Copyright Disclaimer: under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. My localization of this trailer is a proof-of-concept, and as such does not represent the creators in any way.

Here is a quick overview of the content detailed in this post:

With localization of multimedia content growing at an astonishing rate, the LATAM market is a growing destination for many companies. Video games, of course, are not far behind, often providing subtitles for the Spanish market in their video games. This led me to look at Persona 5 Royal, an updated release of Persona 5. I found that the trailer for this game did not have an official Spanish version, nor did it have Spanish subtitles available. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create my own version! I decided to create a Spanish dub with the help of a colleague, and I even added subtitles in English and Spanish.

Dealing with Audio

The first step in my process was to isolate the character voices from the background music. I was able to do this through Audacity, an open source audio editor. I listened to the audio and identified the areas with character voices by tagging them:

Then, I used the Vocal Reduction and Isolation effect with the following settings:

Here is what the audio waveforms looked like after removing the vocals:

This made the process relatively easy and straightforward, giving me time to work on the next part: creating a script.

Generating a Transcript

Using Premiere Pro, I was able to generate an English subtitle file (SRT). The quality was fairly accurate, but there were some places where the text was inaccurate, and other areas where the algorithm left out dialogue entirely. I was able to fix this through VisualSubSync Enhanced:

With clean subtitles, I used Memsource to translate into Spanish. The translation itself was machine translation, with a bit of QA afterwards to get rid of any glaring quality issues. Since the timestamp information was already included with the English subtitles, there was very little QA needed for the Spanish subtitles, so I imported them into my Premiere Pro project. This left one final task: the dubbing.

Dubbing

With the help of a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous, I was able to get voicing done for all the characters in the trailer! Luckily, the dialogue consisted of small utterances, which made the dubbing easy to perform. Using the translated subtitles, we each recorded our lines in Premiere Pro, and I then added any necessary sound effects through the Premiere Pro effects panel. To achieve the wobbly voice effect for the bug-like character, I used the Flanger effect under modulation, in audio:

To replicate the radio announcer effect in the voice clip at the end of the video, I used a combination of the Highpass and Distortion effects:

Takeaways

Although the trailer was under 2 minutes, it was still a lot of work to isolate the vocals from the original track, generate a transcript, and record new dialogue based on the translation of that transcript. Finding ways to use the audio effects available on Premiere Pro to replicate the same sounds as in the original trailer was interesting, but not entirely fun for me! It was fun, however, getting to work with content from a video game and trying to match the character voices. That being said, this project has confirmed for me that I would not like to do voice acting in the future! I will leave that for the pro’s.

The final product: