Making Custom Subtitles for GUNHED (1989)

(You can grab the subtitle file in question here)

GUNHED is a mecha/tokusatsu movie that I watched one time with some friends and enjoyed enough to needle most of my other friends to also watch it. The movie makes heavy use of bilingual dialogue (or as my friend says, "Tekken Rules"): most of it is in Japanese, but I'd wager about 30-40% of all spoken word in the movie is in mostly understandable English.

The movie has hardcoded subtitles... in Japanese, for the English dialogue. The English softsub track that comes with the version of the movie that most people will find (I am looking at the camera as I say this) only covers the Japanese dialogue. This is one of my big pet peeves when it comes to subtitling anime and whatnot, and I figured GUNHED is only about 100 minutes, so I took it upon myself in early 2025 to tweak the subtitles for a movie night. I watch subtitled media pretty much every single day! How hard could it be?

Anyway, now I have opinions.

The Process

I used a free program called Subtitle Edit, which as far as I can tell was made mostly for people to make/translate subtitles in various languages for videos on big streaming services like Netflix. It seems really nice, actually! The only real issue I ran into was that I couldn't figure out how to make it automatically grab the subtitle tracks attached to a video (I assume it's possible, but I was working on a pretty short time frame). I had to extract the track another way and then open it with SubEdit.

So on the right here you have the video in question. You can tell SubEdit which program you want to be used to play it (VLC or MPC or what have you), which seems like a cool feature to me. On the bottom is the audio waveform, and the left side contains the subtitles themselves. Basic use is simple as highlighting a portion of the waveform and typing in the text. Bam, you've got subtitles!

Except you also have to actually figure out what's being said. And how am I supposed to hear what's going on without my subtitles?

I'd sometimes sit for several minutes straight with the same three seconds of the movie looping constantly, trying to parse what fucking words were coming out of the characters mouths. In particular, Bombay (the obligatory "Game over, man! Game over!" character) was a huge pain in the ass. He talks quickly and sometimes switches between Japanese and English in the same sentence. If you can figure out what the hell he's actually saying at 10 minutes 24 seconds, please let me know and I will straight up venmo you five bucks.

Formatting

SubEdit has some baked-in guidelines for what it considers acceptable subtitles that I assume come from Netflix's style guide or something. You can see above that one line is highlighted in red; that means it's breaking said guidelines. What I figured out whilst working on GUNHED:

SubEdit conveniently has buttons that automatically breaks or splits lines across a larger amount of time to match with these guidelines. These almost always caused things to become harder to read, at least to my personal preferences.

Here's an example from the beginning of the movie where I was still feeling out how to even do any of this and assumed the guidelines were best. This is just one full sentence when spoken, but SubEdit broke it into multiple subtitle instances because it thinks there'd be too much text on screen at once.

This immediately brings up a question: should subtitles be formatted so they correspond directly to the audio being said at the time? I watch subtitled media pretty much every day, both in and out of my native language, and I think even when I'm watching something in English I want the subtitles to be text.

I hate when you get subtitles where one sentence...

...that are broken up across multiple instances...

...just like this.

I'm sure the guidelines exist for a reason, but it's so much harder for my brain to parse meaning in text with half-sentence chunks. I want as much of a complete sentence on screen as possible. (I do read faster than most dialogue is spoken, which I imagine to be the main issue with this approach, but that's on me.)

At some point I decided these subtitles were only for me and mine so there was no point in strictly adhering to these rules. And that I could put in whatever dumb shit I wanted.

Having Fun With It (SPOILERS AHEAD)

Disclaimer: I do not speak Japanese. I am not a professional translator in any capacity whatsoever. My only credential is that I've been blogging about anime for over a decade and have a vague sense for what I like in a translation/localization.

That said, at this point I've probably watched the movie more times than literally anyone who'd be reading this post and have a decent understanding of the plot. I felt it was appropriate to edit some of the subtitles for the Japanese lines. They're my subtitles and I can do whatever the fuck I want! I can change shit completely and nobody can stop me!!

A couple things, I judged to be straight-up mistakes. For example, while Brooklyn is looking for parts to repair GUNHED:


(On the video is the sub track the file came with, below is my edit.)

If you watch enough mecha (or have played Metal Gear Solid [side note: Brenda Bakke's character in this movie was the model for Holly White in Metal Gear 2]) you know that a vulcan is a type of gun. Technically it's a specific model of rotary cannon, but it's become a generic term used in various media like Gundam or Mega Man Battle Network. The katakana is バルカン (ba-ru-ka-n), so you could see how phonetically you could end up with Balkan. In context of this being a dumb mecha movie though? It's definitely vulcan and I have zero doubts about this.

Other spots I edited for clarity. Here, Brooklyn's telling Nim over coms that bad shit is happening. She responds (in English) with a curt, "So?" He says (in Japanese), "だから" (da-ka-ra, "so/therefore"), repeating it incredulously in a sort of "excuse me?!" tone.

The original subtitles just seem confusing to me in context and don't feel like the kind of thing you'd say in a back-and-forth conversation. This type of exchange happens at least one other time, and I changed it there too.

And sometimes I edited lines just because I felt like I could punch up the script. This one got actual hooting and hollering from viewers who hadn't seen the movie before:

A character at the beginning of the movie says as a joke that the old whiskey shipped to Island 8JO decades ago "used to make the robots dance". This scene felt like a direct callback to me, so I made the change accordingly to create a setup and payoff. Considering the reactions, I think it was the right move.

Conclusion

I have now seen GUNHED enough times piecemeal that I could quote like half the movie to you. I can call out the exact scene cut where you should pause so the Discord chat can take a bathroom break. I have genuinely contemplated buying the GUNHED anniversary plamo. It's now on my shortlist of "movies to put on the TV if everyone is too mentally blasted to think about anything and you just need something dumb for external stimulus" because I feel intimately familiar with it.

...It's honestly really not that good of a movie.

I also definitely have a newfound respect for sub groups everywhere. I - granted, a first-timer -took like 7-9 hours of focused work to do this, and most of it was already done for me. You're telling me that people transcribe, translate, time, and edit a whole episode of tokusatsu within 24 hours of airing? Every week? That's skilled labor! I'm even more pissed about Crunchyroll's alleged "$80 per episode" rates.

Last, well, it was a fun and interesting project to keep my mind occupied for a while. If you do feel like watching GUNHED, then maybe give my subs a shot, perhaps even compare them with the original track. Again, you can grab the subtitle file here. Enjoy, and let me know how it went!

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