newbie help for foreign subs

[A-thru-Z]

Hello everyone,
firstly I am fresh out of the pond when it comes to subtitles and I may have bit off more than I chew?
My first project is to put polish subtitles onto an english movie but I am having a few problems.
I have got hold of polish subs in the form of a text file which seems to classed as a micro DVD type. My movie is 25fps and I am assuming that being polish the subs are set to 25fps too (being european). I am using DivxLand Media subtitler to preview them both together and it seems that they are in sync though the subs are a bit wayward in the time they stay up on the screen as a pose to the spoken english?
Also, some of the characters in the text are not showing up properly, as in letters being replaced by small boxes and small numbers. I have set the language to 'Eastern European' and also 'Baltic' to see if that helps but it doesn't? In the text file all characters seem right for the polish language.
My questions are...is there a way to determine what the FPS of the 'micro DVD' txt file is just to be sure, is there a non complicated way of timing the amount of time the subs stay on the screen in sync with the words spoken and is there a way to get the right characters in the text instead of the numbers/boxes etc.
If I can get these right then it seems I can embed the text directly onto the AVI and continue in conversion to mpeg2 and DVD etc.
Thanks for any help anyone can give.
P.S I do not speak polish at all!!

[Jeremiah58]

I have got hold of polish subs in the form of a text file which seems to classed as a micro DVD type. My movie is 25fps and I am assuming that being polish the subs are set to 25fps too (being european).

No, not necessarily. A framerate may be different which depends on a video file.

Also, some of the characters in the text are not showing up properly, as in letters being replaced by small boxes and small numbers. I have set the language to 'Eastern European' and also 'Baltic' to see if that helps but it doesn't? In the text file all characters seem right for the polish language.

Try to open those subtitles with Subtitle Workshop. You should see what a frame rate is. If you go to Tools > Information and errors, you would see further information about your subtitle. Read the Help file to see what and how to do with this tool.

...is there a non complicated way of timing the amount of time the subs stay on the screen in sync with the words spoken...

Again, you can use Subtitle Workshop, but for absolute precision, you should use VisualSubSync. It is a non complicated, but it is a time consuming.