Over the years of work, I have noticed an alarming trend — many otherwise capable subtitlers will often follow their client’s guidelines too strictly, almost dogmatically, without a real understanding of why those guidelines are the way they are and not knowing when to deviate from them to ensure the audience’s viewing comfort. This leads to countless subtitling errors, because no matter how robust and well-thought-out a style guide is, there will always be gaps in it, and so there’ll be moments when you need to make a judgement call based on your expertise rather than a written prescription.
In this new article series, I’d like to stress the importance of a thoughtful, intelligent approach to subtitling and to highlight some of those gaps, starting with arguably the biggest one.
At the same time, when given creative freedom, the most skilled and experienced subtitlers don't obsess over that number as much everyone else seems to believe, because they know just how unreliable it can be, for multiple reasons.
First of all, as I wrote in one of my previous articles, CPS and WPM consider only the volume of subtitle text but not its other properties, such as complexity or format. Unfamiliar words, tricky syntax, puzzling dialogue, italics and some other things will slow down your reading, and these two metrics simply do not reflect that.
Max Deryagin’s Subtitling Studio
How To Auto-Add SSA Tags In Aegisub
If you want to add the same sequence of tags to multiple subtitles in Aegisub, you don’t have to painstakingly copy and paste it over and over — you can do the trick in one go using a bit of Aegisub magic. Here’s how:
1. Add a new blank line at the beginning of your subtitle list by using the right-click menu:
2. Comment the blank line out in the text edit box:
3. Make sure it has the same style as the subtitles you want to add your tags to:
4. Add the text template line to the Effect field:
5. Type your tag sequence in the blank line:
6. Go to Automation and click Apply karaoke template:
Done and done! Aegisub will comment out all the subtitles with the same style as your template and create their copies with the tags added. Saves quite a bit of time for large subtitle files.
UPDATE
Turns out there is a better way to auto-add tags in Aegisub — by using Hydra 5.0. This script was created by unanimated, and it helps to add any string of tags to the selected subtitles.
Just copy the lua file to automation > autoload in your Aegisub folder, launch the program and open the script in the Automation menu.