Translating Subtitles?

[Aandis]

Alright i have subtitles for a tv show in god knows what language.I needed to convert it to english.Used Google translate.Worked pretty well except for one little thing which is screwing up the whole trnaslation.I'll give an example.For eg the following line
"2
00:00:07,520 --> 00:00:09,840
Nu, dacã vrei sã stai în
casa aia..."

when converted with google translate to english comes out as
"2
00:00:07,520 -> 00:00:09,840
No, if you want to stay in
that house ... "

Every line's trnaslation is perfect.But look at that arrow between the numbers "-->".It changes to "->".This happens to every line.Now when i use this translated sub they won't work unless there is "-->" instead of "->".Why is google doing this.I mean its not suppose to change any word/character right?Just translate it.Making this right means i have to add "-->" in every line.There are some 100s of dialouges.And i have some 15 subs like that to convert.I am not so jobless to be doing that.What should i do.Is there any fix for this or is there any other program which translates subs???

[poisondeathray]

1) you can probably find english subs somewhere to download if you search

2) if you can't you can use find & replace in word, wordpad or some other text editor, it will automatically find & replace all entries

e.g
replace "->" with "-->"

[Aandis]

OMG!!I knew i could do that.Have even done it past.But just forgot how to do it!!!THANKS alot poisondeathray.It was such a simple thing.Shouldn't have asked.Thanks!!!

[jman98]

Aandis - The language is actually Romanian. I have studied enough foreign languages that I'm pretty good at recognizing a lot of them, especially the major Latin based ones like Romanian. You can confirm this by using Google Translate. Do note that Google Translate's "detect language" feature is fooled by this excerpt and it erroneously identifies it as Italian. However if you manually select a Romanian to English translation you will see that it comes up with a much better match than the half-nonsense that the Italain->English translation comes up with.

[jman98]

I also want to add that Google Translate is pretty darn good and I've actually used paid programs that were not as good, but no machine translation is perfect. If you rely on a machine then note that about 5-10% of what you get will either be completely wrong or not make any sense. Last year I did a Russian->English subtitle conversion for a German film I really wanted to see that had never had an official English subtitle translation but it did have a Russian translation. I can't speak German but my Russian is pretty good and with a dictionary I can translate fine. I used Google Translate to do the heavy lifting and I manually looked at what it came up and fixed the stuff that was just obviously wrong and I looked up the words I didn't know in the dictionary to see if it was right. Google Translate saved me a lot of time but I still had to fix about 10% of what it gave me. Do understand that there's always a chance that it will just botch some critical stuff in the translation and you will either not understand at all what it says or you will be badly mislead. Negative statements are easy to botch in languages like Russian when going to English and you can end up with a statement saying that someone did not do something when in fact they actually said that they did it or vice-versa. It's better than nothing for sure but you're best off to get correct English subs if you can possibly avoid doing the work yourself.

[Aandis]

Alirght..thanks for the advice..