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Especially the "translate each line of dialogue individually in real-time" part. That would mean paying a native Mandarin speaker who is also fluent in US English to do that, a task that would likely take weeks for a full feature.
Foreign language subtitling is arguably one of the highest skilled, exclusive jobs in our industry (hard-of-hearing subtitling in the same language is also a lot harder than one might believe). Ideally, you have to be a native speaker of the destination language, and have near-native fluency in the source language. Keeping the on-screen verbage to a minimum while preserving the essence of what is being said can often be especially difficult. Google Translate will not cut it for an application like this.
I once subtitled a three-minute clip from French to English (using a combination of my schoolboy French, and a co-worker who had fluent French but not very good English) to play at a conference: it took me two days. Part of the reason was that I did it using an early version of Adobe Premiere, which does not make the typesetting, positioning and timing easy. But what really took the time was avoiding unnecessary words in the translation (the three word difference between passive and active voice can easily cost half a second of reading time, for example), and keeping each subtitle on the screen long enough for the viewer to read it, but not long enough for the viewer to lose track of the visuals and sound.
Surely there must have been Mandarin subtitles written for this pic, assuming that it's a mainstream movie? If so, rendering a VF of the DCP with Mandarin CCAPs would take a matter of seconds, if it hasn't been done already. If the distributor could be persuaded to do this, it would be by far the most efficient solution.
Foreign language subtitling is arguably one of the highest skilled, exclusive jobs in our industry (hard-of-hearing subtitling in the same language is also a lot harder than one might believe). Ideally, you have to be a native speaker of the destination language, and have near-native fluency in the source language. Keeping the on-screen verbage to a minimum while preserving the essence of what is being said can often be especially difficult. Google Translate will not cut it for an application like this.
I once subtitled a three-minute clip from French to English (using a combination of my schoolboy French, and a co-worker who had fluent French but not very good English) to play at a conference: it took me two days. Part of the reason was that I did it using an early version of Adobe Premiere, which does not make the typesetting, positioning and timing easy. But what really took the time was avoiding unnecessary words in the translation (the three word difference between passive and active voice can easily cost half a second of reading time, for example), and keeping each subtitle on the screen long enough for the viewer to read it, but not long enough for the viewer to lose track of the visuals and sound.
Surely there must have been Mandarin subtitles written for this pic, assuming that it's a mainstream movie? If so, rendering a VF of the DCP with Mandarin CCAPs would take a matter of seconds, if it hasn't been done already. If the distributor could be persuaded to do this, it would be by far the most efficient solution.
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