Tranlate Subtitle language

[Deaf Raiders]

My mate went to Greece last week came back with a few Old DVDs the audio is in English the only problem is the subtitles in Greek/Spanish. But I've search everywhere for English Subtitles are there are none about? Is there anyway to translate the Greek Subtitles to English. They are not burned into the video i just extracted them?

Is there any programs out there the can translate the Greek/Spanish subtitles WITHOUT using useless Google translator? I have Subtitles creator that no use to me and Subtitle workshop.

Raiders

[AlanHK]

A few subtitle archive sites:
http://www.allsubs.org/
http://www.divxstation.com/subtitles.asp
http://www.opensubtitles.com/
http://www.subbiee.com/
http://subtitles.shadowork.net/
http://www.anysubs.com/
http://www.kloofy.net/
http://www.subtitlesbox.com/

Automatic translation does suck, but unless you want to pay a professional translator, that's the only other option.

[emsdallas]

FYI

I went to the Subbiee website--approx thirty seconds, windows installer started. I canceled the installer and rebooted.

I do not trust websites that automatically start installing whatever!!!!!!!!!!

Just an FYI

Also Kloofy is only for Asian subtitles

Shadowork is a foreign language website that I could not find an English version.

[El Heggunte]

[ n e v e r m i n d ]

[Alex_ander]

One more reason for using already existing subtitles. In most cases the text is just a complement to visual information and would have a lot of double meaning if translated separately. Even if you hire somebody for translation, the only way to do it right would be watching the scenes by that person while doing it.

[jman98]

You can try a Google search on the name of the movie plus something like "English subtitles" and hope for the best. If you spend a lot of time on it, you may come up with something. I have found English subtitles for Asian films in cases where it seemed hopeless at first, but I had to spend a decent amount of time searching and looking. However, some movies have never been translated into English by anyone so there is no guarantee that you'll ever find anything.

The process of doing automated translation is rather complex. You'll have to rip the subtitles using OCR software like in SubRip. The big problem is that you'll have to have a computer that is capable of reading Greek fonts natively. Typically in the English speaking world this will require you to install some additional packages from your Windows install media and make a change in Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Advanced and then picking "Greek" under "Select a language to match the language version of the non-Unicode programs you want to use" and possibly rebooting. Once you have the Greek subtitles in a text file with Greek fonts that your computer is capable of opening, then you can try to find a Greek-English computer program to translate it. Do note that the translation will be far from perfect and quite horribly wrong in some parts. I know little about Greek, but the European languages that I have studied all use double negatives and many translation programs botch this. For example, if you said in Spanish "I don't have no money", this is quite correct but a translation program might translate this as "I have money" when in fact the correct English translation is "I don't have any money". If Greek uses double negatives for negation, this is one possible problem. I do know that Greek use of definite articles is rather unusual compared to any language I have studied and while that won't be a big problem for a translation program, it could lead to some odd results (maybe something like "The John gave me the 10 dollars" instead of "John gave me 10 dollars").

To be honest with you, you'd probably find it easier to machine translate the Spanish subs and you probably won't have to do that complicated mess with the control panel I talked about just to get SubRip to work. SubRip should be able to rip Spanish subs as is - I think.

[SatStorm]

Greek to English is impossible, because those languages have a HUGE difference in the structure.

Regarding online translations: Italian to Spanish and vice versa have great results. Also Swedish to English and vice versa.

Online translators proves best which languages are close enough, even if they don't sound very close to a foreigner of both.

[jman98]

Greek to English is impossible, because those languages have a HUGE difference in the structure.

It is NOT impossible. Babelfish offers a Greek<->English online translation service for free. Go to http://babelfish.yahoo.com.

Russian can have a very different structure from English yet online translators exist between the 2 languages. Structure doesn't make it impossible to do the translation, it just makes it more difficult.

[SatStorm]

Google also offers English to Greek and vice versa.
The success rate on the meaning is less than 30%.

Example: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=el&ie=UTF-8&u=www.in.gr&sl=el&tl=en

It is the structure that makes it difficult in this case, not the word translation. After all, a great deal of English have (Ancient) Greek routs (which surprisingly is not alienated from modern Greeks).

The same goes for many languages (including Russians).

The funny thing is that what it is translated from English to Greek, can be translated back to English pretty well using online translations, because the language structure is preserved - somehow - by the Greek translator in the first place.
Example: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=el&ie=UTF-8&u=www.in.gr&sl=el&tl=en
The original was in American-English, someone translate it in Greek and if you use Google translate, it goes well back in English.

But original Greek texts translated in English can end up really bad. I'm a living proof for that! It is notorious of how I end up misunderstood by the others around here!

[jman98]

30% is a little harsh. I disagree with your conclusions. Other readers can look at the link and decide for themselves. But such translation is not "impossible" as you claim. To me it looks no worse than the Russian->English translators I have used and you can get enough correct for it to be useful. I've seen worse examples of computer based German to English translation than your link provides as an example of supposedly bad Green -> English translation. Anyway, we are digressing from the main point. If you wish to continue to argue how much this translation sucks, feel free to do so, yet I think it may still have value to some people who understand its limitations.

[SatStorm]

You sound very aggressive for some reason, chill out!

I used the word "impossible", because it is impossible for the online services to be used for automatic subtitle translation, as the first poster tries to do. Especially for a Greek-English translation.
It would be easier with other languages which shares common stracture.

Regarding online translations overall, yes this is my opinion: Some sucks and some are decent.