how to open .idx/.sub files in foreign language to be able to translate?

[Mr Luberman]

Hi all,

Not sure if there's a way to be able to do this or not? But here goes.

I've got a subtile file in .idx/.sub format in a foreign language, that I want to be able to open in notepad & try to pursuade the wife the translate & then convert it back to .idx/sub format or preferably .srt fomat.

thinking I might be able to do this in Subrip, I open the ifo file in & can view some of the foriegn characters but alot of the time it cant recognise them.

Has anyone else tried to do this, or know of a work around?

If I get get the file top be opened in notepad, it'll make it alot easier to the wife to translate & for me to persuade her to do it :P

Any help would be appreciated.

[jman98]

idx/sub subtitle files are graphics format (actually BMP). They are basically pictures. You can't open them in a text editor such as Notepad. You have to convert them to a text based format like SRT.

The program SubRip can do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and read in the characters, but you may need the original DVD - not sure about that. The biggest problem for you is that OCR doesn't work very well in non-Latin based languages. I got it to work once for Cyrillic by going to the Control Panel in Windows and looking at the Date, Time, Language and Regional Options. Under Regional and Language Options go to Advanced, set the Language for Non-Unicode Programs to the right one for your language and reboot. If you are lucky, SubRip will now be able to read the subtitles in your non-Latin based language. I have to warn you that this was a bitch to do. If the subs are in Chinese or Japanese, it may not work at all. If the subs are in a language that uses the Latin alphabet, like Spanish, you don't have to reset the Language setting necessarily.

Best bet might be to search if there are subs available in SRT format in your wife's language. It depends on the film and her language. The more obscure either is, the less likely you will be to find it. Also, you might just look for English subs for the film. They might exist somewhere. It would save you and her a LOT of work to look for English subs first.

Dude, translating subtitles sucks big ones. Your wife is going to hate doing this. You better make it worth her while because it is unbelievable drudgery to do this. I've done it before for Russian to English and it sucked so bad I've never done it again. I would truly exhaust every possibility of finding an English subtitle file for this file before I would ask someone to do this for me.