New collective translation service

Here, many people know the collective translation service " Notabenoid ". We used it to translate one of our projects, but soon we realized that it was not exactly what we needed. Firstly, I wanted an online video, and secondly, I wanted to be more focused on specific topics in order to unite interested people around my ideas. This is how our project ChinaFilm.tv appeared .

What is new?

• Firstly, we have a torrent tracker, so the translator can always download exactly the version of the movie that is translated
• Secondly, the film is divided into separate episodes, which allows you to translate and discuss in separate pieces of meaning
• Thirdly, there is a video on the site. Yes, each episode can be viewed directly with subtitles, both with the original and with the translation
• Fourthly, we have all the properties of a regular movie site - reviews, genres, biographies and photos of actors and directors, a forum, wikis, movie news, tags

Technical details

The site is completely written on Django , including the torrent tracker (thanks to Vitaly for the pieces of code from the django-torrent-tracker ). Forum - PYBB (by the way, I highly recommend, the project was abandoned, but recently resurrected and developed again). Video for episodes is cut and converted automatically by a bunch of ffmpeg + flvtool2. Subtitles in the episodes are shown plug-in captions to the player jwplayer.

And what about monetization?

Now we are launching a mechanism that allows users to speed up the appearance of new releases. Each project will have a “piggy bank” where users will deposit money for transfer. At the end of the transfer, part of the money goes to the project coordinator, part to the translators, part to the voice acting. We have already seen a similar scheme in work at one of the sites of a similar focus and it works.

And a little about the subject of the project

')
If you like Chinese cinema, you might encounter the following problem: Chinese films are often translated by people who know nothing about Chinese culture or language. Translations are made from English voice acting or subtitles, while a lot of things are lost: puns, cultural peculiarities. Chinese is much more concise than English, and especially Russian, so phrases are often reduced to the detriment of meaning. Ridiculous Americanisms appear: the characters call each other “Miss” and “Mr.”, the national musical instruments turn into a “banjo”.

We decided to do something about it. First, we chose a movie (not the easiest one to translate, by the way) and uploaded it to Notabenoid . Everything progressed well, but very slowly. In addition, the meaning was often distorted because the translators did not see or poorly remembered the scene they were working on. It was decided to launch the same translation service, but with some modifications.

And where are the results of the work?

The site is now about a month. During this period, we partially translated about a dozen films and fully translated and voiced the very film with which it all began. For voice acting attracted other people, but the film from this only won. The result is satisfied. Download and see here or on torrents.ru .

PS The post is written by the main developer of ChinaFilm.tv, Andrey Kravchuk, who often has something to say on Habré, but he doesn’t have an invite . Thanks for the invite!