Need to translate subtitles

[kpic]

I have found French subtitles for a movie I need to convert to English subs. I noticed Subtitle Workshop has a translator mode so that will make it easier but I still need to translate the subs. Is my only option an online translator in which I have to translate line by line? Like copy\paste\copy\paste?

[jman98]

Whatever this so-called "translate" mode is in Subtitle Workshop, I don't think it actually does translation. Yes, you will have to use an online translator and copy/paste. Note that online translators will be wrong some of the time and what you get out of them may not always make sense. I can speak Russian relatively well and I did a translation of Russian subtitles to English for an old 1960s Soviet movie that has never been released outside of the ex-USSR. It sucked so bad to translate this stuff (I'm not fluent, so I do have to look some words up in a Russian-English dictionary) that I only did 1 movie. I also have part 2, which I have never bothered to translate because subtitle work just sucks. You will learn how much it sucks when you do this. There are commercial translation programs you can buy that can translate entire documents, such as a complete subtitles file, at once. The problem is that they aren't really much better than using Babelfish for free. Using such a program would save you a lot of time over cutting and pasting, but you won't really end up with subtitles much better (maybe 5% more accurate over Babelfish). Such programs typically cost about $60 US or more. Is it really worth it? Anyway, if you search extensively you might be able to find subtitles in English for the film - it does happen that some films you think are obscure do have English subtitles, but you may be right that this film does not.

[kpic]

Thanks for the info, I figured that may be the only way to do this. I realize that the translation may be off in some spots but I do have the movie with hardcoded english subs on it that I can compare the final product to.

[jman98]

You may be in luck with the hardcoded subs. One of the subittle ripping programs claims to be able to do OCR on hardcoded subs. Getting that to work would be a million times easier than trying to translate French subs.
I don't remember which one does it. Subrip maybe?

[kpic]

Yes Subrip does it and I have OCR's hardcoded subs with it, but that movie had the subs in the black bottom border of a widescreen movie, this one is full frame and the subs are in the picture itself, I think Subrip may have problems with that.