So I Guess I Subtitled 'Gamera vs. Gyaos'…
by Weltraumbesty / KRP, 2nd of December 2025
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…and I sync’d those subtitles up to work with pretty much every modern home video iteration of it. The Toshiba DVD released in Japan in 2001, the Kadokawa Blu-ray released in Japan in 2009 (which *should* work for concurrent Blu-ray releases as well, since they’re all derived from that master) and the 4k remastered UHD/Blu-ray edition released by Kadokawa a couple of weeks ago. Because why not.
The new 4k release is what made this possible at all. These discs are the first, to my knowledge at least (and I own most of them, Z-Plan DVD box excepted), to include SDH subtitles in Japanese. That gave me a more or less complete script of the dialogue from the film (some background elements and military jargon are excluded or abbreviated) to work with, which is a lovely place to start considering what we’ve had to work with before (namely the original and significantly abbreviated Daiei-produced English subtitle script, which made its way to the Toshiba DVD release and is, by all appearances, the starting point for subsequent English scripts that have appeared from Arrow, Mill Creek, Shout! Factory and so on…).
My process was pretty straight forward: I OCR’d the Japanese track (using Nikse's subtitleedit and the Tesseract open source OCR engine), corrected the plentiful errors (with a hefty assist from Lexilogos' virtual hiragana and katakana keyboards, since I do not currently have Japanese keyboard support installed locally), and set about translating, reformatting and re-timing everything from there. I fell back on my usual tools for translation work - the text glossing at Jim Breen’s still-excellent WWWJDIC, Jisho.org (with particular shout-out to their handwriting and radical look-up functions, which are great), Kagi Translate for when I was at a loss for a starting point with Grandpa's protracted ramblings and my own writer’s brain for the rest. The resulting script was… uh… long… and far too literal in many instances. Subsequent editing passes improved flow and tightened the script, with an effort towards preserving the tone of the various speakers as best as I could while keeping the lines relatively concise. All scripting and revising was done in Aegisub and subtitleedit. Subsequent watch-throughs were done in VLC and SMPlayer.
The finished script is over 800 lines, and I think it works pretty well. You may disagree. That’s fine. You’re welcome to download the files and change whatever the hell about them.
Some points about this project before I get to the download links. Just skip to the bottom of the page if you don’t give a shit. I won’t blame you.
o1. In case you can’t tell from the above, this is not a professional translation. I’m just some guy with a perseverative interest in Gamera, a passing familiarity with Japanese, and a functional enough handle on both writing and brute-force translating to get what I wanted to do done. I made these for me, mostly because I’ve wanted a decent set of subs for ‘Gyaos’ for pretty much ever. I also made them because I’m expecting a kid next Spring, and I’d rather like for them to have a nice set of subs for ‘Gyaos’ as well.
o2. There are probably some errors. See above. Not professional. Etc. I’ve watched these through with the film about a half dozen times now, and whittled out all of the problems I could find along the way. My apologies for the things inevitably missed.
o3. I have not subtitled the credits. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that they were an absolute bitch to format (there’s a LOT of text on screen at once at some points). The other is that no complete glossed list of staff or cast names exists, best as I can tell, which means many of the names credited (particularly on the technical side) would be guesses at best. I can’t gloss names from kanji for shit, so rather than embarrass myself pretending I can (or worse, providing incomplete titles, as past editions have done), I left the in-film credits as-is. The full run of them is printed at the film’s Japanese wiki page, in the event you are curious.
o4. Most, though certainly not all, of the signage in the film has also been translated. Some with the assistance of image OCR, but most through Jisho.org’s radical look-up. I have left the nameplate for village headman Kanemaru as his family name, only, for the same reason as the credits mentioned previously. Whatever his given name is, I am in no place to gloss it (and if it is ever spoken in the film, which I do not believe it is, I completely missed it). Signage translations are shifted to the top of the frame wherever they conflict with dialogue in an effort to keep things neat and legible.
o5. There is a moment in the film where a scientist just sort of says some un-translatable gibberish. Something along the lines of "ESTOROGISH...GO-BE..." The Japanese SDH subtitles render this phonetically, bless them, but I have left it out of my script. Daiei's own dub of the film translates it as, "Check cell type," and, "Type 4," spoken by two different folks. I dunno. It is what it is, and if he *is* saying something meaningful, please let me know.
o6. Regarding 'Gamera's Song', which plays out the film, I feel like I took more liberties with this than I did other aspects of the translation for expressly lyrical purposes. My overly literal starting translation here just seemed… well, stiff and overly literal.
o7. Formatting. Formatting formatting formatting. The font settings for the script means that subtitles should appear in-image throughout the film (in a similar fashion to the 2001 Toshiba DVD). The font used is a monospace variant in white with a consistent black outline and no drop shadow. None of these things may be to your personal taste, which is fine. All of this should be easily adjustable in any subtitle editing suite that’s worth a shit (for example, there’s a big friendly button in the top subtitleedit toolbar dedicated to adjusting the styling for ASSA subtitle scripts). Knock yourself out. I won’t judge.
o8. Each of these scripts is in Advanced Substation Alpha (*.ass) format. Most media players that are worth using should support them, but you may need to install some plugins (as I had to for VLC on Arch Linux, which split it off into an optional dependency earlier this year) to get them to work.
I think that's it. But just for reference, here are a few of shots of this script in action. Video source is the 2001 Toshiba DVD edition (with apologies for the subtitle scaling, which VLC's screenshot utility does not handle well regardless of how they appear in playback).
The files themselves are linked below (via MEGA). Take whichever you need, or take them all.
'Giant Monster Dogfight: Gamera vs. Gyaos' 2025 Kadokawa 4k Sync
'Giant Monster Dogfight: Gamera vs. Gyaos' 2009 Kadokawa Blu-ray Sync
'Giant Monster Dogfight: Gamera vs. Gyaos' 2001 Toshiba DVD Sync
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~ Weltraumbesty / KRP
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