baihe_media | Soul Sisters (双兔) Fan Subtitling Project: Call for Participants and Interest Check

[ETA: Thanks everyone for your enthusiasm and generosity in volunteering your time and skills! I'll leave this post pinned for a week or so in case there are further expressions of interest, but I think we've got enough people on the team to start work. Since Discord seems to work for everyone, I'll start setting up a project server and hope to get it up and running by the end of the week/early next week, then I'll send everyone invites. Thanks again!]

As discussed here, here and here, Soul Sisters (双兔, pinyin: shuang tu) was released recently on iQiyi with MTL subtitles. Some people expressed interest in having/working on proper English subtitles, so this is a post about that.

I'm happy to organise (unless someone else wants to — if so please let me know!) a comm project for putting together English fan subtitles for the show. If you are interested in having/working on them, please make a comment below to indicate this. I will pin this post and leave it up for a couple of weeks. I have not organised a fandom project like this before so please let me know if I've missed anything out or there's something I haven't thought of.

Subtitling tasks

We will need people to do the following jobs:

Translator: This role involves translating the subtitles from Chinese to English I'm happy to do the bulk of this and to do it by myself if necessary, but it would be helpful to have another person on this task if possible. You would obviously need to be comfortable with quasi-historical Chinese and English.
Editor: This role involves reviewing the subtitles for flow and (if possible accuracy). Ideally I would like two editors, one of whom is comfortable enough with Chinese to check for accuracy and potentially suggest alternative interpretations. However, this is not essential and we could make do with one editor who is comfortable reading just English.
Timer: This role involves creating the subtitle script containing the timings for each line. Familiarity with Chinese is obviously helpful, but I'm not sure it's 100% essential given that the raw videos have Chinese hardsubs that provide reasonably clear indications as to the beginning and end of most lines. It would be helpful to have up to two people doing this task. The timer may also be asked to do some minor typesetting for translations of text that appears on screen but not in dialogue (we can have a discussion as a team about how to best present this text).
Encoder: This role involves combining the subtitle files with the raw video files, if we go for a hardsub release option (see below). One person should be sufficient.
Quality control: The role involves watching through the videos with the subtitles to make sure all is as it should be and to catch typos, errors, etc. One to two people should be sufficient.

If you would like to take on more than one task, you are welcome to do so, and please feel free to say so in the comments.

Raw videos

I have the raw videos for all the episodes in reasonable albeit not best quality. I think these should be sufficient to work from. If anyone is able to get hold of the best-quality versions, please let me know.

Communication

I'm happy to set up a separate comm for project-related communications, or a Discord server if people are comfortable using that. Please also feel free to suggest other communication methods.

Output

We can have a discussion about whether people prefer hardsubbed videos, soft subs, whether to limit it to comm members and our friends, etc. There is also a question about where to host the files (YouTube is probably a no go, due to their copyright strike system). There is a browser extension that I use which will let us overlay soft subs onto iQiyi videos directly, and viewers will be able to access this if they have a subscription to the videos on iQiyi and are prepared to install the browser extension. This is another possible option. I'm vaguely aware that iQiyi has some sort of functionality that allows viewers to submit user-generated subtitles, but one of my red lines is that I don't do free labour for large corporations who cannot be bothered to do it properly themselves.

What to do if you're interested

Comment on this post indicating which task(s) you'd like to take on, any limits on time availability/commitment, and your preferred method(s) of project-related communication.

If you are interested in having subtitles, but don't have the time/capacity to commit to a task, please could you also comment on the post to indicate this, and also indicate your preferred format(s) for viewing the subtitles in. Seeing evidence of enthusiasm is always really encouraging!