“Yes, we are happy to.” – Earl Band
By Ruby Lee
It all started when I was aimlessly browsing through videos on YouTube, trying to find ideas for my Saturday brunch, when I came across this video.
As a lover of brunch and eggs, I immediately fell in love with this song and its catchy rhythm. That was when I decided to localize the lyrics from Traditional Chinese to English. “It would be nice if more people could enjoy this fun song,” I thought. Before I began the localization process, I messaged Earl Band’s Instagram account, and asked them for permission to localize their video into English and publish the final product online. They kindly and quickly replied to me with a yes, and sent me the .m4v video file. They also said that all the band members were excited about this collaboration.
1. Translation
I began the process by translating the lyrics.
This was more challenging than I was anticipating because the lyrics do not always make perfect sense. Additionally, since the translated lyrics will be integrated with the rhythm, the syllables cannot exceed the Chinese version too much. In the end, I decided to use a simple approach, making the translation as short as possible without losing the original meaning.
2. What About the Font?
The Chinese texts were originally hand-written, character-by-character, which is one of the reasons why the video is so unique. English has repeated letters, while Chinese has many unique characters, so I decided it would be best to create a font that matches the original style.
At around 2:12 of the video, the text was presented in another style, so I used Adobe Illustrator to reshape the translated text and place the text to the photoshopped background.
3. Covering the text
The video was edited mostly in After Effects, with only some of the frames edited in Photoshop and Illustrator. I started off by covering the original text with white rectangles.
Most texts have a white background, so this was relatively easy. However, since the words and the illustrations are animated, I had to check frame by frame to see if I accidently covered anything. Nevertheless, at about 2:12 and 2:30 of the video, the text animates, and covers part of the colored background. For this part, I used Photoshop to remove the text, and then reinserted the image back into After Effects.
4. Inserting the Text
After I fully covered the Chinese texts, I started to insert the translated text. The two main issues I encountered were:
- Text expansion
English text is generally longer than Chinese text, so it was crucial to fit the translation into the video without resizing and squeezing everything, making it difficult to read. The best solution I came up with was to insert line breaks and adjust the kerning. - Vertical versus horizontal sentences
Some texts in the video are presented vertically, but English cannot be written this way. I reformatted the text and the animation to make it work in English.
5. Wiggle, Wiggle 💃🕺
At about 2:35, the text and background shake. I spent some time trying to figure out how to replicate this effect. In the end, I screen-captured a frame that does not blur with the shaking effect, and covered the shaking parts with the frame. Next, I enlarged the screen capture to make sure the masked frame won’t show when I recreated the shaking effect.
Lastly, I applied the wiggle expression, which is:
wiggle(freq,amp);
freq (frequency) : how often the object moves per second
amp (amplitude) : how much your object can move above or below the starting value
To add an expression, hold alt (option on mac) and click on the stopwatch icon.
And yes, since the English translations serve individual meanings for each word and I wanted that to be dramatic, I increased the shaking effect comparing to the original video.
6. Voila!
This is the localized video. I sent the video to Earl Band, and they were happy with the work. They even shared it on their Facebook and Instagram! 😀
