Online translation sites.

[Mork54]

There's of course a lot online translation sites that can be used for translating subtitles to your favourite language. I have tried many of them, some are good some, some are not so good Most of them advertise free trial, but those are not practical for subtitles. They are limited to few thousand characters.

I feel I have enough expenses, so I usually take it as a challenge to find free alternatives to everything. Google translate is ok, but often makes strange result and does not understand the context. DeepL is maybe one of the best, but cost to much.

One site I have used a lot is Kagi. It's also a pay service, but the the difference from the others is that the free online service allow 20.000 characters. If you reduce the srt file size by extracting the sub text and the sub number (with Subtitle Edit for example), you will usually be able to translate a complete movie subtitle in 3-4 chunks. Afterwords load the translated file in Subtitle Edit and import the time stamps back from the original srt.

My experience is the translations from Kagi are very good.

[abolibibelot]

Thanks for the suggestion, didn't know that one, could come in handy.
(I started subtitling a whole TV show in 65 x 21min episodes, I have all the videos downloaded from YouTube – couldn't find a better version – plus automatic subtitles of poor quality in original English and in French translation, and I also have more accurate subtitles downloaded years ago from another channel, where the videos were in lower quality, but the timecodes are way off, the French auto translation is okay but far from flawless, two episodes were missing so for those two I only have the poor quality automatic subtitles, and now all those videos from that other channel have disappeared... With my current methods, it's going to be a huge chore, I had to stop after 3 episodes as I have much more urgent stuff to focus on right now. If that method works, it should speed up the process a great deal. Each SRT file has about 27,000 characters so once timecodes are removed it should be well below the 20,000 characters limit, allowing to process a whole episode in a single chunk. And I have yet to test the audio-to-text automatic transcription feature in Subtitle Edit, if it yields a better result than the original automatic subtitles from the first channel, it should also help for those two episodes that were missing on the second channel.)

How do you re-import the timecodes back from the original SRT with Subtitle Edit?

[Mork54]

Importing time codes is easy. First load the srt file with just the line numbers, then go to Files- import Time codes and select the original srt file with correct times.

About the Audio to text option in Subtitle Edit. Allthough I'm not english ,reading english audio into srt files gives exellent results i think.
For english audio:
Engine: Perfview's Faster -Whisper-XXL.
Model: medium.en(1.5GB)

I have less experience with other languages.

[abolibibelot]

Alright, so you still have to keep the numbers. Doesn't it affect the quality of the translation for sentences that are spread over two or more subtitles?

Engine: Perfview's Faster -Whisper-XXL.
Model: medium.en(1.5GB)

Gee, that's huge.

[Mork54]

Alright, so you still have to keep the numbers. Doesn't it affect the quality of the translation for sentences that are spread over two or more subtitles?

You have a point there. However, looking at some of my translated subtitles most of them seems to be logically ended on two lines?
Anyway, auto created subtitles should always be checked and adjusted. At least if you want to upload them. For myself, I dont care if there's a few text inaccuracies as long as I understand the context.