sync.
Within minutes of looking at The Fifth Seal subs compared with the picture, I could tell that while I had thrown the ball closer to the goal, it still wasn’t in the net. I paced myself, restricting myself to no more than 15 minutes of the film’s runtime per day. The last line of dialogue occurs about 1 hour and 41 minutes into the movie. For those of you crunching the numbers, that means it took me a full week following the initial timecode pass. To drive home how long this would take, I spent an entire 3 hour and 20-minute train ride trying to sync 15 minutes. In short, it was long.
“The Art of Subtitling” notes that if one were to translate everything that was said onscreen, it would take up half the frame. Concision paired with accuracy is the name of the game. I ended up locked in for hours at a time going back and forth, watching the bottom of the screen and listening for speech. Seeing what felt right, especially in bigger monologues, to emphasize when the points are actually being spoken. Looking up things like Palinka, a Hungarian brandy usually distilled from apricots, to see if that makes more sense than just “hard liquor.” It’s all about cadence, but getting cadence right takes practice. And several subtitle files being made, tested, and tossed in the virtual trash.
Then, at long last, it was done. I had done my time, the final 15 minutes were at long last complete after enduring the harrowing and powerful finale over and over again. Much like one of our heroes, the light came in as I walked out into the morning sun, proud that I had finally completed my arduous task that no one asked me to do. I felt like celebrating.
Then I asked myself: “What kind of font should I put here?”
I had Roboto for a full year before finally switching it to Helvetica because it just had a more classic look. And, as you can guess, having an answer only led to more questions. Like how do I set this permanently? You can change the font in VLC, but that doesn’t mean it’ll cross over to other things like a DCP with the subtitles burned on.
At last, I found a cheap enough video editor (Filmora) to do what I thought would be the last . So back into the mines I went, this time moving a little faster since a lot of the legwork had already been done. It was the final fine-tuning of timing with an actual sync with the video at the same time as opposed to going back and forth between Text Edit, copy, paste, stick in VLC, check, repeat.
It allowed me to see exactly how the text was appearing on screen. Too much text? Should there never be more than two lines of text on the screen? Goldstein espouses yes, always no more than 2 lines with no more than 40 characters. Thankfully with Filmora, I was able to break up lines because I had developed an ear for the language. It can be hard at times to judge a performance that is in a language you can’t speak, but when you replay the same moments over and over, you tend to catch on to how things are being said and how much can be communicated without you having to fully understand what is being said.
I worked off of three different sources for translations: the original .srt, the more technical translation on the remaster, and, during this final stage of the process, a translation of Ferenc Sánta’s original novel. I took some of my own artistic flourishes at certain moments, but for the most part, I deferred to the first translation, used the second to fill in any gaps, and the novel to be the final arbiter.
Going line by line, I found myself interpreting Fabri and Sánta’s intentions. It’s not always easy. I spent about 20 minutes debating if I should have a character say they were a “carpenter” (new translation) or the more specific “joiner” (old translation) as their occupation. It got so intense that my old actor brain fired up with “This is what I would say, but is it what the character would say?” It’s an exercise to understand the intrinsic nuance of pacing, flow, and characterization.
I’ll admit I had my fun as well. In the first translation we watched, the central character Mr. Gyurica, was puzzlingly translated as “Mr. Ariuncular.” Which then morphed into, and remains, “Mr. Avuncular.” The whole reason I even embarked on this endeavor was because I replaced all the Ariunculars with Avunculars. In my defense, if you see the movie, you’ll see he IS in fact, quite avuncular. It’s me putting my own stamp on something I love.
At long last, and I meant it this time, I had done the absolute final pass. I exported the subtitles from the editor, and put them through one more quick program, Aegisub, to fully finalize both font type, size, and spacing before finally (with some minor adjustments over the next year or so for good measure) setting it once and for all, They say the third time’s a charm for a reason. I poured out a celebratory glass of Palinka, toasted, and drank.
We do a lot of insane things in the name of love. Of course, that usually means doing things like hiring a flash mob or telling someone you love them on the first date. But passion comes in many shapes and sizes. Cinema and stories in general have always been my first love. When I find a story I particularly connect to, I will absorb all that I can. The Fifth Seal is just another one of those obsessions. A remarkable gem of a film that I wanted to put my mark on. I did this because I respect the film to pieces and wanted to give it the proper presentation it deserves. All movies should, and do, have such people doing it.
